Prompt: Recall a memorable argument and write about it from the other person's perspective.

It's one of those hot, still, Star City summers, and the sun hunkers low to the earth like a fat kid frying ants with a magnifying glass. Inside the apartment, a guy in a white tee shirt and a girl in a black tank top lay side-by-side on a king-sized futon, sprawled out to beat the heat. A small stand fan in the corner moves little more than noise as it jerks lazily back and forth with a yawning hum.

"You can't just say things like that, Slick."
"Things like what?" Slick says, searching for patterns in the stuccoed ceiling.
"You don't know people. You don't know what they're like."
"What are you talking about? I know lots of people."
The girl's eyes narrow.
"No you don't."
"I know enough," he says simply. The girl props herself up on her elbow to look at him. Her hair falls over her face, and she puffs it petulantly away.

Programmers.

"You don't know everybody, and you can't make those generalizations."
"What generalizations?"
"You can't assume everyone's like you."
"Well, yeah, not exactly like me, but there's a lot of commonalities."
"No there aren't!"

She needs to stop dating programmers. Sure they're primarily non-threatening, loyal, well-paid, and charmingly awkward in social situations, but the reductionist, dualist mentality they contract through prolonged exposure to the artifice of binary logic gives them false confidence in dealings with a world they know little about. Slick's a great example of this; extrapolating, postulating, deriving comfortable conclusions from a pool of knowledge that, on average, is barely ankle-deep. On good days, she just lets him go, fumbling through philosophy like a drunk wobbling home from a bar, but today is not a good day. It's hot as hell, and the last thing she wants on top of that is an earful of Slick's ill-informed assumptions about humanity.

He looks over at her finally. Dark eyes flashing, jaw set in defiance. His placid expression gives way quickly to one of bemusement and concern.
"What, are you angry? Why are you angry all of a sudden?" If he knew a fraction of the things he thought he did about people, he wouldn't need to ask that question.
"You're wrong, Slick! Just... just wrong! You think everyone thinks the way you do, but they don't. What do you know anyway? What makes you such a fucking expert on people?"

She can see his brain work furiously behind his hazel eyes, twitching back and forth with hers in apologetic analysis. That's all this guy does is think. And talk. But what does he actually know?
"What do I-- What? Such an expert? Whatever, kid. Your tripping out."
"Don't say 'whatever' to me!"
"Whatever."
"I am <i>not</i> tripping out! <i>You</i> just don't know what the fuck you're talking about!"
"How the hell do I not know what I'm talking about? Food? Shelter? Avoidance of pain? You think anyone's against that?"
"Yes!"
"'Yes'? Who?! Those are basic human precepts!"
"But how do you <i>know</i> that?!" she storms, marveling at his arrogant conviction.
"Christ, kid, I don't <i>know</i> anything, right? I'm just guessing from empirical data..."
"That's right, Slick, you <i>don't</i> know anything! Right now you're just making shit up!"

Her parents were refugees from the 70's war on communism; victims of containment's rabid rush. She's got a scar on her sternum from a knife wound she suffered at fifteen. Her best friend went section 8 in the marines and hung himself with his belt. When she was seventeen, she mixed herself an iodine cocktail and woke up in the hospital, chained to a gurney. She's sold, used, and kicked all kinds of shit, been to twelve different countries, is fluently bilingual and wrapping up a classics education at Star City U. Slick, by comparison, went to Japan for a week last summer, dropped out of school, and can pound a can of beer in eight and a half seconds -- And yet he lectures her now, with science's calm audacity, about people he's never met, patterns that don't exist, things he doesn't know.

She's staring at him, fuming, fire leaping from coal-black eyes. Somewhere in his head, a loop returns zero; kicks a line out to standard error. His expression says "does not compute" and his mouth confirms the statement. 

"Jesus, Jen, what the hell are you so pissed about?"