Keyframe

Brick By Boring Brick

"So one day he found her crying,
coiled up on the dirty ground.
Her prince finally came to save her,
and the rest you can figure out.
But it was a trick, and the clock struck twelve.
Well, make sure to build your heart brick by boring brick,
or the wolf's gonna blow it down."

- "Brick By Boring Brick," Paramore (2009)

Alejandro

When November comes to central California, it sneaks up on me without New York's chill to come with it. There's only a few weeks left in our autumn quarter, but I have a sinking feeling that it's far from over.

"I can't," Lily whines, digging her palms into her eyes. "I can't do this right now."

"Yes you can," I say from behind her, hands not ceasing their kneading on her shoulders.

She's so tense all the time, both physically and mentally. She lets me unwind her with shoulder and head massages, but, for the life of me, I can't get into her brain and smooth things out there. She has a tendency to revert directly to this "all is lost" spiral when she doesn't immediately pick up what she's studying—the classic mark of a whiz kid facing adversity for the first time. That's a phenomenon I'm glad to not have experienced yet.

She inhales with a little sniffle, covering her face with her hand for a moment before picking up her pencil again. Lillian Bennett is so much smarter than this; having a conversation with her will tell you that. She speaks nature like a third language, having a large file in her brain for scientific names, ecological webs, and microbiology. But, for some reason, calculus is where her skills fall short.

Eve Montoya runs her class like a dictatorship, and, because it's already upper-level, she's not the best at slowing down or giving detailed explanations for those not picking it up. Lily's been to her office hours more times than I can count, but even those seem to be futile when it matters.

"The last test," I start, ignoring the part of my brain that says to stay away from the topic. "How did you do? You...never told me."

I'll admit that it shocked the devil out of me when she admitted she failed our first test, and that I wasn't expecting her to be so open about everything after that. But, right now, I wish she'd just let me in again so I could help her. We've taken three tests this quarter: one together and two alone. The last one happened last week, and I know we've both gotten our grades back.

"I passed."

Her answer is short but telling. I'll assume it was somewhere in the 70s—passing, but nothing to be proud of.

"Good." It's better than no improvement at all. "At least you're getting somewhere."

"Yeah right; I'm barely holding on to a C in that class." She leans back in her desk chair, and I can see her eyes close from above. "The final is gonna destroy me; I know it. My GPA will get screwed up, I'll have to retake the class...I'm resigned to my fate."

"You sure about that?" I ask quietly, knowing from our time together that she's probably just trying to convince herself of that. "What about your parents? How would they take that?"

Her eyes are pointed up at me when she opens them again: dark, angled, and rimmed in curled eyelashes. She takes a moment before she answers, clearly weighing how much of the truth she'll tell me.

"Best case scenario...they'll cut me some slack because it's just one class. I'm doing better in biology and chem, so—they might think calc is a fluke." Another pause. "Worst case scenario, they symptomize it as part of a bigger problem and bring me home for a semester or two. They'll worry that I'm getting bad again...that always scares the shit out of them. They'll do anything to stop it."