The Thing about Falling ✓

Sixteen • The Thing about Libraries I

Owen

"Athena, I'm so sorry but I really have to cancel PT for tomorrow, okay? No, I still haven't told Sophie yet but she'll understand. It's midterms week and I barely studied anything and I have a project to do for Anderson's class. Are you sure you're not upset? Okay, okay. Sorry, love. See you." I said to Athena through a phone call.

It had been a few hours after classes for today had finished yet I still need to brush up a bit on this project for chem lab that I had to do with a partner. Thankfully, Maya was available and she took me under her wing. At least it was better than being given away to some random student who Dr. Anderson equally despises and we could be hated together. What an absolute joy.

I hung up my call with Athena and as much as I was incredibly saddened by our loss time to which I blame myself for, my main priority these days is my education. I'm independently living far from home with my girlfriend and a couple of friends and the best I could give back to my parents for keeping up with me were decent grades. It would hurt me to tell my parents especially my mum that I had dropped a course or needed to repeat it for the next semester.

I was in the library with Maya and some of the students in Dr. Anderson's class looking through reference books for this shitty paper we have to do by two's. At most, we were about 8 students of his looking for things we can put about reaction rates of specific chemical compounds Dr. Anderson assigned us to search for and write about.

"Owen, have we already done that experiment for chemical equilibrium? I can't see the papers where you wrote down your observations here anywhere." Maya exclaimed as she searched through the scattered sheets of paper we both threw above the library table we were situated at.

Binders were thick with notes, homework and researches and our notebooks were full of colorful tabs to mark down what's important from what's insignificant. At this point, I can't even understand what I've written down because my handwriting looked like a chicken walked over it and left weird-looking marks. Plainly, everything was a mess.

Of all the dates available for submission of this paper, Dr. Anderson chose the exact date right before midterms. And I haven't even studied for midterms because all I've been doing lately were trying to make up loss time with Athena and doing this project with Maya.

I can't think straight.

Wait, have I called Sophie yet and alerted her that I would not go to PT tomorrow?

I'm so fucked.

"Owen? Are you even listening? We already made a schedule for the whole week and we are way behind. We should be done by today but we aren't. I don't want to fail midterms as much as you do." I heard Maya tell me as she frantically encircled important notes she found useful for our paper.

I turned my head toward Maya who now had her jet black hair into a low ponytail. Her expression portrayed the most evident hints of seriousness and intense focus, I just wished I had been the same.

Maya was seated beside me as she scanned through our combined school material and I was on laptop duty. Mainly, the only thing I had to do was to type and to think. Unfortunately, I failed doing both.

"Sorry. My mind's been foggy lately." I said as I took some of Maya's papers from her stacked pile of things we could use and started encoding some possible ideas and how we could organize them onto the paper.

"Girl problems?" she asked as she kept her gaze directly towards our notebooks and flipped through them briskly.

"Not really. It seems that I have been trying to do so much these days, I don't even know how to manage my time well." I said as I read the parts she highlighted and encircled and brainstormed how I could incorporate these into our project.