I was 14. The hormones did their job and I became interested in the opposite sex. On a dance I approached a pretty girl.
“My friends have warned me about you. You’re odd,” she said.
“Good advice,” I said, and walked away.
We pause here with an advisory to the less experienced.
It’s then you play your hand. When the odds are stacked against you.
It’s all about the payoff.
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I think you may be reading it as a lesson in strategy, as if this were the moment to “play your hand.”
But that isn’t really what the post was about.
The memory is factual, yes, but it also works as a kind of Rorschach test without announcing itself as one. It looks like a small story about a boy and a girl, but it functions more like a mirror. People read it and decide what the boy should have done.
Some read it as a missed opportunity: when the odds are against you, that is exactly when you make your move.
Others read it more simply: if she and her friends had already made up their minds, trying to persuade them otherwise would have been wasted effort. “Good advice” was the cleanest possible conclusion.
Others see that the boy realized in three seconds that the vibe was off and checked out. That he showed a level of emotional efficiency.
And some read it as the girl expecting the usual script — embarrassment, pleading, an attempt to impress — and instead getting a response that declined the whole game.
But I wonder if there’s a reading I’m missing.
Of course. What if her friends were right? 
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She announced that she and her circle of friends value conformity above all else. He decided she and they would be poor company.
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