That’s true, conveniently well-informed man in my head, but roughly 100% of all private schools in the South are also run by racist pricks. Which is why Dwayne’s hate crime had only resulted in a two-month suspension (which, granted, caused him to fail the year) instead of outright expulsion.

Though, at the time, I wasn’t aware of any of this. All I knew was that Dwayne had shown up the first day of fifth grade and when the teacher asked him if he’d like to say a few words about himself, Dwayne shook his head and replied, “Nope.”

Later that same day, I ended up behind Dwayne in the line at lunch where he promptly informed me, “New Balances are for pussies.”

Those were Dwayne’s first words to me. Needless to say, I wasn’t a big fan. But at the start of seventh grade, I had found myself with limited options for friendship. It was either buddy up with the 14-year-old bigot and his social-pariah sidekick or hang out with girls. And as much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, at 12-years-old, I wasn’t quite evolved enough for the latter.

At first, things were pretty bearable as long as I made sure to keep our conversations geared toward comic books and video games. Dwayne absolutely loved the Punisher (every hardcore comics fan reading this just rolled their eyes and went, “Of fucking course…”) and even at that age, I already knew way too much about everything Marvel.

Whenever Dwayne did say something ignorant, I simply ignored it and since I was usually the one leading all of our discussions, after a while he simply stopped trying to commiserate his white pride with me and it was pretty smooth sailing after that. As far as I was concerned, my whole “who am I going to eat lunch with” dilemma had been mostly resolved. Then Halloween happened.