There were three of them, sitting together at a table, but it was only one of them, one of the two men, who held the three of them together.

The third one had his hair shaved very close to his head. He didn’t play video games anymore, he said, he thought it was the sign of a diseased mind. I don’t believe that, the first man said. What, that he didn’t play video games anymore or that it was the sign of a diseased mind? she asked.

The second one was a woman. She sat across the table from both of them, due to their lengthy acquaintance, an arrangement that had begun to take on the quality of an interview. She thought to herself it was funny that relationships tended to arrange themselves spatially in this manner.

The third man was saying that a video game had stolen all his friends. The same game had stolen all the friends? the woman asked. Yes, the same game, he said, a game called Valorant. He hated that game, he said, if he ever got his hands on it he would, and he mimed choking. It was a joke, she thought, but he was clearly in pain; he had moved back to a condo in his hometown. He retreated into humor whenever she asked him about his life, but she asked anyway. It was insane how cheap his rent was, he said.

The more the third man talked about his life, the more she could tell he was depressing and embarassing his old friend, her old friend, who held the three of them together. He said on new year’s eve he would drink a six-pack of beer alone at his apartment. And don’t even try to stop me! he said. She and her friend looked at each other and then looked back at him. It was a challenge, she knew, to either of them, to say something, to tell him he should do something better with his time.

She looked through the plate glass of the strange restaurant window, studded with doors that seemed from the exterior to open into the restaurant, but were in fact locked, at his silver Toyota parked at the intersection. People from the street kept trying to come into the restaurant through the locked doors, pulling fruitlessly on the handles of the doors, before standing up straight with a little start as they spotted the true door to the restaurant further down the side of the building. She had seen five or six groups of people already make the same mistake, and she had made the same mistake. Her friends who had moved back to their hometowns loved to talk about how much money they were saving on rent by living in their hometowns, but she could see his silver Toyota parked right there, a second apartment. She wanted to ask him something that would communicate she did not share his opinion of himself, his sense of personal failure. Were there any bars he liked where he was living now? Yes, he said, there were four bars there. It was a family town, he said, and the first man, who had grown up in the same town, chimed in that it was all about the kids. Everything in the town was about the children. That part of the conversation was over, they grew quiet.