He saw me as I got off the escalator at the top of the Metro station. He jogged across the street with arrested steps; he looked about ready to break into a full run, but never quite got there. He reached my side of the street and hugged me, and he smelled the same as he had last time I saw him - something about his cologne, or aftershave, or something. But as he stood back from our hug to say hello, everything else was different. My casual tshirt and jeans seemed to shy away from this powerfully dressed figure. He was wearing a tie. A blue shirt - he always wore only blue - with the sleeves rolled up against the DC heat. His khaki pants were pleated sharply down the center - I wonder where he learned to do that? - and shoes that he walked to avoid scuffing.

So this is the 'real' world, I told myself. A high-paying job comes at some cost, I suppose. I can't say he lost his sense of style after graduation - he looked good. But it wasn't the casual kind of good-looking that had attracted me to him in college. It was the good-looking of a powerful man who worked two doors down from the White House. Someone who had left the word we'd shared far behind.

We ate dinner in a small Chinese restaurant just across from the Metro station. "I need to try out local places," he said as he held the door open for me. Where else had he been eating, if not at "local" places? Images of company meetings over six-course dinners flashed through my mind; the scene in American Psycho where they all sit around and exchange business cards, and no one can quite the the reservation at Dorsia. "Local" places were just unnecessary when you worked in a tall building with desk guards.

Conversation was casual. I talked about the job that had brought me to DC for the summer; he discussed the finer points of keeping documents out of the hands of the Justice Department. Everything he said sounded so important, so real, that suddenly the job that had been my world seemed just like kids playing games. But I wanted to talk about kids playing games. While he told me about the rigors of moving into a new apartment, I wanted to remind him of doing the Robot at a Tango Club in Argentina, just because we felt like it. He told me stories of people our age with more money than they knew what to do with, buying bottles of Grey Goose for a tableful of friends because what else do you do with a $15,000 bonus? My mind passed over the posh DC clubs and back into his quad, and the night we'd played a game of Pong with 36 cups to a side. I sat in that restaurant convinced I was talking to some executive who had nothing else to talk about, not my college friend who used to drink before Chapel and bark at strangers, just to see what they would do. It had been less than two months since I saw him last; we'd parted ways in a New York airport with a promise to see each other again. But the person I was seeing now wasn't the person I said goodbye to that day; wasn't the person I'd counted among one of my closest friends at school. He was a businessman, with a real job and a real life and something had happened in those months, and I was terrified that this was what was going to happen to all of us - even to me.

As the waiter cleared the plates, a dollop of rice was left on the tablecloth. My college companion, with his power tie and rolled-up sleeves, didn't hesitate a moment before scooping the rice off of the table and into his mouth with his fingers. There was a beat. He looked at me, I looked at him, and we both started laughing. I reached across the table to squeeze his hand. "I thought I'd lost you," I said through my laughter, and he smiled back at me. It wasn't the grin of an anti-trust paralegal, but of the friend I'd known for years. A friend I'd shared countless other laughs with, would share countless more.

We got coffee after dinner - his iced and simple, mine some concoction with more sugar and less sensibility. We parted ways, but I'm not worried about him anymore. I'm not worried about myself, either, I don't think. People like us, you can dress us up, but there's a part of us still doing the robot at inappropriate times, or playing beer pong with way more cups than we should, or just laughing at how crazy everything is. And really, there's nowhere else I'd rather be.