I Know Something That You Don't Know

Two

I sit on my chair as I snap my pen on the wooden desk, thinking about the conversation of the two students. The Devil's night, the day of dead tour. Some sort of Hallowe'en in the middle of summer. Oxford hugged this celebration for almost half a decade. Exciting journey to a deserted area which the school arranged, simulated in either a creepy cowboy rancho, or a dissident hell, which challenges and drags courageous school people into a scary adventure and places their names on the yearbook once they succeeded. Teachers also give them some plus points, lucky maniacal winner.

     But this tour was also suspended once. After three years, it was back, after the incident of Claire Dank, a freshman, who was lost during the tour and has never been found. They say that it was of a foul-play-angle. Rape cases also set in, but no evidence proved those. And another side scattered through the university. Claire being blinded by the devil. She must have been attractive for the evils and so she perished. But again, no single witness justified.

     I was still in high school then.

     My thoughts shift to the present as the deafening school bell rang. Our first subject. Calculus, lead by our monotonous and low voiced teacher.

     The chatters in our room silenced as a lean and an old teacher slip through the doors. His eye wrinkles sagging, forming petite waves on his fair skin. And so he sat on his desk, dropped the thick tome, and started speaking, without any introduction, and it looks like he's chanting a spell.

     "The range of a specific quadratic equation whose roots are categorically significant to find it's solution," he started. And everybody yawned. "If we can see," he sweeps some ink on the white board forming a Cartesian Coordinate Plane. "it has special ability to form curves such as parabola and hyperbola."

     Together with the raindrops outside the window and the cold weather, and especially his voice, I am lulled to a deep sleep, and my eyes never refused to.

     I was walking under the rain, on the road this morning. I had no umbrellas and so I am definitely wet, and the rain smells rotten. All the buses were busy, and I found myself on the middle of the road, never caring about the busy street. And the horns of the buses around me sounded angry. Annoyed. Then I was hit by the bus, and seconds later, I was airborne. Suspension in air, and so I fall. There was a loud thump on my head as my skull crushed the road. Thump. Thump. People around me. Finally, I realized a pair of fingers are poking my head as my drool spill on my desk. All my classmates were laughing and so my teacher's lips grew to a grimace.

     "Mr. Scott, it is nice to see you as a baby in a cradle of desk," he said. His face so near to me that I smell a scent of fainted powder and black coffee. "Stand up and elaborate the equation on the board."

     x^-8x-9=0. Written in the bold marking pen.

     The pen dropped on my palm, and so I stared intently at the equation. I smirk and wiped off the drool off my face and dashed to the board.

     Everybody was amazed. "At least you do have your brain." Our teacher spoke.

     As I sat, I looked at the acute but readable numbers on the board, and smiled with my chins up. I read it in my mind.

     9 and -1.