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Some may say that Pat Benetar got it right when she sang that "Love is a battlefield." However, almost any teenager could give a much more appropriate example of that comparison.

High school was a battlefield. Instead of squadrons and troops, there were cliques and smaller slightly less exclusive circles of friends, and rather than fire and bullets hurtling through the air with thunderous racket, in this place where barracks and trenches were replaced with lockers and classrooms, the weapons of choice were words. Whether derogative hollers across halls or breathless whisperings of gossip, they were all capable of delivering stinging blows to whomever they concerned.

So wouldn't it just make sense to step back? To remove yourself from the battle entirely, to not concern yourself with the useless words of others, and simply go through the day without seeing the madness of war hiding behind every face in the sea of student warriors?

If you don't care what they think, then they can't hurt you; their fire and bullets turn to chaff on the wind. Gun-toting soldiers twist and change to yappy little mongrels, nipping from time to time without permanent damage caused.

It really was the best way to deal with it all, not dealing with it at all.

After all, who were they to act as they did? First to jump to conclusions and spread rumors, then to judge and jeer based on nothing but their own words... It was madness. The two wanted no part in the raving lunacy, and so they ignored it as best they could. Of course they still heard the words, just as one would hear the whistling wind, but that was all they were - wind and air, something that simply was and would be, something that would continue on unaffected by their reactions, if they'd even had any at all.

It didn't matter what they thought or what they said. All that mattered to the two were each other, and they didn't need any external opinion to tell them what they were and what that meant.

So what if Stan had gotten tired of chasing after Wendy so many years ago? So what if Kyle had only ever shown the briefest of interest in girls equally long ago? Girls were a foreign concept to them - something that could have occasionally made them feel funny and act equally so, but that didn't mean they understood them, or even really wanted to.

But back then, they still cared about social norms and following the crowd. At least, Stan did. If everyone else was jumping from their burning bridges to seek new ones to clamber over, then by god, so was he, even if Kyle did roll his eyes and tell Stan he was being retarded.

Still, Kyle would sometimes go along with Stan's less than brilliant ideas. Sometimes just to offer company to Stan, sometimes to try to make sure his best friend didn't do anything too stupid that he would regret later; sometimes a combination of the two. But other times, he went along just for the hell of it. Not that he necessarily expected positive outcomes, but sometimes the ideas that wheedled into Stan's head didn't sound all that bad.

Like that time when Stan had overheard some of the girls talk about practicing kissing with each other so that they'd be good at it when doing it with boys. He didn't know people could even do that! So of course he had to tell his best friend, to see what he thought of it. Kyle had been unimpressed, and said it was stupid to "practice" kissing; you were either doing it or you weren't.

But Stan didn't care. He didn't want to throw up whenever he kissed a girl, so practicing had sounded like a great idea. Kyle still thought it was pretty stupid, but the idea had already burrowed into Stan's mind and taken hold.

Kyle didn't know if he went along with it to make sure that Stan wouldn't get hurt by doing it with someone else, or because he hadn't cared at all or had cared too much. Maybe it was all and none of the above.

All he knew was that he'd never once seen Stan looking at girls throughout any of that time.

Stan had eventually stopped calling it practicing.

They'd eventually done more than not-practicing.

And eventually, the whispers had started.

But did that really make them gay, or even "together" necessarily? Maybe by default, but it wasn't a willful act of self-labeling. They weren't gay, since they never did those things with anyone else, let alone even want to do so. They weren't "together" because they'd always been together, and saying it like that only twisted the word.

They were Super Best Friends; that was all the label they needed. All the rest was words carried away on the wind.