Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Eighteen - Stupid Idiot

I got an F on my math test.

See, I was not the type of person who cared about math. I had this weird thing where I was a total obsessive perfectionist when it came to English and art, and would spend forever improving whatever I was fixating on until it was as impeccable as possible, and then still only see the imperfections in my final product. But with math, science, and history, I bullshitted my way through every assignment and didn’t blink an eye when the frequent B’s rolled in.

Because I did not care. C’s on math quizzes and tests were regular occurrences in my life, and didn’t bother me in the least. I was not going to grow up to be a mathematician or accountant or physicist, or, God forbid, teacher, and, therefore, only needed a basic, shitty understanding of what we were learning in order to graduate High School and get on with my life. Actually, in most cases, I never bothered to try to fully figure out what we were being taught in math and just cram studied the night before tests, forcing enough formulas and facts into my mind to get a passing grade on the upcoming assessment.

So it was no surprise that I literally had no fucking idea how to do any of the advanced Geometry that we had been working on for the last month. However, I ended up having a complete ‘fuck the world’ night when I was supposed to be studying for that chapter test, failed to force up any amount of motivation to discover out how to find the volume of cylinders, and spent the night listening to Green Day while dancing around my room and hanging up posters instead. I was totally screwed the next morning when I realized I only knew half the formulas necessary and could not complete either of the word problems that counted for 20 percent of that test.

I expected a B from it, wouldn’t be surprised – or all that disappointed, really – with a C minus, and knew that I had done terribly. But when I checked my grades online a week later and was confronted with a fucking 54 percent in little black and white text from my laptop screen, I felt unprecedentedly bad.

I was well aware that math was, by far, my worst subject, and had no shame in admitting how horrible I was at it. But I had never gotten a F before. On anything. Ever.

My brain was too muddled to perceive that, really, it was only a numerical percentage difference, and didn’t actually matter, because I was starting to doubt one of the only things I was sure of about myself. And, fuck, I was getting to the point where absolutely nothing was definite, and, let me tell you, that is not a fun way to live.

One thing that I’d been secure with throughout my sixteen years of life was that I was a relatively smart person. I was not an A plus student, but I was also not – and never had been – failing any classes. I was an exceptional reader and writer, knew how the universe came to be, was aware of the date that the Constitution had been signed, and could do long division provided that a calculator was somehow missing from my possession.

The schools in my district were good. They were well funded and had advanced classes to suit each individual’s needs. I was in the second highest math lane. I was intelligent, and I had always been sure of that, even if I wasn’t some kind of ingenious child prodigy.

But I got an F. A fucking F. I did not get F’s on tests. And I knew, I was completely and totally observant of the fact that school is probably the single worst system of judging intelligence in our world, but that did not stop me from beginning to worry that, after all those years of education and studying late into the night, spending my short life scrawling homework assignments, doing my best to pay attention as teachers blabbered about cell reproduction and the French influence on the American revolution, that I might be stupid.

And I was already overwhelmed enough, trying to scribble out enough semi-legible chapter summaries of the science non-fiction book that I’d been assigned to read for a project to make it look like I’d actually, you know, read it, before the deadline, and write a farewell letter to my classmates for history even though we weren’t graduating for another year and my history teacher was on crack when she decided that would be a good way to teach us about the end of George Washington’s presidency, as well as, of course, do my mother fucking math homework that I didn’t get.