Excuse my French

douze. cinéma vérité

It was during first period that I realized that my extracurricular activities, which annoyed me to no end while making me look better on paper, were not sufficient to make me look like an ideal college applicant.

Really, it was pretty sad—it was already bad enough to start the day off with chem class with Bredbenner. When the thought struck me, I stopped writing (a pretty bad idea since the teacher tended to rattle off information so quickly that if I missed even five seconds, it would guarantee five incorrect answers on the next assessment). That was not good. That was so not good, especially this late into the game.

Olivia sent me a puzzled look, pushing her notebook over to me so I could copy. I came back to my senses and began to write down everything she had written down as well as everything new that Bredbenner was saying (which was harder than it sounded). Gracious.

By the looks of this lesson, the next chemistry test was going to be crazy hard.

Once we were half-way through the lesson (I was stuck in a phase where I wasn't sure whether I wanted to fall asleep or die of despair), I relaxed since I was finally all caught up. I glanced to my side. Olivia was still giving me that expression that said, "Is there something going on with you?"

"I just had a revelation," I whispered to her out of the corner of my mouth.

"Oh?" Her eyebrows were lifted so high that they were threatening to disappear into her bangs.

I rolled my eyes at her even though I just really wanted to have a deep thinking session about the futility of human effort (kind of...I was exaggerating there). "It concerns my future."

"Huh." Olivia turned back to her notes. "That's, like, totally not general at all."

"Okay, I just realized that I might have just ruined my chances of getting to any college by not participating in any sports," I said, all in a single breath while watching Bredbenner carefully. He was quite a vigilante these days. And the last thing I wanted to do was to infuriate a mad scientist vigilante (now that would really blow my chances of doing anything with my life).

Olivia tried very hard to hide a smile, but she didn't succeed. At all. "You're overreacting, A." She avoided my eyes by writing down a formula from the board.

I followed her lead, but I still pursued the subject. "Seriously, Livy. I mean, you and Lila probably won't understand at all."

"And why is that?" Olivia picked up a highlighter from her pencil case and highlighted a vocab term. She was really reminding me of Lila at this point (since when did she own a neon green highlighter?).

Ugh. She really didn't get it. "Lila does travel soccer outside of school, and that totally counts. You do tennis, and you're great at it. And, like, I don't even know if I have to mention this, but Luc does three sports. Three sports. And he's going to become rugby captain next year, if I'm not wrong."

Her expression lit up (I wasn't really sure if it was because of the Luc mention or the compliment I had paid her). She took a second to compose herself again, which was smart, before responding. "Audrey, but you do—"

"I do basically all the clubs that you do."

There was a pause on her end.

See, she finally understood what I was going through.

"Um," she started slowly, "you're, uh, pretty good at writing. And French. And—"

I scoffed. "Did you just say that I was good at French? Dude, I'm in French 3 Honors while there are those people who started it in middle school, and they're, like, in French 5 now. And then you have to look at Luc, who—"