Asterisk*

Echolocation and Ecology*

*Taking place at our favorite shithole: school

Drills pounding in your head,

Textbooks flip open,

Teachers bang on the door,

A winter morning awakes.

A weekend far away,

The tense test takers close.

A system broken,

To never be fixed.

Apollo

Forensic science was always fascinating to me. It was fun; trying to prove something with only the facts at hand, instead of conspiracy theories that pull it all together. I'd leave that to Kyra. I didn't have the capability to stand in front of a jury and say things on a whim. I need about forty hours to plan out one sentence for it to make sense. What I could do, however, is sit in a lab and just play around with different things. Put on a white coat and pretend like I was part of a murder mystery saga without ever having to be shit on publicly when things go wrong.

Science was a pretty fun subject as long as you can get past the science teachers always being the worst ones in the school and the shitty equipment that they try to pass off as top notch. Now that I was actually in college, I figured I could get mediocre equipment, at best. Guess who got proved wrong? Me.

I was currently walking around with safety goggle marks, trying frantically to study before my ecology test tomorrow. For some reason, Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory would just not stick in my head, regardless of how many times I tried to drill it in. I kept trying to get Jinx to help me, but I felt bad because I knew he was the type of person who winged every test and pulled it out of the bag, so he was just sitting there bored while I freaked out over vocabulary terms.

I was currently in class, trying to pay attention to some professor explaining how quantum physics can help people in the forensic science realm. It's funny how he thought college was cheap enough that I could just get another degree simultaneously. Not only that, but school was a beacon of mental illness. It's like putting suicidal thoughts, depression, and anxiety in one big room, then locking the door and saying goodbye. That being said, I also wanted to get a PhD, just so people could start calling me Dr. instead of Mr. That's a pretty dumb motivation to get a degree, but whatever. As long as I got there somehow. I would start bribing myself with M&Ms if I have to.

I had been hanging out with Marcus a lot lately. He was pretty cool. He was willing to sit there and listen to me trying to remember vocabulary definitions, regardless of how dumb I sounded. He was also willing to struggle to find the root of words on google for me, which I find one of the most boring tasks to do. I remember he mentioned something about his brother being a linguistics major and doing this all the time.

Marcus had promised to help me after school with this stupid science theory, which I was kind of looking forward to. The part where I was spending time with him, not the part where I was going to have to struggle to retain information. He just had a very comforting vibe to him. His voice was kind of deep but barely changed pitch. He could definitely read audio books if the whole toxicology thing didn't work out for him.

The last ten minutes of class seemed to go so slowly, but once the class was dismissed, I swung open the door and left like I could actually run. It was like all of the professors decided that none of us had been to school before and they had to reiterate that people shouldn't come to class late for the whole class.