All the Jews and all the Christians and all the blacks and all the whites and all the boys and all the girls had a big giant war to decide who was the best. When it was over they were all dead, so it was hard to declare a decisive winner, but I think it was boys.

Harry and Henry arm-wrestled to see who could be proven the strongest. Harry worked out at a gymnasium almost every day while Henry just sat on the couch and watched various cable programs that didn’t seem to have taken any effort to make. Still, Harry was nervous, because there was something about Henry that implied that buried within his lazy frame was an untold source of pure animal strength. These fears were quickly subdued when Harry roundly destroyed Henry at arm-wrestling.

Two women who have never met spy each other from across a crowded bar and know instantly that their concept of the ideal man is exactly the same. Concerned over what this could mean in terms of romantic competition, one of the women tries to figure out a way that she can, kindly, ensure that were the perfect man to enter the bar she would be the first to get his attention. While she is pondering her plan, the other woman walks up and throws a drink in the first woman’s face, totally fucking up her makeup and her hair, so that when the perfect man does walk in a few minutes later she looks like such shit that he elbows one of his friends’ arm to get his attention, and they both laugh a little bit in that mean, secretive laugh that you know is about you.

One afternoon at school, a thin, weak boy named Ian attempts to take the higher ground with a popular kid named Brian who is often extremely mean to Ian for no reason at all. While they are both sitting out during a game of crab soccer, in a surprisingly calm moment in which Ian does not feel any more threatened than the constant throb of immediate danger he regularly feels, and Brian has, surprisingly, no particular urge to draw attention to Ian (because he doesn’t like sitting out, and drawing attention to Ian will also show him, possibly, to be an inferior crab soccer player to Tim, with whom he is always in natural competition), and in this calm moment Ian tries to repeat a riposte to Brian’s attacks that his mom told him last night while they ate pizza: Life is not a popularity contest. “Yes it is,” Brian says with a snort, and years later Ian realizes this is true.