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Sun | August 21, 2005
roommates
I don’t know why I wrote this. It has no place except here.
Whenever Shawn had a disagreement with Lauren, he said, "we’ll flip for it." Lauren always called tails. She always lost. The coin was double-headed. Shawn had gotten it awhile ago from a street vendor on Houston Street. When he saw it, he knew it would be good on her, because she always called tails.
"Let’s get a new couch," she had been saying. When he got home he went over to the couch and exaggerated his search for a good spot to sit. He sat demonstrably on the worn springs, letting his feet up in the air to show how low he sank. Sure enough she said it again. "Let’s flip for it," he said, taking out the coin.
It didn’t happen often enough for her to suspect. In this way he saved himself a couple of hundred of dollars he would have spent splitting the cost of a new couch, a 7 am run to the grocery store for milk, and Texas barbecue instead of pizza one Saturday night.
One day she said, "you always use a penny. Use a quarter." And sure enough, she won. From then on they always used a quarter.
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