From Poppy Sundeen

There’s an unspoken rule that most day-to-day conversations should be conducted at a surface level. You don’t tell other people about the rule, because you know everybody knows it already.

Everybody except Willie.

You say hi to Willie and within five minutes, you’ve traveled from surface level through the basement to another basement underneath it that you didn’t even know existed.

Willie sits over lunch and gladly tells you his innermost secrets, except they’re not really secrets because there he is telling you — gladly.

Sometimes, what he tells you makes you see something a new way, and you hear yourself say things you’re only just learning as the words leave your mouth. Self-revelatory things. But you didn’t know they’d be self-revelatory because you didn’t know you were going to say them.

So there you are, exposed. You’re sitting naked in a restaurant. But it’s okay because Willie’s naked too. And it’s even more okay because naked minds, unlike naked bodies, don’t attract much attention. Nobody else in the restaurant even sees them, so you’re not really embarrassed.

Unsettled is more like it. Maybe by something Willie says between bites of his migas. Maybe by something you say as a response to something he says. Either way, Willie manages to open a neatly arranged drawer inside your brain and turn it upside down. Now you’re going to have to sort through the contents — ideas, feelings, beliefs — and rearrange them.

So you leave lunch with homework that does what the kind you got in school should have done but probably didn’t. Homework that makes you think, feel, explore, grow and figure stuff out.

Among the stuff you figure out is why nobody tells Willie about the rule that says day-to-day conversations should be kept at a surface level. Nobody can bear to think what life would be like if Willie decided to go along with it.