Aubrey, the Star

24: absolute zero

Aubrey

★

absolute zero - "the coldest possible temperature, at which all molecular motion stops."

"You're not listening."

My eyes snapped open as I drifted back into consciousness. The world around me was a blur. I felt out-of-body. Where was I? Lights floated aimlessly, distorting my eyesight. It reminded me of a downtown street on a rainy night. The heaviness of my limbs reminded me of a car skidding down that wet road, preparing for a head-on collision. All of the gears had shifted into overdrive. Much like my life in recent days.

The feather-touch of a hand fell onto my shoulder. I skidded the car into an oncoming car. My reaction was to jump hard as I tried to escape the wreckage. I felt my knees slam up onto the bottom of a table. The bones throbbed as I shuddered away from the touch. I opened my eyes, staring into Mickey's concerned ones. She looked around Chellgren's library to see if people noticed us. Noticed me.

"Mickey, I'm Ms. $750 million and counting," I said, "they see me. Everyone always sees me." Even when I'm having such a hard time trying to see myself. I wanted to go back to the days when I was invisible. No one cared about me in California.

I squirmed from her hand. She dropped it to her lap, tucking it between her thighs. The unsteadiness settled inside of me. My stomach had turned into knots. I pulled at a loose curl that fell into my face while cradling my aching knee in my other hand. Relishing a physical pain was something that I needed. Everything's been so emotionally heavy lately. My feelings were out of my control. This knee ache was something I could alleviate.

"I'm sorry." I choked the words out. Not really sure who I was apologizing to exactly.

Mickey's eyes softened as if she understood my internal conflict. She was starting to understand the complexity of my complicatedness. I attempted to give her a smile. The corners of my mouth didn't bother twitching up. Her shoulders slumped and she opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. A breath of silence wrapped around us. Choking me. My friend inhaled a big breath before talking.

"With the way this session has been going, I don't think you're going to pass your math test tomorrow," she said, bluntly. The coursework for Algebra was spread out on the table in front of us. There were an array of papers with chicken-scratch problems that I'd attempted to solve and gave up on. I think in the middle of Mickey giving me a mini lecture on factoring I zoned out and chose not to zone back in. I reached for a blank piece of paper, completely scatterbrained.

"Okay," I said, let's do this for real this time." My hands felt around the mess for the pencil I'd lost.

Mickey ran a hand down her face. I picked up a pen instead and began to write down a practice problem that I'd left off on before falling asleep. In an attempt to solve it, I fumbled. Scribbling out numbers and replacing them with others. None of it was making sense. My eyes glazed over when I saw the red pen corrections on all of the other papers in front of me.

Fuck. 

There really was no way that I would be passing the test. That would take a miracle and God hasn't considered me a favorite of his in a long while. My head felt like it was being rattled inside a pinball machine. I choked down a sob.

"Hey, none of that!" Mickey cleared away the useless papers, crumbling them up. "We'll go at it for another hour. Hell, another two hours. As long as you need to understand it, Aubrey."