She had never known hands that didn’t quiver, migraines that went away without painkillers, eyes that could meet other eyes—but that wasn’t saying much. The only thing she knew was what she didn’t know. She could only bring herself to like what she didn’t dislike. She defined her positivity as a negative applied to a negative. A good day was when nothing bad happened to her.
Unwilling ignorance had its burdens. The domain of what she didn’t know included: how to read, how to speak, how to count, how to conceptualize numbers, and most of all, how to think, and therefore, how to “am”. Don’t be mistaken; none of these observations were her own, but rather of a formless entity that, of course, she did not know of. Formless, nameless, identity-less, and yet also an anteater whose elongated snout nudged her along every unretained lecture. If she knew how to want, she would want to know how to know. That would surely be an invaluable skill as a second-year biology major.
“I don’t know,” she would have answered, if asked anything, if she knew how to answer. She would also argue that “I don’t know” was a perfectly accurate answer to a question. She was more than capable of not understanding anything. Understandable that someone would underestimate her, though. People often underestimated dolts.
Group discussions with her were unbearable. She didn’t know why the girl in her desk clump with the studded ruby earrings was talking right at her, instead of the entire group. As if they knew each other. As if she knew anything.
“What are the odds of us meeting again? I decoded the message you left in my notebook and followed the accounts you mentioned, but I messaged you on all of them and you never replied. But maybe I decoded it wrong? Your symbol for A and M look too alike.”
She looked to her left, but the desk there was empty. She looked to her right, but there was nobody in that desk either. Their group had been a pair all along and she hadn’t noticed. She was the only one the girl could possibly be addressing.
“I don’t know you,” she told her.
The girl’s realization crept into her like the hair-thin legs of a barn spider that was friends with a pig, and Charlotte’s Web was spelling her mistake out on her disappointed face. “Oh.” She didn’t want to believe she was wrong, so she chose to believe that she had a good reason to be wrong. “I’m so sorry. I have prosopagnosia. Do you know what that is?”
Thankfully, the question was rhetorical.
“I’m completely face-blind—I can’t recognize anyone’s face, not even my own, so I have to memorize stuff like people’s clothing or accessories. But I thought I recognized your face. I really thought I recognized someone’s face, this time.”
“What’s your name again?”
“Sorry, I never actually introduced myself because I thought we already knew each other.” But she wasn’t really sorry. There were few things she was actually sorry about. “I’m Anitra. I’m a chemistry major. What about you?”
“Sonatina. I’m trying to study biology.”
“Oh, are you undeclared?”
“No. Um. I’m just bad at biology. It’s hard to actually call myself a biology major if I’m not even good at biology.”
“Well, shit, I’m also bad at biology. This worksheet is really hard, too. Do you get it?”
That was Sonatina’s first time hearing of a worksheet, which was probably the sheet of paper on Anitra’s desk with random permutations of GCAT between 3-prime and 5-prime. She took the paper, glanced over the questions, tried to make sense of it, and then promptly gave up. The English alphabet was hard—so many perfect curves she couldn’t emulate, so many straight lines that went jagged or slanted in her hand, so many light-speed translations from pencil-markings to tongue placements to air-blowing with funny throat vibrations. The worksheet made as much sense as an Ouija board to her and haunted her just as deeply, except there was no “GOOD BYE” to terminate the connection of her soul to the letters.
She could walk out, though. The letters, the questions, the worksheet, the discussion class, the letter grade at the end of the quarter on her transcript—that was as far as the connections went. She was still detached from everything else. Anitra didn’t matter in the long run, probably wouldn’t even talk to her after the class ended. It was a big university. She could walk out and keep walking until she made it to the other side of the campus, the business school, and grab a latte there. Nobody knew Sonatina in the business school. Those flimsy connections would stretch so far that they’d snap and it didn’t matter who got tangled in between, didn’t matter whose flesh was sliced through. Entanglement wasn’t the same as connection.
Anitra took the worksheet back and pushed lead out of her mechanical pencil. “The second strand should just be all the complements, right? A to T, T to A, C to G, G to C. I remember it as ‘All The Cool Girls’.”
She wrote directly on the worksheet, despite the all-caps warning not to write directly on the worksheet so that other classes could reuse it. Sonatina didn’t stop her. Their 5PM class was the last class period of the day, so it was probably fine. Unless it wasn’t. The TA had the right to deduct points from their assignment for not following simple directions. Sonatina couldn’t stop her. Being right and being rude meant the same thing too many times. She didn’t even have the capacity to show that she understood Anitra’s explanation.
Anitra wrote down the answer quickly for someone allegedly “also bad at biology”. Sonatina knew it. Anitra was the type that feigned mediocrity to make her average performance stand out more, to fit in with others’ self-deprecating habits. Sonatina hated that. She didn’t need disclaimers to assure people she was dumb; she was perfectly capable of showing it every time she pulled on a door meant to be pushed.
Anitra hated Sonatina and how dumb she was and how easy she was to mistake for someone she knew. It was obvious from the atrociously rounded-out apexes of her capital “A”s and the sharp double-points of her capital “M”s. Rounded or sharp? Pick a lane, already. Anitra was also inconsistent with which type of lowercase “a” she used and all of her lowercase m’s had a bigger first hump than second. How hypocritical of her to criticize her old friend’s cipher when she couldn’t even form her un-ciphered letters in a pleasing way.
“Does that make sense?” Anitra asked.
“No,” Sonatina said.
“Sorry, I’m bad at explaining things.” But Anitra meant that she was sorry Sonatina didn’t understand, not that she was sorry she couldn’t explain better.
Sonatina enviously glanced over at the group of four beside them, already talking about each other’s clubs and interests because they answered the worksheet within the first five minutes of looking at it. Five wasn’t a bad number. Next Tuesday, Sonatina was going to slide into their desk clump and act as if she had always been there.
“The question is asking for the RNA sequence, I mean,” Sonatina said. She switched to the seat on the right of Anitra. It didn’t even make sense that there were two empty desks shoved into their desk clump. Anitra should have scooted just her own desk next to Sonatina’s, in the first place. And why in a diamond with so much wasted space at the center? It should’ve been a rectangle. Sonatina scooted her desk right next to Anitra’s to correct the error. “So you take the sequence you just wrote, and then you replace all the T’s with U’s.”
Anitra didn’t shrink away as Sonatina crossed her arm over to write on the worksheet. That was the nineteenth red flag. Sonatina was only now realizing how many flags were being raised and that all of them were red, because now her eyes were focused, her photoreceptors were firing off like gunshots in war trenches, her irises were dilating at the sight of Anitra’s shiny pink lip gloss. She was thinking how self-centered Anitra’s pneumonic device for remembering the DNA bases was. Sonatina remembered the DNA bases as G-CAT, plain and simple, which had nothing to do with being cool or being a girl. She had a feeling Anitra best knew things in proximity to herself.
Feelings had nothing to do with knowings, though, and the most pressing certainty was that Sonatina didn’t know when she would be able to pop her next few pills of extra strength acetaminophen.
“Wow, that makes sense.” Anitra leaned in. Elbows touched. Body heat transferred. “I totally misread the question.”
It was hard for Sonatina to voluntarily want to know anything, but she liked the sparkle of Anitra’s studded ruby earrings and the warmth of the rose gold. She would’ve liked to know where to get those same earrings. She had lost interest in looking nice in high school, back when her pounding heart woke her before her alarm clock out of habit of having to finish homework last minute before she had to catch the bus, but having nice things never got old. Beauty didn’t need genius, was perhaps higher than genius, as it needed no explanation. Ruby earrings could fill in the gap where her disappearing GPA was supposed to be.
Anitra finished the rest of the worksheet on her own, not even bothering to pretend to collaborate.
(TO BE CONTINUED)