Antagonym

Chapter 9

The first snow had come and I wasn't having it. For someone that liked the cold, snow was one thing I despised with all my heart. Maybe it's just a regional thing, but snow made me want to curl up into a ball and scream. Just think of all the fun it's associated with: shoveling, black ice, dirty roads, rock salt, getting everywhere, making people drive like idiots; it was an all around good time. A great fucking time.

I found it almost impossible to believe that less than a week ago I was comfortably tanning in a bikini just half an hour from here yet now there's ice on the sidewalks and everyone is wearing winter jackets. Sure, snow is great when it first falls. It's pretty on the trees and the grass and if it melts away, it isn't a pain in the ass. But when it's October and there's still leaves on the trees and on the ground, you get damp and rotting leaves packed into the grass and the roads and the snow turns brown faster and everything is just miserable and depressing.

I hated it with a burning passion.

So when I showed up to my psychology lecture at nine on a sunday morning, I looked like a fucking mess. The whipping wind had made my pale cheeks red and my teeth were practically chattering at the below freezing temperatures outside. For a hockey player, you might think I'm crazy but I'm not. I loved the cold. But then you add wind and take away the exercise and the whole thing becomes a lot more unbearable.

When I sat down at one of the cushioned chairs in the lecture hall, I was quick to pull out my Electrodynamics textbook because that class was easily my hardest. It made me question why the hell I chose to become an astrophysicist and most days it made me want to cry.

I guess you could say a lot of things about today made me want to cry.

I was in the middle of one of the longer math problems in the textbook when someone put their stuff down next to me. Psychology was a filler class to get credits so it usually had a lot of people, but so far I'd been lucky enough to sit by myself in the back row against the wall to the right. Maybe I did have resting bitch face, because as soon as I looked to my left and saw it was Beck, he furrowed his brows and asked, "What crawled up your ass and died?"

"Electrodynamic theory II."

"I'll pretend like I know what that is." Beck took the seat next to me.

"Since when are you in this class?" I asked him while turning back to my book in a last ditch attempt to finish the math problem before class started. In all honesty I got so much tunnel vision in school, even as a high schooler, that I almost never noticed the kids in my class that weren't directly related to my work, let alone in a lecture hall.

"Since August when classes started," Beck retorted while relaxing in his chair, crossing his muscular arms over his chest. "How was Maya's baseball game?"

I'd seen Beck since then, but we hadn't talked. It had only been two days anyway; but we were busy at practice and our schedules just didn't happen to collide. Although figuring out he was in my psychology class probably meant we would get lunch after, as that was were I'd come from that day in the dinning hall. That's most likely where Beck first saw me in this class, as I was leaving.

My knee still ached a little but for the most part I was back to normal. Something told me that that was Beck's way of trying to figure out if I went to the doctor without actually asking because he knew it would piss me off. "It was good. They won so that was good," I murmured somewhat repetitively, still distracted by my textbook. For the most part, I tried to tune him out.

"You must really like electrodynamic theory."

"Mhm."

"Just like you hate hockey."