Ordinary - Chapter 4
Chapter 1, 2, 3
Chapter 4
She snuck into the art history section the next morning, ducking her head and avoiding everyone's (all two people) gaze. Part of her felt guilty for trying to leave them. Then another part felt defeated at the fact that she had not been successful. She was a deserter, skulking back in the middle of the night with her tail between her legs, hoping no one noticed her absence.
No one did notice. When she took her seat and pulled out her work, she hazarded a glance at the other inhabitants. The other student was bent over his work, face pinched in concentration, ravenously chewing on his pen. There was no way he noticed anything. The ceiling could fall, and as long as debris didn't land on his paper, he wouldn't notice.
The boy at the circulation desk was asleep. She cheered herself slightly by imagining that he had noticed her absence yesterday, and when he woke he would be surprised and glad to see her back where she belonged. Maybe he was sleeping now because he stayed up all night wracked with guilt that he hadn't paid enough attention to her loveliness when he had the chance.
On that note, she turned to her work. The fruitless adventures of the day before had left her so far behind in her studies that she felt a bit frazzled, a bit high strung, as if someone could pluck the tendons in her arm and she would sing, she would whirl on them and cry out that they needed to stop plucking at her arm and leave her alone so she could study.
This was probably not the most productive state of mind, as she faced her first problem with a kind of frantic determination.
…
…
…
…
And then…
And then…
Her pencil tapped frantically against the table.
Ribbit
She jumped, her head snapping up to face the frog that had hopped onto one of her closed books. She stared at it a moment, as its glazed eyes flickered and the pulse in its neck thrummed. Suddenly, its throat expanded, its skin becoming translucent, blown up like a balloon.
Ribbit
She jumped again, pulling back in her seat.
A second frog croaked from further down the table, and she turned to find it sitting near yet another. The one in front of her croaked and when she looked at it again, it had been joined by two more. They were all dazed or uncaring, as frogs tended to be, all spotted and warty, all facing different directions, ticking in different rhythms, occasionally stretching out a slimy webbed foot to hobble a few inches in one direction or another.
Their numbers grew constantly until the table was nearly covered, until her notes just barely peeked out between fat, slick bodies. Frogs hopped about her feet and drew far too close to her fingers. Soon the thumping of their hops and the roar of their continuous croaking reached deafening proportions.
She was not particularly frightened of slimy things. In fact, she mostly found them fascinating. Her sister always scolded her for sitting in the mud on the river bank, getting her dress dirty and holding a toad captive while she told it secrets in hushed tones. But this influx of frogs was too abrupt, too out of place, and far too distracting to be entertaining. Even if she had been disrupted by something amazing like butterflies or dandelions, she would still be irritated and distressed that they distracted from her work.
These frogs seemed more like a plague than some amusing aspect of nature.
The cat grinned up from her lap, one of the few places left that he could sit without sharing space with a frog.
"What are they?" she asked.
"They're frogs," the cat said.
"Yes, I can see that."
"Then why did you ask?"
"I know they are frogs, but there must be something special or magical about them."
"Why's that?" he asked.
"Because frogs do not simply appear in such quantities on a study table in the library."
"They don't?"
She paused and thought for a moment. She was so stressed that maybe she had forgotten that this was a fact of life, and she was showing her own ignorance yet again. This was like when she forgot that breakfast came before lunch and you curtsey to others instead of bowing, and you don't tell the girl with the tiny hat pinned to her head that her hat is askew - apparently it was supposed to be worn on the side like that.
"No," she decided. "They do not."
"They're not just on the study table. They're also on the floor."
"I don't see how that makes much difference."
"Details are very important. You should be more mindful."
"Yes, but deciding which details one should note and which ones are unimportant is a useful skill."
The frogs' croaking grew in volume and she rubbed her forehead to in some way ease her headache.
"You should poke them," the cat said.
"What?"
"Poke them and they will stop croaking." The way he eyed the frogs with glee made her wary that he was being entirely truthful. Maybe if she poked them, they would explode, leaving a splatter of green slime across her books. That would amuse the cat to no end and make her work even more difficult.
But then again, she needed them to stop making noise if she was ever going to concentrate.
Hesitantly she reached out a finger and poked the nearest frog in the chest. It blinked at her, but made no further noise.
Emboldened, she touched as many as she could reach, as quickly as possible, then brushed the cluster of silent, grumpy frogs off her notes. Several toppled onto the floor, bouncing as they landed.
Ribbit
She glanced up to see that one of the frogs she had touched was once again croaking. It was quickly followed by its neighbors and soon they were all just as loud as they had been.
"It didn't work!"
"It's only a temporary solution," the cat said.
"So I must prod them continuously for them to stay silent?"
"Yes."
She frowned and set to work patting them all on the head again, nudging them away as they tried to scoot back onto her course work. It seemed as soon as she reached the last frog, the one she touched first had started to croak again. And there were now so many frogs on the floor, where she couldn't reach them without crawling under the table in an undignified manner. She left them where they were, and a steady croaking hum droned on even as the frogs on the table fell silent, muffled ever so slightly. Even if she bent down and silenced them all, the frogs on top of the table would begin croaking again by the time she was done.
She tossed her pen down onto the table in frustration. "This is hopeless! I'm too busy poking frogs to have time to devote to my work."
"But how will you make them quiet if you give up poking them?"
"You do it," she said, grabbing the cat under his front legs. He seemed to lengthen in the air, and she had to lift him high to plop his hind legs onto the table. He turned once in a circle them flopped down on top of her notes in a ball.
She pulled the page she was working on from beneath him, nearly ripping it in the process, and she shoved him away when he tried to take up a position on top of it once more.
Set up an integral using w as a temporary variable such that…
, and…
…
A few croaking frogs had oozed into her study space again.
Therefore
“Five!” said the cat.
She blinked. “What?”
“Five x.”
“That makes no sense!”
“Sense?”
“Yes, I-“ She sighed realizing that the cat was not intending to be helpful.
“Five x! Squared!”
She grit her teeth, tuned out the frogs to the best of her ability, and focused.
Therefore…
…
“D W… D double yooou…” the cat sang.
…
“E W… E double you…”
The rhythm of the frogs seemed to align to the cat’s tune in a scattered way, almost matching, but then not quite.
…
“F double you… G double you…”
Now
…
“H I J double you, so we sing you again: F G H I J K…”
She was just trying to do her work, which no one anywhere on earth seemed to want her to do. No one wanted to help her. She never really expected the Cheshire cat to offer a hand, but would it kill him to swat at some frogs for her? He would probably enjoy it if it wasn't something she had asked him to do, if it wasn't something that would make her life easier. Heaven forbid he do anything other than get in the way and torment her into feeling horrible.
The frog's song rose another notch in volume, seeming to rise in pitch as well. Alice squeezed her eyes closed and tried to concentrate, but all she could feel was anger - anger at the frogs, anger at the Cheshire cat, anger at the stupid boy at the circulation who was sleeping through the entire ordeal, ignoring her completely, anger at the other student and his ability to focus, anger at the girls in her dorm and the other people in the library who couldn't provide her with a refuge.
Most of all, she was angry with herself. Why couldn't she clear her mind? Why did she bring all this on herself? Why couldn't she ignore the circulation clerk or talk to him, or step on all the frogs and be done with it? Why couldn’t she remember the integral of sine?
Equals… Equals… It’s so simple. Where is it?
“L M N O… Tangent! Tangent times three!”
Alice lost it.
With a pained and broken roar, she grabbed the edge of the table and stood, toppling the table and all its contents onto the floor. Books thumped onto frogs, that flattened with a pop. Others bounced and rolled away with startled croaks and bulging eyes. Her papers fluttered in an explosion into the air, drifting down again, cutting back and forth through the air. The cat let out an angry, terrified rorwl and dug his claws into the table to leave scratch marks as he skidded to the floor to land in an over fluffed pile.
And still, the boy at the circulation desk and the other student didn't look up.
No one noticed her. And no one ever would.
Her shoulders slumped and she sunk into her chair, suddenly overcome with exhaustion.
For a moment there was quiet. But it was strained to the point where she could not enjoy it. She could find no relief or pleasure in it.
She opened her eyes to see the table righted once again, her notes and books in their proper place. The cat and frogs absent, as if they had never been there at all.
Chapter 5