Inciting Investigations

Chapter 1

Birdy Anders

Birdy sighed loudly. Maybe she was just being a dramatic teenager, but at the point that she was at, she really didn’t care anymore. She was working on her Algebra II homework, and it was absolutely horrendous. She didn’t know why that teacher liked torturing them.

Seriously though, Mr. Jenkins had assigned three worksheets, which were all at least thirty problems long, and they were all due the next day. It wasn’t even like she had had these assignments for a week and just decided not to do them. They had all been given to them that day, and he did this practically every single night. It was tiring, it really was.

If she hadn’t known better, then she would’ve thought he was trying to kill all his students slowly in some sadistic boredom trap. Really, she didn’t know better, so that possibility was still on the table. She wasn’t about to let that one go. There was too much evidence for it.

She gave out a sigh once more at the problem she had been stuck on for the past ten minutes. It had tons of big words like ‘logarithmic’. She felt like she had heard that a couple of times in class but she probably just didn’t have the energy at the time to actually pay enough attention to hear the teacher describing what it meant and how to use it.

She knew she still had twenty-two more questions left after this, and she really wanted to get it all done quickly. She was genuinely questioning if her brain was completely fried or melted from the amount of time she had spent working on all of this. So she just put down whatever bullshit her brain made on auto-pilot and hoped it made some sort of sense.

Birdy knew she wasn’t always the smartest person. Both in real life and on paper. She had okay grades, but they weren’t the best. B average, that’s what she was. She did and said things without thinking a lot, and she knew it was a problem. Everyone always told her to ‘just slow down and think things through’, ‘think about your words before you say them’ but she didn’t know how to do that. Her brain liked to ignore those messages and do its own thing.

She sometimes hated herself for that. She really didn’t know why she couldn’t just focus during class and pay attention to the homework. She knew she could. She really did. Whenever she found something interesting in class, then she could place all her attention on that subject and do great.

She could write essay after essay on the mythology of mermaids or sirens and how they became a part of ancient civilizations. They would all be effortlessly worded with clear intention and understanding of the material. Some of her teachers had even told her they had never seen such a wondrous piece of writing before in their whole teaching career.

On the other hand, if you asked her anything about what sedimentary rock did…some other type of rock when rubbed against it, she would not be able to tell you a thing. It was just one of those annoying little things about her. There were a lot of those annoying little things about her. Or, at least, that’s what everyone else seemed to be telling her constantly.

She guessed that she could somewhat understand what they were saying. She knew that she could be a bit careless and stupid, and she had a bit of a bother. But she really tried to stop doing the things people told her they didn’t like. She just slipped up sometimes. That was all.

Birdy breathed out through her nose heavily. She knew that she needed to stop thinking about these self-deprecating thoughts. She knew it wasn’t helping anyone, especially not herself. She just needed to make sure that she was focusing and blocking out anything else.

She had also heard her school counselor say that when she was having trouble regulating her thoughts, to just think of one good thing. It could be about anything: her family, her life, her friends, her school, just anything good. So she tried to do that more often.