I’ve been Googling around to learn how to break up with a friend, and with good reason: Anne has boned me again. When she texted earlier to ask if I wanted to go to a bar with her and her boyfriend, Pete, what she meant was, Wanna go to a bar with me and Pete and Pete’s friend on a surprise, blind double date an hour from your house? I’ve been hesitant to distance myself from Anne because I don’t have that many people in my life right now, but the cost seems too steep as I buckle myself into the back of her Subaru and shake hands with Dan, a beefy tank top in a Mets hat.

“Dan plays soccer with Pete!” Anne announces, her voice competing with Otis Redding’s. Once the internet teaches me to renounce our friendship and cut her out of my life, I will miss her taste in music. “He’s an accountant!”

Dan shrugs into his mediocre biography dump. “I work in Syracuse with my dad.”

“Cool,” I say, fighting the urge to press on my eyelids until I see spots. “I’m currently unemployed.”

“But you used to work at Medieval Times,” Anne cuts in, wagging a sky blue fingernail near her rearview mirror. “Bea was the queen,” she says. Her hand drifts over her polished red topknot. I suppose I’ll miss her hairstyles, too.

From the passenger seat, Pete turns around to face Dan and I.

“Oh, Bea,” he says, smiling a gleeful, shitty grin. “Did you get fired?”

“Did you?” Dan echoes, raising his eyebrows and simultaneously apologizing.

Pete fidgets with the collar of his salmon-colored shirt and laughs. As usual, he’s overdressed, his hair slicked back with a product whose smell reminds me of the ill-lit men’s shoe section at Macy’s. Pete started growing his hair out after we broke up last year. We started to get serious, and I balked: I brought him to my parents’ for dinner, squirming as he shook my dad’s hand with too much gusto and overpraised my mom’s Ancient Roman-inspired roast tuna. A social studies teacher, he nodded with genuine interest when she told him how the Romans ate dormice but not tomatoes, which weren’t introduced to Europe until the Conquistadors brought them back from South America. I looked at his head, cocked and smiling at my weird professor mom as she got lost in her favorite facts, and I knew that I had to end things. Pete could fit into my family, could fit into the newer, lighter life that I was cobbling together, but he wouldn’t be enough in the long run. It didn’t matter that I enjoyed his confidence, his love for his career, his gym-membership body: the specter of commitment appeared, and I disappeared. I did it cruelly, too, telling him that I was in love with my ex-boyfriend. Always had been, I said. Always will be. Since then, he’s rightfully and spitefully hated me.

Pete narrows his blue eyes. “Did you, Bea? Get fired?”

In the driver’s seat, Anne’s shoulders tense. Here’s the order in which we all care about what happened between Pete and I: 1. Anne. 2. Anne. 3. Anne. 4. Pete. 5. Me. I don’t know why Pete lets Anne invite me out with them, or why she continues to do so. Every time I’m with the two of them, they end up in a fight about something ridiculous, like who loads the dishwasher better or whose kindergarten teacher was more inspirational. Don’t worry, I want to tell Anne. I'm pretty sure that this is our last night together.

As one does, I did a lot of moronic pretending when I was in grad school. I lied about what I knew (because if you pretend to read Heidegger, then you always have to pretend to have read Heidegger), and I lied about what I liked (e.g. whiskey, cats, and Bob Dylan’s Christmas album). When it was easy or self-serving, I sometimes told the truth, including once at a dinner party when I said that my favorite novel was The Great Gatsby.

The host — a lovely intellectual titan who kept a framed letter from Heidegger — was semi-listening, and I was desperate to be not-stupid. I made a quick calculation, figuring that my honest answer was innocuous and transcendent enough to escape any prodding. I responded, clearing one conversational hurdle and preparing my brain-legs for the next. Someone quipped about goony high school teachers ruining Gatsby and the discussion lurched elsewhere before I could try to explain why I loved the book. Equally grateful and slighted, I sipped some whiskey (barf) to celebrate the preservation of my 22-year-old intellectual persona.

Fast forward four years later, and I’m the goony high school teacher ruining The Great Gatsby for my juniors. I think that they’ve been lapping up Fitzgerald’s airy descriptions and delighting in Nick’s creepy-ish search for significance, and in my estimation, they’re about to fall to their cool denim knees upon reading the startlingly perfect last page with the classroom lights off and the windows open. As soon as my favorite student finishes reading aloud to us, she huffs, “Man, everyone in this book was such an asshole.” My face must look somewhat punched, because she backpedals with swift sincerity: “Sorry, Ms. D. I know you love this book, but…”

Again, with a new group of students, the space doesn’t open up for me to tease out my Gatsby love, because now we’re arguing about whether characters should be likeable if the reader's going to learn from them, and the way my students lean forward makes me realize that I don’t have to answer for the book yet — as long as I can help make this kind of discussion happen. After all, reading asks you to juggle what’s going on inside of you with what’s out there in the world, especially as you grow old and visit beautiful countries and do crazy stuff like become someone’s mom.

As I write this, I’m finishing my sixth year of teaching. I don’t teach Gatsby these days —too busy writing “persuasive” commercials for raw onions with 8th graders — but I’m still learning from it. Now, it meets me in a place where the green light switches from gorgeously abstract to kind of terrifying. Over and over, Gatsby demands that I stay alive to how time passes over my changing self, and I think that such aliveness is the very best thing I can ask of myself and my students: all of us future liars, generous juniors, and onion salespeople alike.