Nomenclature

Jenn keeps getting it wrong. She'll say "Mymattew" (putting "my" in front of her friends' names is an old habit of hers, and I don't know what happened to the "h" in his name) when she doesn't mean her Mattew--yes, it's pronounced ma-too--at all. That guy, usually known as "Matt," is a friend of hers from high school who's going to college here. Or she'll hear me say "Matthew" and forget that I'm not talking about the one she's thinking about.

(At some point last year we realized we both had friends named Matt and they're enough alike that when we tell stories about them we would have to specify which Matt we were talking about--the choices, of course, being "mine" and "yours.")

When we both came back the day after Christmas and were catching up Jenn said, "So how's Mymattew?" I knew what she meant--she wasn't expecting me to know anything about her friend and was asking about my boyfriend, if only to get me to talk.

Actually, it had the opposite effect; I couldn't say anything. I didn't answer the question she asked, and I didn't want to correct her, since that would probably involve something with the words "my Matthew" in it. Jenn would make fun of that. She doesn't have much to ridicule Matthew and me about, so she's merciless with what she has (and what she fabricates).

My friends all seem to have called him "mine" at some point, though. There are too many Matts; we have to call them other things just to lessen the confusion. And, as Katie assured him, he's always been "Holly's Matt" (my college friends of course have only known him as a friend of mine from high school). Matthew didn't seem to care, saying only that there are worse things one could be called.

When Al asked me to ask him a physics question about Nemesis, he wrote back to both of us and signed the e-mail "(Holly's) Matthew." I laughed at that; Jenn pronounced it ridiculously drippy. She also scrawled HOLLY'S MATTHEW on our bunk beds, but that doesn't bother me. On other parts of the wood she's written "Holly loves Robb," someone's phone number, and who knows what else.

Anyway, when Jenn asked me about the wrong Matt and I didn't say anything, she eventually seemed to realize what she'd said and corrected it. "I mean, yours."

I laughed. It just sounded so funny. "Hey, this is important!" I said. "I went to a lot of effort to be able to call him mine!"

I don't call him that, though. It sounds weird to me! My friends may all say he's mine...but to me he's just "Matthew." No one else gets the name.