Probability of Friendship 100
LEO
Iwake up to warmth. Max is pressed against my back, one arm slung over my waist, his face buried between my shoulder blades. His breath is soft and even, still asleep.
This is… nice.
Max has always been tactile; he falls asleep on me during movie nights, uses JP as a pillow during study sessions, and drapes himself over furniture like a very clever cat.
This is just Max being Max. I close my eyes and let myself sink back into the memory of how this all started.
How Max decided we'd be friends, and I let him.
The orientation room is too loud. There are approximately two hundred freshmen crammed into this auditorium, and every single one of them seems to know someone already.
They're laughing, talking, forming groups while I sit in the back row, hunched over, trying to make my 6'1" frame take up as little space as possible.
You can do this, Leo. It's orientation. A few hours. Then you can go back to your dorm and hide. There's a 73% chance no one will even notice you're here.
I pull a granola bar out of my bag, checking the ingredients list for the third time. Oats, honey, almonds, dried cranberries. No shellfish. Good. The last thing I need is an allergic reaction on my first day.
"Is this seat taken?"
I look up.
There's a guy standing next to me, he's small, maybe 5'6", with blonde hair that sticks up in about twelve different directions and the brightest blue I've ever seen.
He's wearing a T-shirt with a robot on it, and his mismatched socks are visible above his sneakers.
One has tiny astronauts, the other has cartoon cats.
"Uh." My brain stalls. "No. I mean, you can sit. If you want. There's a 50% chance better seats are available closer to the—"
"Nah, back row is perfect." He drops into the seat next to me with a grin. "I'm Max."
"Leo." My voice sounds weird. Too formal. Try again. "I mean, that's me. I'm Leo. Not that you… Obviously, you knew that's what I meant.”
Stop talking, Leo.
"Cool." Max doesn't seem bothered by my verbal disaster. He's looking at my granola bar. "Checking for allergens?"
"Shrimp," I say, then immediately want to die. In a granola bar… Why did I say that? That's too much information for someone I met three seconds ago.
But Max nods like this is completely normal. "That's smart. Good to know. I'll remember that. No shrimp around Leo."
The way he says it, so matter-of-fact, so certain, like he's programming it into his brain right now, makes the tightness in my shoulders ease a fraction. "Thanks," I manage.
"No problem. We're gonna be friends, so I should know these things."
We're gonna be friends. He says it like it's already decided. I should probably find that presumptuous. Instead, I find it… relieving?
"Okay," I hear myself say.
"Yeah?" Max's grin gets wider.
"Yeah. There's an 87% chance I'm already being weird anyway, so—"
"I give myself at least a 77% chance of already being weird," Max interrupts. "So we're perfectly matched." He speaks in percentages, too. Max smiles at me, and I feel my lips spreading in a smile in return.
"Then we're perfectly matched. Wanna be weird together?"
And just like that, the tightness in my shoulders is gone. There are still approximately fifty different ways this could go wrong, but enough now, I can breathe. "Yeah," I say. "Okay."
The orientation starts, and I try to pay attention. I really do. But Max keeps leaning over to whisper observations. "That guy's tie has the Fibonacci sequence on it. That's pretty cool. The architecture of this building is actually fascinating if you look at the load-bearing—"
He's distracting, but not in a bad way. More like… interesting. His brain clearly moves fast, jumping between topics, and I find myself trying to keep up instead of worrying about whether I'm sitting wrong, if my shirt is wrinkled, or if everyone's judging me for sitting alone.
"Do you think they'll have good food here? I heard the dining halls are hit or miss."
I'm not alone anymore. When orientation breaks for campus tours, Max bounces to his feet. "Come on! I'll show you around."
"Don't we follow the—" I gesture at the tour guides gathering students into groups.
"Trust me, I know a better route."
He doesn't hesitate. Doesn't check his phone or glance around to orient himself. Just… knows. Like he's done this before. But before I can analyze it, Max is already heading for the door, and I'm following, hunching slightly to avoid bumping my head on the doorframe.
You can do this, Leo. Just follow the small blonde guy.
Easy. Max does know a better route. He takes me through a side entrance that avoids the crowd and shows me a shortcut between the science building and the library.
He points out which vending machines are broken and which ones sometimes give you two snacks for the price of one.
"How do you know all this?" I ask as he leads me up a stairwell that definitely wasn't on the tour map.
"Oh, uh." Max rubs the back of his neck. "I've walked around campus a lot. Explored. You know." His face says he's not telling me everything. But there's also a chance I'm overthinking it, which is pretty much my default state, so I let it go.
We end up on the roof of the library, technically not allowed, but Max knows how to jimmy the lock. "Don't ask," he says with a sheepish grin, and the view is incredible. The whole campus spreads out below us, green and sprawling and full of people figuring out their first day here, too.
"This is my favorite spot," Max says, sitting on the edge with his legs dangling over. "When things get overwhelming, I come up here."
I sit next to him.
How close is too close? Three feet feels safe.
No, that's weird, like I'm avoiding him.
Two feet? Still feels like I'm making a statement.
One foot is definitely too close, right?
That's intimate. Friend-close, not stranger-close, and we just met, even if it feels like… Okay, Leo. Pick a spot and commit.
I settle somewhere around two and a half feet. Close enough to be friendly. Far enough not to be weird. Probably. You're overthinking sitting down. This is a new low.
"Do things get overwhelming a lot?" I ask.
Max shrugs. "Sometimes. I'm not great with people. I mean, I like people, I'm… not good at the whole social thing. Small talk feels like trying to debug code without error messages."
"That's—" I blink. "That's exactly what it feels like."
"Right?" Max turns to look at me, and his smile makes my pulse jump. Just the caffeine. Definitely the caffeine. "Finally, someone who gets it."
We sit there for a while, not talking, just watching the campus below. It should be awkward, but it's not. It's comfortable.
"So," I say eventually, "are you going to tell me how you know all this campus stuff already?"
Max winces. "You noticed."
"You've given me fifteen campus hacks in the last two hours. Including how to avoid the broken water fountain on the third floor of the math building, and which professors leave their office doors unlocked. That's not normal freshman knowledge."
"Okay, yeah." Max takes a breath. "So. This is going to sound weird."
"We're already being weird together, remember?"
"This is my third year on campus." I stare at him. Process that. Run the calculations.
"You've been here for two years already?"
"Yeah."
"How old were you when you started?"
"Sixteen." Sixteen. He started college at sixteen. My brain tries to wrap around that and fails. "You must be, I mean, to start that young. You must be…” I feel kind of lame for not coming up with something better to say.
"I'm just… kind of… I’m very smart," Max says, like he's apologizing for it.
"Like Mensa smart?"
Max's face goes pink. "I've been in Mensa since I was ten, so I'm not even close to the record."
My jaw actually drops. "There's a record?"
"Joseph Harris-Birtill was two years and 182 days old when he joined. He was already learning Morse code and studying the periodic table." Of course, Max knows that.
"I'm impressed even if you waited until the ripe old age of ten," I say, and Max laughs, a real laugh, bright and surprised.
"Thanks." He fidgets with the hem of his shirt.
"I finished my first degree last spring.
Applied Mathematics and a minor in Physics.
But I wanted to start fresh this year in Robotics Engineering, and I thought…
maybe if I came to freshman orientation, I could meet people my age.
Make friends." He looks sad. "I know that sounds pathetic—"
"It doesn't," I interrupt. "It sounds lonely."
Max blinks at me. His shoulders drop, and he lets out this breath like he's been holding it since he sat down next to me in orientation. The smile he gives me isn't the bright, manic one from earlier; it's smaller.
"Yeah," he says quietly. "It was. Is. My mom lived with me my first semester in the family dorms, but then my dad fell and broke his hip back home in Wisconsin, and she had to go help him. I convinced her I'd be okay, that I knew the campus, that I could handle it."
"Could you?"
"Academically? Sure. Socially?" Max shakes his head. "I lived in a regular dorm after she left. The guys on my floor thought I was weird. Too young, too intense, too… much. So I studied and finished my degree in two years because I had nothing else to do.”
I have to look away for a second because the image of sixteen-year-old Max, alone in a dorm room, studying because he had nothing else to do, sits heavily in my gut. This brilliant, bright kid, alone on campus at sixteen, spent two years with no friends because he didn't fit in.
"Well," I say, "you're not alone anymore."
Max looks at me. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. There's a 100% chance we're friends now."
"I thought you dealt in probabilities, not certainties."
"This is a certainty." And I mean it. Whatever pulled Max to sit by me and me to follow him today, it's real. We're like magnets. We're supposed to smack into each other. Max's smile is so bright I have to smile back.
"Okay," he says. "Friends."