Me, Myself, and I

class with the prof

Brooke is a very balanced individual. And by that I mean, she is a teetering seesaw. Sometimes she lets her frizzy blond hair fly all over the place, sweats and loose sweaters and the types of things I only really saw the athletes wear in high school. Other days her appearance would flip like a coin: french-braided and pinned hair, tight v-neck, skinny jeans, something designer for shoes. So I wasn't sure what to expect when I moved in with her. It was a gamble I was willing to throw my lot into.

We had this invisible boundary line. I always imagined it was red. My side? Alex's hats were strewn about the place, my favorite with the gold stitching always hanging off the post of the bed. Anything school related was stacked on the tiny shelf next to the cot; note cards, textbooks (Psychological Functions, College and Career Math Principles, Utopia, I forget what else), pens, tucked away behind the swinging slap of wood, out of sight and out of mind.

Orientation went as well as it could've. I was glued to Alex's hand. Lot of nervous smiles from all around. We had to introduce ourselves with a few icebreakers; they were nice. Didn't press too hard for information, shared random facts like our favorite color (mine: gold, Alex: orange), subject (mine (a lie, I didn't have one): geometry, Alex: economics), etc. My answers got more extravagant with time, pushing the lies that I was the school girl who was so passionate about her studies that she would do just about anything to continue to pursue them. The truth is I wasn't sure what I would do if I wasn't here, and that was more terrifying.

Perhaps, if Alex's mind was more reckless, went in the extravagant directions that mine did while tossing and turning late at night, we wouldn't be here right now. We'd be out in the real world, across the ocean somewhere, or climbing a mountain, pretending to captain a cruise ship. It's not like I could read about these things and feel them the same way as being out there.

Then again, I needed Alex. He grounded me, kept my thoughts within reach when I was around him. Or, let's be honest, kept those thoughts from even forming.

I awoke the first day of classes with this blurry turmoil in my head. I'd hoped it would clear with a cup of coffee, but the campus cafe did nothing to quench the feeling, only sending me into hyperdrive. Stacks was too far a walk. I just kept imagining myself climbing a mountain somewhere.

The place must've been here for ages. The desks were wooden, creaked when you squirmed in them. (Quite the contrast to the basement renovation back at Delcoph High School.)

Alex was already there, front and center, surrounded by half-asleep peers and uneven desk spacing. With an apologetic smile, I snuck into the corner, closest to the emergency exit, and pulled out my used copy of Business in the Real World. Five bucks at a garage sale. Someone had quite the intimate relationship with it, a rainbow of highlighters arraying across nearly every word, and the blurry footnotes...they weren't exactly footnotes. They insisted on covering up bits of the text. The best part, though, was the whiteout used on various sections of Chapter Six, completed with half-erased drawings of skulls and screaming babies.

"...tenets are universal concepts. You couldn't break them with the double edged sword hanging over Damocles."

I shook my head. I knew I was in a classroom, not back at that counselor's table trying to read his chicken scratch. Business. Business with...Jake, straggly bearded, bad handwriting, guidance counselor Jake, now stood in the front of the room with a clean-shaven face, hair in a bun, wearing a suit and tie, holding a white piece of chalk towards the ceiling as if it were a wand. I slowly closed my book and stared at the board.

He'd drawn an upside down pyramid, divided into three parts, a large word hiding in the bottom. The letters were so squandered, looked like they'd been hit by a train. He moved the chalk to the second portion of the triangle, wrote out more. "Business Fundamentals are not universal, and only pertain to particular categories." He wrote more along the base of the triangle, which also happened to be at the top. "Standards are industry based. Almost three-quarters of business 'rules' are just standards in disguise. Makes businesses appear more independent."