Don't Forget to Write

Espresso Beans and Lavender Shampoo

After getting back to school showering in the locker room and changing into street clothes, I had just enough time to get to class. It was Thermodynamics. I triple checked my bag for my calculator and my pencils, thrilled to solve these hard equations. Crunching numbers and working through a problem was exciting, to me it was a written-out puzzle that anybody in the world could solve, because math was a universal language. A language without accents, dialects, conjugations, and spellings. A language that was just as true in Canada as it would be in Russia. A language that was invented, like our verbal languages, but rather discovered continually. It existed whether we understood it or not. If there was a cataclysm that brought on the end times and society had to restart, many of our languages and customs would drastically change if they weren't eradicated all together. But math? Math would be the same. Even if we lost all of the information we had on arithmetic, people would come along to discover it, and it would be the exact same methods and laws that we have in place today. That, to me, is our way of seeing the Order of The Cosmos, rather than the Chaos.

Despite my excitement, the combination of my exhaustion and the droning voice of Mr. Smith, who was reading off the numbers and explanations of equations monotonously, as if it were a grocery list, put me into a hypnotic kind of trance. It started with a long blink. Then that blink doubled and my head dropped in a nod. I woke up when my head hit the bottom, snagging itself up by my neck. Each line of notes started strong, then got smaller and smaller as I nodded until it whisked into nothing when I slipped into a couple seconds of unconscious, then opened my eyes and started the next line. The notes were nonsense. My head was rhythmically sinking and rising in a circular motion along with my eyelids as I went from asleep to awake and back again in a groggy, math-induced hypnosis, my arm and head all connected in this annoying cycle. My body was beyond my control, trapped in this pendulum of drowsiness that I couldn't free myself from.

"Hey," whispered a girl to my right. I peeled my eyelids open and turned to face her. "Rough night?"

"Rough morning, actually."

"Here, take some. They keep me going through class." I held out my hand and she poured what looked like chocolate beads into my hand. "Chocolate covered espresso beans," she winked at me.

"Thanks, stranger."

"Karen."

"Peter," I said, extending my hand. She shook it firmly, nodded with a soft smile, and returned to her notebook.

The chocolate-covered espresso beans kept me awake through the rest of the three-hour lecture. Even Mr. Smith's droning voice couldn't penetrate the stable concentration buzz the caffeine had given me. When class was over I put my books in my backpack and turned to talk to the skinny brown-haired girl who had given me the beans, but she was gone. In her place was nothing but a scented cloud of lavender shampoo. I'm not sure how I knew it was lavender, but it was.