It's scientifically proven that every douchebag became that way because of their douchebag best friend, named Ricky. He won't always go by Ricky; in fact, he probably doesn't. Maybe he's more of a "Richie" or a "Rick", or even the dreaded "Richard." Any guy who is referred to as "Richard" on a regular basis has the kind of absurd confidence you don't need to be exposed to. Even more likely, he has a cryptic nickname with an interesting backstory.

"Oh yeah, we call him Spike," they'll say. "You don't want to know. Okay, I'll tell you. It's because when we were in seventh grade, he got this ridiculously spiky haircut."

Don't mistake this guy for the coolest one in the friend group, either. He's never the leader, he's always just the best friend. He's the one that comes up with the crazy hijinks, and then takes the fall when things inevitably go wrong.

I had my own personal Ricky, which is what every unathletic, vaguely insecure teenage boy dreams about. I could've paid him $10 to stand by me, laugh at my jokes, and agree with me all day, and our friendship would have been the same. He wasn't exactly a ladies' man, but he liked to think of himself as one. He was better at helping me get girls, honestly. We both knew it, but he didn't mind the power imbalance. I might've had better sex, but he had better drugs, which made us equals.

Ricky was a funny dude, but he was also short. That was his problem. I wasn't exactly a giant at 5'9, but I towered over him. All of my friends were on the shorter side, actually, and skinny, too. I was the only average height, average build, non-glasses wearing one of us. It wasn't exactly that I looked good, I just looked good next to my emo, vegan, drug addicted friends.

"How do you do it?" They always asked me.

"All you need to do is gain weight," I thought about saying. "Then get some contacts and some platform shoes, and you'll be made." But I decided to maintain my sense of mystery. They thought I had something special going on, something that they didn't know about, and that didn't bother me.

Ricky was a douchebag, like I said- I knew it, and he knew it, but we were still friends. We met in our freshman year at the Academy, and stuck together, because we both made inappropriate jokes, and were bad at baseball, but insisted on playing it anyway.

"What can I say? The pants make me look good," Ricky always said, which I couldn't argue with.

Anyway, we had been friends for what felt like such a long time, there was no going back, even though I hated him some days. Whenever a poor, unsuspecting girl would look past his stature and like him for his other redeeming qualities (whatever those were), he would lead her on, take advantage of her, and then kick her to the curb. I always tried to warn them, but they never listened to me, because they were so caught up in the "bad boy" persona. Girls like bad boys, or so I've heard. I have a hard time believing that's really true. I think they end up with bad boys a lot, but they don't really like them.

Ricky always came over to my house, I never went to his. He lived in a trailer. I lived in a room with Jacob, which was almost as bad, but not quite. Whenever we got high, we went to Jose's house. Jose was a Christian; he didn't smoke with us, but he let us come over, because he lived with his grandparents, and everyone knows that weed wasn't invented until the 1960's.

We weren't smoking that day, though. He came over with the pretense of studying, and maybe getting in a little pitching practice. My adoptive dad loved that, because he was a baseball fanatic, and also our coach. He knew I sucked, and he was embarrassed to have a son that sucked at baseball, since he was supposed to be telling other people how to do it.

I don't remember what we were talking about when the real conversation started. 80% of our conversations were just a string of meaningless swear words strung together with articles. Hardly anything we said really mattered, and if I remembered all of it, my head would explode before the end of the day. I think Ricky could tell I wasn't listening, and he got frustrated.

"Snap out of it, Cal," he said. He was the one who convinced me to start going by Cal in the first place.

"What?'

"You're not even listening to me."

"Yes I am."

"What did I just say?"

"Fuck?" I took a wild guess.

"Fuck, you're right," he said, and then we laughed. "But we've got to do something."

"About what? I was just kidding. I wasn't really listening."

"Uh, I know. That's what we have to do something about. You're not the same, Cal."

"I know," I said. I didn't even have to ask what he was referencing.

"Damn, son! What did Penny do, to fuck you over so bad?"

"She didn't do anything. It was my fault."

"Bitches be crazy," Ricky said that to me all the time, like a friendly reminder.

"She wasn't a bitch, though."

"I know. I was talking about you. You're going crazy, Cal. We need to get out or something."

"Bitches do be crazy," Jacob chimed in, from his side of the room. He was sitting at his computer desk with a pair of beats slung around his neck, and I knew he purposefully wasn't playing music so he could listen to our conversation. "Please get him out of here. He's suffocating me."

Ricky ignored him, as usual. Another reason why we were friends, besides out of habit, was the fact that we hated all the same people.

"He hasn't left the house since he and Penny got together."

"Dude, it's been like, a year."

"Four months," I said, under my breath.

"What was that?"

"Four months and 11 days. I remember, because we started dating on September 11th. And that was kind of in poor taste. Also I remember because I still love her, even though we fought last night."

"Melodramatic," Jacob piped up again, and I winced at the sound of what used to be my favorite word.

"I know. I'm sorry. Do you want to actually go outside and toss a baseball?" I looked directly at Ricky, so Jacob wouldn't think he was invited.

"Or you could just stay in here and listen to angsty music with me. That might make you feel better. I'm not angsty," Jacob clarified, "I just like the pop punk genre. How do you think I would look in a crew neck?"

"Good," Ricky said, and then I cleared my throat. "What do you want me to say, Cal? That a crew neck wouldn't compliment his skin complexion? Then I would just be lying."

"Thanks, Ricky. I'm on the Hot Topic website right now. I'm thinking about ordering one. Maybe with the outline of an anchor? Or should I save that for my tattoo?"

"Tattoo," Ricky advised him. "Get any crew neck you want, just don't get one with the band member's faces on them, or people will think you're gay... not that that's bad, or anything," he said, eyeing me carefully.

"I'm not going to break if you say the wrong thing."

"Really, Cal? Because it kind of seems like you will."

"He will," Jacob said, not even bothering to look up from entering his credit card information into PayPal.

"I know. It's gone on for too long. We have to use some tough love."

"Are y'all bonding right now?" I asked, just to be sure.

"There is a wallowing gestation period," Jacob started, "which ended a long time ago."

"They say that it should only take half as long as you were together, to get over a breakup," Ricky observed, which was surprisingly deep, for him. "How long were you together?"

"You should know this one, Rick."

"I probably did, and I probably forgot, because it was ages ago," and Ricky and Jacob air-fived from across the room.

"Could you please not bond over my pain?"

"We're trying to help you, Cal."

"Yeah, we're trying to help you," Jacob said, and I could see him dragging a Mayday Parade keychain into his shopping cart.

"You don't even drive," I reminded him.

"What?"

"You don't drive. Why do you need a keychain?"

"Because I'm buying a keyring, too. And I can't have an empty keyring. That would just be stupid."

"So stupid," Ricky agreed.

"You're already stupid."

"Don't worry, Jacob. I support you decision," Ricky said. "And your shopping addiction." Ricky spoke in a low, gravelly voice, which was uncharacteristic to his body type and made everything he said automatically funnier, so Jacob laughed.

"Thanks, Rick."

"I know what we should do."

"About what? About these incredible savings?"

"No, about Cal."

"You mean David?"

"I mean Cal," Ricky said, because no one, not even his new best friend Jacob, could've convinced him to call me by the name on my birth certificate.

"Okay, I'll humor you. What are we going to do about Cal?"

"Can you please stop talking about me like I'm not here?"

"You're not here," Ricky said. "Not completely. That's the problem. I want to go back to the way it was before Penny. You know, I always thought she was annoying. We used to do all this crazy shit together, before she came along."

"There's a reason we stopped doing crazy shit," I reminded him. "It's not because of Penny. And I know you always thought she was annoying. It was annoying that you thought she was annoying. She knew you hated her."

"She knew? She's not dead, Cal. And I still hate her."

"What are you thinking?" I asked, just because I was interested, and desperate. The same reasoning is what got me in a lot of trouble with girls before Penny came along.

"Egg a house." Jacob snorted, and Ricky said,

"Do you have a better idea?"

"Literally anything else. That's so stupid."

"I thought you were on my side!"

"I mean, I agree Cal is acting weird lately, but he's always been weird. That doesn't mean you have to egg someone's house."

"I think it does. Have you seen the poetry he's been writing? And the sad songs?"

"You told me you liked the poetry." I had shown him the poetry, and he had walked in the room while I was messing around with the piano a few times. I played both the guitar and the piano, but I found the piano came more naturally. It was like my native language.

"Oh, yeah, dude, it's great." Then Jacob added,

"Which Ricky knows, because when he's not being a sixteen year old pothead, he daylights as a literary critic."

"Whatever, I don't even know what that means, so it doesn't offend me."

"I like the poetry," Jacob offered. "Some if it is actually quite nice."

"I never showed you my poetry," I said.

"Well, not directly, but I've seen in lying around."

"We've been over you going through my stuff!"

"Yes, as I recall, I said that if you didn't want me to go through it, you shouldn't leave it all over the place. Because you did, I assumed that on some level, you really did want me to see it." I scowled, and Ricky tried to direct us back to the topic at hand.

"Egging houses."

"Idiotic," Jacob said, and for the first time, I agreed with him.

"Let's make a whole night of it," Ricky said, excitedly. "It'll be just like old times. We'll invite Griffin and Dylan," he said, referencing our other friends. "And Jose." Jacob cleared his throat,

"And Jacob, if he's not busy waiting by the door for his orders to come in."

"Don't worry about that. I got express shipping," and then he smiled so smugly, I wanted to punch him in the face.

"A whole night of egging a house?"

"We'll do other stuff, too. Good stuff, if you know what I mean. I'll bring it."

"How is this supposed to help me get over Penny?"

"How is getting high not supposed to help you get over a breakup?" And I guess when he put it like that, it seemed like it would.

"We didn't breakup, okay? We took a break. And I don't want to get in any more trouble. I'm tired of getting in trouble."

"I'm tired of you getting in trouble, too," Jacob said. "Whenever mom and dad yell at you, I don't know when it's safe to come out and ask what's for dinner."

"We're not going to get in trouble. We'll be careful. It'll just be this once. If it doesn't work, you can go back to being a little bitch again."

"Wallowing," Jacob said.

"I think saying 'little bitch' has the same effect as 'wallowing'."

"I'm trying to expand your vocabulary."

"I don't want to go back to wallowing," I said. "I really don't. I just don't remember how to do anything else."

Jacob covered one side of his mouth with his hand and mouthed "melodramatic", but I still saw, and it stung, especially when Ricky nodded.

"Sometimes, you just gotta go out and do a bunch of useless shit you won't remember in the morning. It's a miracle cure."

"I'm not even sure if those guys are my friends. We don't have a lot in common anymore..."

"Let me call them," Ricky said. "Let me prove it to you."

"Okay," I said, because I had no fight left in me, and Ricky was already dialing a number.

"Call up the guys, we're going out tonight. And by going out I mean staying in, at your place. Yes, I mean Griffin. And Dylan. Come on, you know who the guys are. Ugh, Jose, you're ruining it. I just wanted to say 'call the guys up, we're going out tonight', and have you know exactly what I meant so I could hang up.... No, I don't like talking on the phone... Yes, I'm sitting right next to Cal... And yes, he's coming tonight. No, I'm not bull shitting you. He says he's ready to move on. Yeah, right. Ahahaha. That's what I said! Hey, do you want anything from Torchy's? I might go through the drive thru later.... Torchy's? It's that taco place. How have you never been there before? Oh yeah, that's right, you're Mexican, you can just get that at home. Damn son, I wish I could get quality priced Mexican cuisine at a reasonable price, every night. That is the life. Alright, see you later. See you tonight. With the fellas. Ahaha. Alright, I'm hanging up now.... No, you hang up first! Okay, you-" I heard the sound of a busy signal on the other end of the line, and Ricky snapped his razor flip phone shut indignantly.

"He hung up on me. Can you believe that bitch?" Ricky had explained his thought process behind calling male friends bitches multiple times before- he thought it demasculinized them. He always called me a slut, too. He called his step-sister, Summer, an ignorant tool, among other distasteful things.

"It sounded like you were done with the conversation."

"He hung up on me," he repeated, as if I hadn't heard and responded the first time.

I have a lot of flaws, some I was born with, and others that I've acquired over the years. But they all stemmed from the same basic imperfection: when it came to peer pressure, I caved. I don't know what it was. Ricky, Dylan, Griffin, and the rest of them could talk me into just about anything. Jacob was the opposite. If you wanted to convince him of something, you better have gone prepared with a five page, double spaced essay and at least one graph outlining why it would be a good idea. With me, it never took very much. Only the promise of something enticing. A fun night was enticing, because I hadn't had one in such a long time. In 4 months and two weeks, exactly.

"Okay."

"Wow, that didn't take very much," Jacob commented, like he was just reading my mind.

"I think I'm ready to move on."