Chapter 10: Square Peg
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. "Stupid fucking alarm, I hate it, it's too early," I said half awake, slapping at my phone until it shut up. Half seven. Three hours of sleep, maybe three and a half. *Not my best decision but I made a hundred and forty-five quid in a couple of hours so I can't complain too much.*
Biscuit was on my pillow. "Biscuit, can you move your fat arse out of the way, I need to get out." He didn't move. He looked at me, yawned, and put his head back down. I had to climb over him like he was a furry roadblock.
Mum was in the kitchen with the radio on and toast already waiting. "Good morning, Mum, did you sleep well?"
"Yes I did, but if I look at you I'd say you didn't sleep well at all. You look like a zombie, Liam. Is everything alright? Do I need to call the doctor?" She put the toast down in front of me and stood there with her arms folded, doing the full scan.
I sat down and told her, "No, Mum, I'm fine, I just didn't sleep well, that's all. It'll get better over time."
She looked me up and down and shook her head. "If you say so. But I'm keeping an eye on it, because if this keeps happening I'm going to call the doctor and we are going to go and get you looked at. Do you hear me, Liam?" she said with a slightly raised voice.
I nodded. "Yeah, Mum, I'll keep an eye on it myself too." *Like I would. I need to learn more, I need to be better, to earn more money... slow your roll, man. I need to relax as well. The money will come in due time.* I took a bite of toast and tried to think about something else. It didn't really work. My head was still half in last night, half in today.
I put my earbuds in on the walk to campus. The first track that came on was something I'd loved in my old life, except back there it was an old song and here it hadn't even been out a month. Still strange, that. Being in 2016. People where I came from talked about this year like it was some golden age for music and everything else. Funny hearing it for the first time when you already know every word.
I turned the corner and there it was. Same ugly brown buildings, same car park with the potholes, same security guard by the entrance who never checked anyone's ID. "Right. Let's get this over with."
Statistics 101. Dr. Morris in his brown cardigan with his World's Okayest Lecturer mug. Half the seats empty because of the rain. The girl to my left already asleep with her head on her arms. Morris started going through probability distributions and I sat there listening, taking notes like a good student.
He went through the first concept step by step. I followed along, writing things down, and by the time he finished explaining it I had it. All of it. Not just the idea but the formula, the proof, the edge cases, everything he'd said in the last ten minutes locked in like it had always been there. I didn't need to go back over my notes. I didn't need to read the chapter tonight. It was just in there.
That was Total Cognitive Enhancement. It didn't make me faster in the moment. I still had to sit and listen to the whole explanation like everyone else. But where other people would go home and read their notes three times and maybe get it by Thursday, I had it now. First pass. Done. And it wasn't going anywhere.
By the time he moved to the second concept I was already connecting it to the first one without trying, seeing how they fit together, where the logic overlapped. By slide six I'd stopped taking notes because there was nothing to write down that wasn't already locked in my head. *This is going to be a long day.* I spent the rest of the lecture drawing a dog that was supposed to be Biscuit but looked more like a potato with legs.
Linear Algebra was the same story. Professor Chen put a problem on the board. "You've got twenty minutes to work through this."
I read it. Worked through it. Had the answer in about two minutes. Then I had to sit there for eighteen minutes pretending, which was harder than the actual maths. The bloke next to me was chewing his pencil and staring at the board like it owed him money. I drew another potato dog.
* I'm going to lose my mind in this place.*
By lunchtime I was done. Not tired-done, just done. Done with pretending. I grabbed a sandwich from the canteen, found a table, and was trying to figure out if the tuna was actually tuna when someone's tray hit the table hard enough to make my sandwich jump.
"LIAM." Jake dropped into the chair opposite me, already eating, already talking. "You're here. Didn't think you'd come in today because of the rain and also because you're lazy."
"I'm not lazy, Jake."
"You once slept through a fire alarm." He didn't wait for me to respond, just kept going. "So how was it? Being back? Because I'll be honest, when you were in hospital I had to sit next to Patterson in Stats and he breathes through his mouth. Through his mouth, Liam. Like a dog. The whole lecture. I nearly transferred to another university just because of that."
"Lectures were boring, actually." I said it without thinking and Jake stopped chewing, which for him was basically a medical event.
"Boring? You? Liam, mate, three months ago you were up at midnight doing Stats homework and still getting it wrong."
"I didn't get it wrong."
"You got a thirty-two on the last assignment."
"That was one time."
"Out of a hundred, mate." He leaned back and narrowed his eyes like he was trying to read small print on my forehead. "Something happened in that hospital. I don't know what. But you're different. You look the same, well actually you look terrible right now, but you're different. You're actually here now. Before, you were always sort of floating about, like your body was in the room but your head was somewhere else. Now you're in the room." He said it like it was nothing, just an observation between chips, but it landed harder than it should have because he was right. He didn't know why and he couldn't know why but he was dead right.
That was the thing about Jake. He wasn't academic and he'd never solve an equation or write a paper. But he could walk into a room and tell you who was upset, who was faking it, and who needed a drink. He noticed people the way I noticed systems.
"Almost dying changes you, I suppose," I said.
"Yeah. My cousin broke his leg skiing and came back doing yoga and eating kale. Lasted three weeks and then he was back at Greggs." He grinned. "Don't start eating kale."
He kept going. Dave and the eight pints, because Jake was never going to let that go. A girl called Gemma in Sports Science who'd asked him for a pen and he'd given her his good one, the blue one, and she'd smiled, which in Jake's head meant they were basically getting married. "You can be best man. Wear something nice," he said, completely serious. Then the chicken wrap, the one the canteen had stopped doing, and how he was considering a formal letter of complaint. "Who do I even write to? Is there a sandwich ombudsman? There should be."
I sat there eating my sandwich and laughing and this feeling was sitting in my chest the whole time. Not pain. Not sadness. Just heavy. Because Jake was the best part of this place and I was sitting in a canteen full of people living normal lives and I knew, the way you know weather is changing before the rain starts, that I was going to have to leave.
Not today. Not next week. But I couldn't sit through three years. But Mum would never accept "I'm bored" as a reason and Dad would go quiet, which is worse than shouting. I needed something real. But what? What do I do that makes Cambridge or Oxford come looking for me?
Jake stood up and grabbed his tray. "Right. Biomechanics. Henderson's got a cold so he's going to talk even slower than normal and I didn't think that was physically possible. Pub tonight? Seven. Dave's buying first round because of the taxi."
"Yeah, alright."
He started walking away, then stopped and turned back. "And Liam? Whatever it is, yeah, you can tell me. Whenever. No rush." Quick. Like he didn't want to make a big thing of it. And then he was gone, already saying hello to someone three tables over, already laughing about something, already Jake.
I sat there for a minute after he left. The canteen noise washing around me. Whatever it is, you can tell me. I couldn't, though. Not this. Not any of it.
I went to my afternoon lectures. Applied Maths. Computer Science. Sat through both. Didn't correct anyone, even when the Computer Science professor said something about encryption that made me want to put my head through the desk.
Mum wasn't home yet. The house was quiet. Biscuit met me at the door, did his usual thing where he spins in circles until you give him attention, and then followed me upstairs. I dropped my bag, sat at my desk, and he jumped on the bed behind me. Just me and him and the water stain on the ceiling shaped like Italy.
"I need to find something." Something extraordinary. Something that would make a place like Cambridge come looking for me instead of the other way around. I didn't know what that thing was yet. But I knew it was out there somewhere and I knew I didn't have three years to find it.
My phone buzzed.
he definitely owes me 8 pints. see u at 7.
I smiled. Put my phone down. Tomorrow. I'd figure it out tomorrow.