Humane

Chapter 10

"What's an open interval again?" I asked, my pen zooming through my notebook.

"We leave the limits."

"And closed?"

"Limits included."

I cursed and changed the symbol. A parentheses meant a parentheses, but no, Math needed it to be complicated. "My brain's dying."

"And that's just the beginning!" My friend laughed, turning the pages of her notebook. Fifty pages of work, and it was only Math, not even including the worksheets and assignments. "You don't complain much about the brackets in Computers though."

"What's there to complain about?"

"Oh, I don't know. Tuples take simple brackets, lists take square, and dictionaries take curly. You never lose it there."

"That's simple stuff. Python is so straightforward. Format is easy. And then there's this mess. Open, close. Close, open. Close, close; open, open. Have you ever seen any data type with different brackets?"

"You say that right now, but I remember how it was for you back when we had Java."

"Java was hard, okay? I didn't follow the language from the basics thanks to the for loop and its three arguments requirement, so I absolutely screwed that up. I don't even remember that auto generated thing we had to write in exams. Public, static, void, main, something. At least it's automatic in Python!"

"Still working under the same principle, though." She sighed. "All you want is convenience."

"It's easier," I insisted. "Now help me comprehend inverse trigonometric functions. This stuff is literally cryptic. I can interpret Greek faster than this."

"This is Greek though? The word trigonometry itself comes from Greek."

"Shush. I said Japanese. You're hearing things."

She sneered and pushed her rough notebook nearby. "You're an idiot."

"Thanks. Prove that the sine inverse of a negative angle comes up to negative of the sine inverse of that angle, please."

Once again, I threw that fake happiness around like it was nothing, even though all my excitement had evaporated leaving behind a painful sense of dread. But nevertheless, I lifted the sides of my mouth up as the flashbacks of Doll's creepy Cheshire Cat expression on my face crushed me inside again.

I had come to hate smiles.

"How was your day?" Marlon inquired, his eyes bright.

"It was unbelievable," I replied. It was all ominous. These experiences... were supposed to be my normal. Yet they were just so wrong. "It's as if the cage I was trapped in disintegrated all of a sudden."

His smile twitched slightly.

"I see," he said, regaining his composure. "I'm still glad to hear that. Say, Ava, have you seen the newly-built garden?"

I perked up upon that reference. The school had been promising us a small flower bed since forever. So many seniors had graduated slightly disappointed, promising to return with their alumni pass only to have a look at it.

I guessed a lot of people wanted to have something of their own, a mark perhaps. A mark of the current batches, of the graduated, and of the future students.

"They finally made it?"

"Oh, not really." Marlon started walking ahead, guiding me. "The legend goes that the gardener was bored, and since the primary students weren't there to scatter the seeds, there were too many weeds–"