Munmun(51)

I told her, nono please babble away, thatscrazy that they make you work and expect you to study so much, do they ever let you sleep, do you even get to Dreamworld on a regular basis.

She told me, she sees Dreamworld maybe twice a week, mostrelaxing part of her day is at school forsure, in the parkinglot or at Mun World, she can’t even read her comics at home, when her dad catches her reading comics he grabs them and throws them away.

I told her, comics huh, what comics do you like, could you recommend some, I’m trying to get better at reading.

She told me, ohman, there are some good ones, rightnow I’m really enjoying Lords And Swords, it’s a middleearth but crazier, more violent for sure.

Her friends got sick of watching us eventually and Angel yelled, “Time to go, we’re missing class, psycho,” all buzzed from pints of bubbly slush.

My brain tried one last reminder of, Warner, don’t forget, you lived in this girl’s garbage for two days, feel some shame.

So I felt some shame.

But she piped, “Well hey, it’s great and amazing to see you scaledup, anyway let me give you my number, we can meet up again sometime and I can give you a comic maybe.”

I said, “Heckyeah, areyoukidding, I’d love that.”

She tapped it into my phone with spangly fingernails.

“Thanks for the drink, Warner,” she smiled, in her voice my name was a pair of pearls.

“Ryangosling, since when do you know girls,” demanded Tray, watching me strut out of Shaky Buzz with a girl’s number, but I stayed mysterious about it.





DREAMWORLD


Didn’t just get the number from Grace, got a comic too, infact she gave me a couple and then kept messaging me, ayyy read it yet, wat do yew think, phonegifs of blinkyeyes and clashyswords.

Nope, sorry Grace, I have no time to read unfortunately, I only have time to stress endlessly about math.

Mathy Track was my only hope for retracking. Wordy was a lostcause because of my still crappy readingskills and none of the other retracks intrested Hue.

“I know your goal is to make the absolute most of yourself,” he told me, “so let’s avoid the more vocational tracks that will limit your potenchill. Mathy and Wordy are the ones that I believe will open more doors than they shut.”

“Or what about Busy Track, couldn’t that put Warner on a path to one day running a great corpo,” tried to help Prayer.

“Let’s try for Mathy Track,” firmed Hue in a tone of This Is Not Actually Super Upfordiscussion.

And Mathy made some sense for me anyway, I was learning to enjoy the way numbers click together neatly. Plus I always sort of knew munmath without really knowing it, forexample even as a kid you could ask me, hey Warner, popquiz, what’s the scale of fiftythousand munmuns, prettyquick I would tell you that’s fourtenthscale, more than thirdscale, less than halfscale, whatelseyougot.

So sure, of all the studies probably math was the best fit for my brain if I had years and years to learn it, but I only had weeks, and the thing I was learning was, math was a house with too many rooms.

Numbers, negatives, plus minus times divide, the percents and fractions of munmath, you think you’re pretty quick with that stuff, well, congratulations idiot, that’s just the first room. Step into the nextroom and you’ve got letters running around in there, letters that might mean a number and might not, so have fun dealing with that. Sometimes you solve for ecks, ecks is a mystery criminal you have to catch, sometimes else it’s not a crimeshow it’s a lovestory, ecks is in a relationship with why.

Nextroom, nextroom, room after that, here come more wild symbols, squiggles, pies and roots, brackets, brambles, parentalsis, mediums and means.

Meanwhile branching off the whole freaking time to left and right are rooms of shapes, angles, grids, lines, charts, artrooms of mathy drawings, and the doors between the rooms are insane relationships, somehow a square can also be a sentence of letters and numbers, pee equals four ess, riddle me that, math wizards.

You think okay, this is a little berserk, but I can probably manage as long as they don’t come up with anymore stuff and then you find some stairs leading up up up, ohno, there’s a whole other floor, you stagger upstairs and it’s just bonkers up there, everything is a function, everything is in parentalsis now, buynomeals, somehaitians, intergulls, signs cosigns loggerrhythms, meanwhile the shapes in the artrooms are mutating, threedee, fourdee, sillenders and prisons, scalers victors tensores manyfolds, meanwhile meanwhile step right this way so I can introduce you to the number eye, root of a negative, it exists in the next world but not in this one, a moaning groaning mathghost, now it haunts you forever.

Panicked, you vidsearch, how much more math even is there, how many more floors, you stick your head out the window and look up and ohmygod, ohcrap, pagesandpages of mathtopics in your vidsearch, floors and floors, it’s a whole tower teetering into the clouds and you’ll never get to the top.

Now for the finalblow, look out the window across the street, more endless towers with endless rooms, mechanics, electrics, chemicals, medicals, programs and logics, all stuff you’ll also need atleast firstfloor knowledge if you want the counselors to let a fifteenyearold retrack at Votech.

In the sweetsmelling aircondition Dreamworld of Hue Family Palace, moreandmore everyday I felt panicked, afraid, fighting off hopelessness, trying to win little victories one problem at a time. But every win was dwarfed and drowned by the hugeness of math.