The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know (Russel Middlebrook: The Futon Years Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

room studying with her grad school friends Trai and Lena. Trai is this small Asian guy in hipster horn-rims and skinny jeans. Lena is small and skinny too, with long, straight brown hair—sort of an anemic flower child with blocky, tortoiseshell glasses.
    Truthfully, it's always a little disorienting to spend the day around all those fit, tan bodies at the lake, and then come home to Min and her skinny, pasty grad school friends. It's also weird how the three of them all sort of blend together, with their flat hair and dark earth tones. Sometimes I thought of Trai and Lena as Min's "Min-ions", mostly because of how much the two of them resembled her.
    "Hey, guys," I said, squeezing my way into the kitchen. From there, I could see that the three of them were analyzing scatter plot charts on their iPads. Living on a houseboat is great and everything, but the problem comes whenever you invite more than one person over. Then it's suddenly like spending three hours in a crowded elevator.
    "What's for dinner?" Min asked me.
    I held up the take-out I'd picked up at Than Brothers on the way home—this local chain of Vietnamese restaurants. I'd ordered an extra large chicken pho with extra vegetables.
    "I always order exactly the same thing," I said. "But they always charge me something different. It's never more than fifty cents either way, but still."
    "Vietnamese charge by the mood," Trai said, and I was a little afraid to smile. I guess he could say that, because he's Vietnamese.
    "Anyone want some?" I said, mostly just being polite.
    "No, thanks," Min said.
    Trai snickered, and I realized that Lena had just sent him a text message through her iPad. Had it been about me?
    Here's where I should probably point out that I didn't like Trai and Lena very much. The weird thing was, I couldn't really pinpoint why. I just always had a sense that they didn't like me first. Maybe it was all in my mind. I mean, why did I assume Lena's text message was about me?
    "So how was your day?" Min asked. She hadn't looked up from her iPad, but she sounded sincere.
    Truthfully, I wanted to take my pho into my sleeping loft and eat it alone on the futon. But it was going to take a few minutes to reheat in the microwave.
    "I ran into Kevin Land," I said. "Out at U Village."
    Min's face jerked up. " Seriously? How'd that go?" She knew my whole history with him.
    "I didn't talk to him. I just saw him from afar."
    "Is he living in Seattle now?" Min turned to Lena and Trai. "Kevin was this guy that Russel used to go out with in high school." Trai is straight (but not really a Seattle Straight Boy), and I was pretty sure Lena was bisexual like Min.
    They didn't nod or look up or anything, just kept working.
    "Who knows?" I said to Min. "I unfriended him a long time ago."
    "What are you going to do? Are you going to talk to him?"
    "I don't know." I really didn't. I decided to take the high road and try and include Trai and Lena in the conversation. "You guys are the physicists. Isn't there a theory that everything that could happen has already happened?"
    Lena and Trai exchanged a glance. Trai typed something, and now I saw a text message pop up on Lena's iPad.
    "Well, sort of," Min said.
    "In that case, I already met Kevin," I said. "And I'm sure it was a complete disaster."
    Min smiled.
    "But maybe I should," I said. "Maybe the universe is drawing the two of us back together again."
    "Maybe it is," Min said.
    "What's that theory?" I said. "That we're all connected?"
    "We're all connected in lots of ways," Trai said. "All the atoms in our body have electromagnetic forces. There are forces in the universe that drive everything together, even as other forces push us all apart."
    Tell me about it , I thought.
    "And there's the idea that there's really no such thing as 'solid' matter—that we're all just energy fields, exchanging atoms with everything around us. That the divisions we see are just a matter of perception. We're constantly exchanging