Me, Myself, and I

steps to becoming a college dropout

1. Study with an insistent partner

"Try this one."

My head hurt too much to be irritated with him. Alex had abandoned his studies, splattered all over my bed, my beautiful, hard as a rock mattress bed pressed against the dorm wall. He opted instead to assist in mine, drilling me with questions I didn't know the answer to. Reminding me that coming up with wrong answers is just a piece of the path leading to the right ones.

"Alex..."

He shook his head. "Nah, we just need to change up our strat. Um...what's a market economy."

"Unrestricted business. Business owners set the prices and say screw the government."

He raised an eyebrow. "And what is the US?"

"Mixed, yeah?"

He smiled before I ever did. The information was in there. Had we just found the key? Maybe.

Hindsight? We hadn't even found the door.

2. Cram your brain like a food pantry

It's just more of step one. But a lot more notetaking. And we all know I love notetaking.

I copied Alex's motions, retyping everything he'd written down. Turning it all into questions. Answering said questions. At first I imagined myself typing up something for my own business, until that actually became what I was doing instead of getting those concepts down. I'd revamp and blank out the document again. I had those first two pages down solid by the end.

Hands-on is for upper classmen. So stupid. I knew plenty of people who could answer any number of questions. Put them in the real world and they'd crumble.

I bet that's why Alex was working so hard. The world outside of books was brutal. If he really thought that knowing the definition of "pricate enterprise" was enough to take over for his folks, he had another thing coming.

He kept telling me to come up with hypotheticals. "Jake said exam is all definitions," I said.

"I know, I just really suck when it comes to actually using it."

I raised an eyebrow. "And I don't?"

He caught my eye. No, I didn't. Jake said so himself. And the words of a professor were like the words of God to a guy like Alexander Kelpash.

I was up until late. That hands-on work of the future sounded like a glorious destination. And I would get there. I'd do the math. The vocab. The grinding. Destination unknown was becoming solid concrete, that mysterious top of the tree poking out. Hypotheticals. I was good at those. I could memorize some stupid vocabulary.

I could recite my makeshift definitions back at Alex with ease. I could do this. I could do this. I could do this.

3. I couldn't do this.

When I got that email, I didn't do anything dramatic. Ghosted the messages, ignored my transcript. Canceled my appointments one by one. A quick form of departure.

My empty bags seemed to fill overnight with all the things that had just been thrown in there. First the little things, a pencil or two, my cursed laptop...then came the clothes, the gifts...the bedding. Before I knew it my entire half of the dorm was bare-naked beneath the window. Brooke said a thing or two to me about stupidity. Then again, I wasn't sure she hung around long enough to notice.

People stop going to school for a lot of reasons. Some have families to provide for, society pressing against them in every directions. I had lost a staring contest with the sixth letter of the alphabet. I'd do anything not to see it anymore.