"Hey, I totally forgot to finish guessing the other intelligences."
I let my arms hang over the end of the couch above my head, reaching until my fingertips brushed Tay's rug on the floor and my back popped. He pushed at my legs, which were kicking in the air next to him as he sat upright finishing a crossword in the newspaper.
The cooking teacher said she felt bad for throwing it at us, so she let Tay keep it and also gave us a free ticket to her next class on Serendipitous Shortcakes.
"How many did you get?" I asked. "Two?"
"Three," he replied.
"Okay, go."
The newspaper crackled. I started ticking slowly with my tongue and tracked my eyes around the upside-down apartment. Tay's arrangement of items was about as clinical an example of 'organised chaos' as you could get. Stacks of partially opened advance reader copies of the company's books braced the corners of the living room, lamps sat atop wobbly side tables, and jackets and shirts were lumped high over the back of an olive armchair (though I noticed Tay had been wearing his original work outfit more often than not, lately). The mustard yellow couch was turned to face the floor-to-ceiling windows and, instead of a TV, a battered iPad was propped against a line of four heavy mugs on the coffee table.
"There was linguistic intelligence, wasn't there?" Tay asked. I nodded, not a comfortable feat when done in opposition to gravity. "Then how about visual intelligence?"
"Yup."
"Okay. And mathematical?"
"Yup times two."
"Sweet. Those are probably the easiest ones, hey?"
"Mm, probably."
"What else... What definition of 'intelligence', exactly, is this theory using?"
I pulled out my phone and found an article describing Howard Gardner's hypothesis. "'In order to capture the full range of abilities and talents that people possess, Gardner theorises that people have more than just intellectual capacity'."
The sound of a pen scratching caught my ear and I realised Tay was still doing his crossword. I was about to tease him for trying to flaunt his cleverness when the coffee maker clicked itself off in the kitchen behind the wall of bookshelves (Tay had filled his with more photos than I had ever seen in one person's home). I swung myself up and off the couch to drain the last of the coffee before it got cold. I brought the confectioner's box with today's brownies back to the living room with me. It was covered in printed daffodils.
"'Abilities'..." Tay muttered, even as he wrote another word in the paper on his knee. "Can you have an intelligence for skills?"
"In this case I think the guy is basically saying our skills are our intelligence," I said. "Verbal, mathematical etc. – right?"
"Ah, I suppose so. So, does that mean we have physical intelligence? Reflexes, coordination and stuff? Sportspeople definitely know something I don't about moving the body."
"Oh, that's it. Bodily or kinesthetic intelligence."
"I'm good at this."
I watched a light rain begin outside, blurring the purple-grey sky. Somewhere behind the clouds, the sun had just about set. A bitter bite of over-cooked brownie made me misjudge my next sip of coffee and Tay laughed at my scrunched face.
"Serves you right," he said. His pen didn't stop its writing. "Both for letting mine burn, and for giving yours to the teacher as an apology."
I massaged the stinging roof of my mouth. "The only reason you didn't give her yours too is because they came out like–" I held up what resembled a black briquette– "this."
YOU ARE READING
The Ordinary Haunting II
Fanfiction~Sequel to The Ordinary Haunting~ Tay Tawan was not expecting to get tied to New Thitipoom when he died. He used to be a happy-go-lucky kind of guy; the kind with no real troubles or regrets that he considered important enough to stop him from his e...
