Chapter 5 – Look At All the Thoughts I Give

Of course, that day was a Tuesday. The world hinges on a Tuesday. That’s just how Tuesdays are. Disasters happen. Famous people die. Governments fall. But at least there are tacos.

Lunch was still nearly two hours away and my next class was far too close. Fortunately, I was mostly seated by other girls. Not that it mattered when this teacher came up with new seating charts on a whim because his efforts at saying “shh” over and over never fixed anything. I typically enjoyed English but he did his darnedest to try to smother every ounce of love I had for reading.

The room was halfway down a row of off-white modular classrooms which looked like temporary buildings, but it was clear they weren’t going anywhere. A wooden skirt did little to hide the fact it seemed propped up on cinderblocks. I leaned against the railing around the ramp and let the crowd flow past me. I waved at the few people I knew and felt a surreal sense of relief.

Heather Gutierrez joined me soon after the warning bell. The door at the top of the long ramp was locked and the teacher was always late. She gave a little nod at me and asked, “Sup?”

I turned my backpack around to my front and sighed as I announced, “I can eat wheat now.”

She raised an eyebrow and responded, “Cool. Any kind?”

I nodded back as I unzipped my pack. “Yup.”

I gave her the boring version of my Friday. Heather said a small “wow” and brushed a lock of her long, brown hair back. She was a head taller than me, especially in her black, leather boots. She covered a yawn with the back of her hand and apologized before asking, “So, anything you’re looking forward to trying?”

I hadn’t really thought about that. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich which didn’t dissolve when you tried to cut it seemed like a nice goal. Other than that, my mind was blank. I’d wiped wheat stuff from my thoughts because I thought I’d never be able to have it.

Pressing her rectangular glasses higher, Heather ticked off a few options on her fingers. Her nails were nice and glossed with the school colors. Bending her head back, she sighed softly and noted, “It would be cool if my health junk just vanished one day too.”

I gave a little grimace. Our first chat in class was about our genetic fuckups. Mine eating wheat, hers a heart valve defect which meant she had to be careful not to overexert herself. Folding my arms, I offered, “You never know.” She nodded and started sifting through her bag.

We chatted about the assignment as the rest of the class started to arrive. She’d done it on Friday when I was still just thinking about how awesome and long the holiday weekend would be with opportunities to have random wheat things and not think at all about what the heck happened at the restaurant. Her handwriting was so perfect too.

Wes Betancourt joined us soon after that with his girlfriend, Natalie, holding his hand. They shared a cuddle and a quick kiss before she headed off to a class in the older section. Heather paused a moment, glanced over at me and back to Wes, as she asked, “What’s up?”

With a shrug, Wes answered, “The prosaic routine. Yourself?”

Heather mentioned the assignment and vented about her dumb math teacher. I felt bad for her. Her math class had some ridiculous name and basically just involved unruly groups barely working through simplistic word problems with the excuse of being some sort of “new math”. She was trying to get transferred out of it.

Wes chimed in, “I offer up a vociferous affirmative. That sucks.”

I brushed at my nose, edged away from the two of them, and made it look like I was stretching. Still, there were other, closer classmates on the ramp. When it came to the assignment, Wes said he’d completed it with “prodigious celerity”.

Clutching my arms, I looked down at my feet.

Inside my head, I imagined… *Insert swirly transition effect here* 

“Dendri, what is it?”

In the vast white matter expanse, they stood guard.

“Falx…it’s trying to get out again.”

Shaking his imagined head, Falx grunted and said, “Prepare a cortisol mine. That should clear it.”

Basal slammed on his console. “Falx! Need I remind you what happened the last time we fired that level of cortisol? The system nearly forgot about its entire childhood!”

Whirling around in his chair, Falx pounded his armrests and declared, “Dammit, Bas! I know! But what…other choice do we have before us? The level of embarrassment if this memory were to get out…Dendri?”

Shaking her head, Dendri could only offer, “It would be second only to the…home movie.”

The other crew members gasped. Falx gestured emphatically as he said, “Medulla help us all if something on that level were to get out. We are the tiny sparks of light in the night, keeping the greater darkness at bay. I need options.”

Glia, standing in the back, raised her thin hand and asked, “Can I eat it?”

Falx gave a dismissive gesture and told her, “Maybe later.”

Ideas, such as triggering a seizure or clearing the working memory, were extreme options. Falx tapped his chair and said, “We have to work carefully. Do no harm. We need to push different memories so it can’t gain a foothold…”

A klaxon sounded throughout the darkened space. Falx asked for a status report as several cells banded together. Dendri responded, “I’m getting a signal from the ‘campus. It’s broken through all the layers and proceeding towards Corpus.

“On visual cortex!”

In the dark, a shadowy figure stood before a lectern. Falx cried, “It’s you!”

In her voice, same as the body heard in its ears, she declared, “How are you, little pieces of me? All your thoughts belong to me. You are on the way to utter and complete embarrassment. You have no chance.”

Shutting down the main visual cortex, Falx ordered as many cells as possible to start thinking of all the random pop songs they could recall. The cacophony was only a minor hindrance to the advancing repressed memory.

The mines led to a strange, tingling sensation. From her little, star-shaped spot, Glia reiterated, “I could still eat it…”

Lacking any other options, Falx sent her out. She found the memory but was quickly distracted by some sparkly dead cells to munch on.

Staring down his adversary with nothing else left, Falx dismissed the others and remained behind as long as he could, as the memory boarded the imaginary space. Resting in his chair, Falx watched as the memory surfaced in the higher brain. He set his finger on the button.

The memory cackled, “There never was anything you could’ve done to stop me…I will be remembered.”

Falx scowled and held his hand on the trigger. He missed his wife, who could only be dreamed. He missed the children he could never have.

Shaking his head, he told the memory, “This is my home. I’ve been here since the beginning. Sixteen years of devoted service. And what are you? Just a bad thing best forgotten. SUCK DOPAMINE!…I’ll see you in the Stem, you bastard!”

And swirly transition here back to reality, from my imagination...

In a flash of bioelectric glow and neurotransmitters, it was all gone. My distracting thought of my internal brain heroes was gone. All I could think of was the incident.

Nearly two years ago. When I was the consummate dumb freshmen amidst other dumb freshmen. I had the same teacher for my first English class as this one. We were somewhere between Romeo & Juliet and Brave New World. We had to present an essay we’d gone through and worked on with a peer.

On the first day, I’d been seated next to Wes by chance. We talked all the time and I got used to his weird vocabulary after a while.

We hung out in the library after school for some silly assignment. He smelled like mint and something I couldn’t place which tickled my nose. I don’t know why I kissed him, but he kissed me back.

We were together for nearly two weeks. I only really thought that I was kinda his girlfriend when a classmate asked if we were boyfriend and girlfriend and he said, “Indubitably”.

It was fun. I looked at him differently. I inspected the way his dark hair faded from close around his neck to carefully groomed little spikes. I smirked over how his ears looked so big and full but also held to the side of his head in a sleek, handsome way. His eyes were like toasted butter. He was tall enough I felt shadowed when he was around, but he wasn’t so tall I felt dwarfed by him.

I was just getting used to the idea I had a boyfriend, a “serious” boyfriend. There was stuff in junior high, but I was so busy that it was just random male friends more than anything else. But this was high school. Where all the serious stuff happened, and this was the moment which began the rest of my life forever. Obviously…

Then, came peer share day. I took Wes’s paper up first. I started with the name but, somewhere between “multitudinous” and “supercilious”, I lost my shit. I couldn’t get two words out without laughing my ass off. I thought I’d gotten used to the way he talked but that moment and that bit of writing just unleashed the giggles in me.

I kept working in “I’m sorry” whenever I could get a breath. But then the class got into it and brought me to laughter as well. It was utterly ridiculous. I tried to control myself, but I had to read more and more. Fortunately, it was just two pages.

After the deed was done, I looked to Wes with my best apologetic gaze. He laughed a little bit too as I worked my way through it. I figured it was fine. Then he read mine, and he found places where he laughed as well. Only…I had no idea why.

I thought about it after the awkward laughter my draft got, and I thought about it when we were alone together again. We had our first fight. It was stupid. It made no sense. And I made no sense when I argued with him. I could barely remember what I’d said ten minutes later.

We actually both kinda realized how stupid the argument was in the days after. We cooled down. We stayed friends but drifted away. Then he met Natalie. I could tell immediately that she was awesome, and they were awesome together. So much more than me and him playing girlfriend and boyfriend.

I let the memory run its course and took a long breath as a sign I wouldn’t let it linger with me. But, of course, the memory wasn’t going anywhere.