pi. The popular guy. He plays football (quarterback, obviously) and drives a Camaro or Mustang. He treats pretty much everyone like shit. He wears expensive clothes and is sometimes seen taking a pull from a flask at school. Nobody rats on him because he's so popular and popular kids are like celebrities. He's going to go to a better college than you and will be set up with an sweet investment banking or consulting job, despite having crappy grades and little interest in the actual field. He'd rather be sitting at home, getting drunk, playing Madden on the PS2. He drives a BMW M3 to the reunion and listens to popular female teen-idols, which is very very creepy.
e. The popular girl. Obviously connected to pi. She has one pet activity - maybe volleyball or cheerleading or dance team. She says things like, "I've upgraded my boyfriends throughout the years." She can't work a computer with any real facility and stares indignantly when someone asks her a difficult question. Her grades are average, but she'll go to a decent college because her father is well-connected. She'll major in something fluffy, but her family will praise her for "doing what she loves" which is actually scoring blow at a drastically reduced price. She marries rich and drinks too much wine, which we'll consider to be alcoholism.
pi^e are the popular boys, who are complicit in all the shittiness that pi does. They all go to community college for a year, only to play football, drop out and work in the quarry, construction or sell insurance over the phone to old people. One of them is in prison for something violent, sexual and drug related that no one wants to ever think or talk about.
Euler's constant (gamma). The valedictorian. Outspoken and full of piss and vinegar, everyone believed him when he said he'd go pre-law at Georgetown. His social drinking gave way to casual mescaline use. He dropped out of college, followed Phish for a month before getting sick of the smell of patchouli. Now he lives on a guest ranch in northern Mexico, tending to livestock and practicing in his true passion - the mariachi trumpet, which we plays for the ranch guests at dinner time.
Morse-Thue's number. The sexy, oft-talked about but rarely talked to foreign exchange student. She wears a half-smile that nobody really wants to understand, because they know she is silently judging them and their America. She holds an unrequited crush on Chaitin's constant, who was never seen as ambitious and everyone was surprised when they learned that he had started an internet enterprise sold it for a mint, then became a mid-ranking professional bass fisherman, all by age 28. Several girls (e^pi, the female friends of e during high school) try to sleep with him at the reunion, but his heart belongs elsewhere.
It belongs to Chapernowne's number. She read books constantly - serious fiction or sometimes quirky reference books, like high altitude botany or maintenance of hydraulic machinery, never popular fiction - and sometimes people would whisper about her sexuality, probably because they were jealous of her appetite for learning. She went to Swarthmore, where she developed a single-track fury for a worthy but not very mainstream political cause. She doesn't go to the reuinion, and when Chaitin's constant learns this, he leaves. He does finally find her, but never has the nerve to call her.
i^i is the D&D/Magic card kids (because i^i has multiple possible values). They are easy to get along with and really like Star Wars. They all major in engineering - one of them goes to MIT, another to Cal Tech, the rest to reputable engineering departments at state schools - though not all of them make it a career. Two of them become science fiction authors.
I had my heart broken by zeta(3) junior year. She does that sometimes, but only if you allow her to. You are Catalan's constant. Rare, beautiful, usually unnoticed. Our close, mutual friend is sin(1) and we have a good time, but stay out of trouble. Let's go bowling and give ourselves thematic names on the automatic scorer.
