Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Thirty Eight - Unlikeliness And Resistant Existence

We were supposed to be reviewing for the last math test of the year, excluding the final. I, being unenergetic and generally pissed off by my classes, did one problem, scanned the others, and determined them too inane and irritating to complete. 

Instead of doing math, I was erasing an eraser I’d found in Josh’s pencil case, scrubbing off the graphite with the end of the only pencil I still had and needed to avoid losing until I was done bubbling in all the Scantrons that came with finals. It’d probably be gone within a week, but I’d made it through the entirety of my junior year with a defective zipper on my pencil case and could totally endure the remaining weeks with what I still had.

Although Josh promised repeatedly – when he wasn’t muttering numbers as he typed them into his calculator or squinting at his paper, trying to recall how the fuck to do math – that the eraser was white, originally, the parts that I rubbed clean of gray were definitively pink. Not even the usual eraser-pink; it was light pink, bubbly, a product that was most likely aimed at girls under ten. 

“It totally got discolored by my pens or something; I don’t have a pink eraser,” Josh continued to argue, lips moving in time with the scribbling of his pencil, practically illegibly numbers appearing on his paper.

I rolled my eyes, turning my attention to one of the eraser's practically black corners. “The whole thing? Evenly?”

Josh opened his mouth to make some retort, apparently failing to come up with one and instead distorting his expression with annoyance and sliding his elbows forward across the desk, forehead connecting with the fake wood. I shook my head at his mathematical irritation and said, “I’m guessing that you secretly love pink and bought this, stole it from the sister you might have, or found it somewhere and figured that a pink eraser was better than none. And do you even have a red pen?”

“You know what, whatever, maybe my younger sister lent it to me and I never gave it back, shut up and let me do this,” Josh gave in, seemingly pushing random buttons on his calculator before abandoning it and going back to trying different equations. 

Smiling with success, I put down the eraser and drooped in my chair, tilting my head back to see that there were over thirty minutes until class ended. Too much time.

Right when I was starting to consider actually doing some of the math review, Josh banged a fist on the table, noise squeaking out of him and grin splitting his face. He exclaimed, “Fuck yeah, that actually worked!”

Both unimpressed by his excitement and understanding the happiness of completing something difficult, I said, “Yeah? What’d you do?”

Josh shrugged, considerably less proud, and explained, “Well, I basically guessed, but I got the right answer, so.”

“That’s all that really matters,” I replied, sarcasm evident in my voice although I wasn't positive if I truly believed that or not. “Unlikely that you figured it out like that, though.”

“Yeah, well, a lot of things are,” Josh said, already going on to the next problem.  

I silently agreed and considered the factuality of this, contemplating the many events that had caused me to be in that plastic chair, disregarding my math problems and erasing lead from Josh’s eraser.  

Up until seventh grade science, I assumed that evolution was somehow purposeful. That fish’s fins developed because their bodies moved through the water as if they were already there and made their importance obvious, that jaguar’s speed increased because they pumped their legs quickly enough and refined their muscles, that frogs could be invisible on their lily pads because their skin’s pigments recognized and copied the colors in the next generation.