Work Text:
Kierra isn't really sure how to count. She isn't horrible at math either. 126 times 3 is 378. She doesn't have to use her calculator for that or write in the air. It's an easy question. But Kierra just can't count. She's been taught before, too many times. Her whole life she's been in a private school, and her fingers fold only to count, because numbers are her fingers, and her fingers are numbers. Her brain is numbers, in fact. Her tongue is too.
But sometimes her thoughts are too cluttered, and her tongue is too numb, or her fingers are too twitchy to count. So she thinks of the same song over and over again, mouthing the lyrics to it. The song is getting tiring. It's from her favorite girl group, but hearing it every day in her head is mind-numbing, so she loses track of her numbers anyway. She decides to listen to more of their songs over and over again, hoping the lyrics will stick to her. The rhythm, the exact minutes and seconds. She doesn't look at the music video, not even a peek at her bias' face, because that might be all she thinks of, instead of counting.
So, just for counting, she listens to another group of girls. She doesn't have a bias there, so she drowns herself in their songs and looks at their faces with little care.
Kierra has probably forgotten how to count again, because the time is 7:20 A.M. Someone, or something, is screaming at her. So she has to rush out of the house. She counts.
1 Mississippi
The house she's walking beside still has their air conditioner on. Do they have jobs or school?
2 Mississippi
A girl walks past her, wearing the same uniform. She knows this girl, but also not really. They've been on the same sidecar a few times, but Kierra never got her name.
3 Mississippi
Kierra is somehow at the gate of the subdivision already, getting into a sidecar. It's only been 3 seconds.
She's reading the question. There are 5 colors for a jacket, 3 possible materials for it, and 2 possible lengths. She's not really reading it. She knows because the person in her head isn't talking. Instead, jokes from a livestream she watched 2 weeks ago are what she hears. Angie was, like, trying her best to peek at Kierra's answer, and snickered disappointedly when she realized Kierra hadn't written anything, and Kierra side-eyed her. Camelissa tells her to stop giving her answers to others, because she might be used by people. Kierra tries her best but always forgets to cover her paper.
She finally reads the question. It's easy. 5 times 3 times 2. What an odd combination, since 3 is the number after 2 when you count.
Angie finally gets what she wants, and Kierra is kind of upset. She failed at just covering her answer. What else is she incompetent at?
Kierra is walking in circles. She isn't sure why. Whenever her family starts to judge her for it, she just says it's because it gets her imagination active. Her feet burn. Her calves are a little sore, and she's sweating. The sweat drips down from her forehead to her arm, slightly outstretched to look at her phone. Ew. She jumps high, jumps again, then jumps for the last time, like some volleyball underdog who's dedicated every millisecond to training to get better than the other girls. This action satisfies her as much as it tires her. Whenever she feels the need to rest, she does. But her brain quickly reminds her that she needs to move, as her leg is twitching. Kierra doesn't feel forced to move so much. It makes her happy. She feels normal whenever she sits down after moving so much, because she, for once, won't be fidgeting or stretching to cope with the lack of movement.
She's fiddling with her bookmark, even though she's supposed to be reading the book. Kierra does like reading, and she has a decent attention span. But it's like over the years, her mind's become more and more energized. It suddenly has room to think about everything. She's been reading the same paragraph over and over again, and then when she feels like she can finally get past it, she rereads the paragraph and sees words that didn't register to her earlier. By this point she knows Patroclus kissed Achilles; Patroclus really regrets it. Like, yeah, he messed up. She knows it happened. It just, like, won't lodge itself into her memory. Because she can only remember that one of them runs away. She can't quite recall who ran away, even though the words are right there. Suddenly Camelissa is texting her, and her bookmark disappears back into the pages.
Isaii
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Hey girl nu ginagawa mo?|
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Kierra's thankful for the distraction, so for a moment, she can forget that she's forgetful with stuff other than academics.
"Hindi naman ganun, kase nga 'di ba—"
Camelissa's mouth is moving. And Kierra's ears are buzzing. Her brain assembles the things Camelissa is saying, but then it stops. And for whatever reason, it stops and decides that she should mull over her dreams and future for a second.
I don't want to be miserable.
Well, that one's obvious. Nobody wants to be miserable, stupid.
I don't want to have a white-collar job.
Yeah, they're really boring. You're going to be sitting around all day, typing mindlessly. Probably. I mean, look at your parents.
A blue-collar job, maybe?
You're way too weak for that. It could work, but maybe peek at the mirror for a second and look at yourself. You struggle to open the house's door.
Then what do I do? I'm scared for the future. This isn't exactly helping.
I'm not sure either. Maybe you'll really end up living paycheck to paycheck. Now, the job market already isn't doing well. Be scared for the future. It's uncertain.
Can't believe I'll dream so hard, study so hard, for nothing.
Life's tough.
"—Tas yung tinext mo sakin, na medyo nagiging pet peeve na ni Juno si Angie dahil bida-bida siya, I kinda get it. Like, medyo nasa side niya ako."
Kierra snickered out an agreement, like she'd been listening the whole time.
This one teacher is kind of an asshole, actually. Sir Ross De Los Santos. Sir Ross. Seriously, Kierra hopes he burns. He's yapping on about a performance task he's assigning in M.A.PE.H. He claims it's a collaboration with their English and Filipino subjects. A time-consuming reflection paper they'll have to do after watching a play in Manila. He's waving around an I.D, while Noah is in the back, only wearing the lanyard. Sir Ross' tone is boisterous—and irritating.
"Share ko lang, sampung I.D ki-nonfiscate ko kanina sa ilang ilang estudyante."
Kierra isn't sure what he said, but her classmates scoffed, and under her breath, Eris muttered, 'fuck you'. So Kierra cusses him out in her head too.
"Akala ko dati si Sir Chris lang pwedeng manguha ng I.D, pero ngayon alam ko na pwede rin pala yung mga teacher. Maghanda kayo, ha?"
Juno rolled her eyes, then fixed her hair, making sure to hide her face. She has a hard time masking her emotions. Noah smirked. Evilly, like he usually does.
Kierra stores a few jokes and imitations in her mind, saving them for later, when she was sure her classmates would be talking about him behind his back. Calling him a pedophile, even, for touching and talking to the girls so weirdly. Meanwhile, he'll scream at the guys for breathing too much air.
Kierra later finds out from Carmelissa through text that their English and Filipino teachers never knew about the so-called collaboration. Sir Ross just made it up.
Screw him, I wasn't even listening.
Kierra wants to do the project. She really does. The time is 3:25 P.M. She just got home, she's all changed, and it's the perfect time to do the project. It's digital anyway. But she doesn't want to stop doomscrolling, and the thought of working kind of scares her. Because how long could it take? It might be heavy or really easy, like copy-pasting most of the text from Google and just changing a few words so the teacher can't reverse search. The uncertain time that will pass scares her. She's never been good at this.
Again, Kierra never really learnt how to count.
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The guilt and self-hatred are getting to her faster than she thought. She feels useless. Like a blob, though that sounds too silly of a description to describe her abysmal state. Camelissa is already texting her about the project. How she decided to do it, what she did, and what Camelissa herself is doing. Kierra hasn't done anything, but she answers her texts anyway.
She glanced at the top-left of her phone. It's 5:42 P.M. This is not project time, definitely. She's drinking a Yakult, which she will soon regret because she's eating dinner real soon. She's pretty sure she has plenty of time to do the project since it's impossible it'll take more than 3 hours. She'll do it at 8:25 P.M. That time sounds right.
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It's 8:25 P.M. The time Kierra has been dreading all day. She decides to let a few minutes pass, since that won't impact her project immensely. Self-indulgently reading a fanfic isn't going to kill her or make her fail science. The due date is today, at 11:59 P.M. That's lots of time. Even if she doesn't finish it before her supposed-to-be bedtime, Kierra can stay up long enough to finish it.
Her younger brother, Alex, is begging her to dance to some newly debuted boy group's song. She relents and buries the project in the back of her mind.
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It's 10:17 P.M. She's finally starting the project, looking at all the instructions, and it is a lot harder than she thought it would be. Her fingers are typing rapidly, while her brain, not working quite as fast, is thinking about the possible answers that make sense. It's not doing well. She's not doing well. She's wishing she let the guilt get to her earlier. She should've used Camelissa's texts as, like, a push to finally start the project. Now she's lying on her side, her room plunged into darkness. There's a strip of light on her wall from a parking car's headlights. And for whatever reason, she looks at it. For a long while, until the car's finally parked.
Only then does she start typing again, her heart sinking as the time turns to 11:00. Then 11:26. 11:48. 11:51, and Kierra finally finishes the half-assed project on ibis Paint X. It looks so crappy she almost didn't pass it, but she did.
She tells herself that next time she'll start earlier to prevent the stress of this—procrastination. But deep down she knows she'll never learn. The time will pass again, and in probably a few weeks, she'll be in the same position she was in today. Trying to catch up.
Numbers are so complicated. Because it's 11:59 right now, and for some reason, it feels like she'll still get enough hours of sleep if she does now. Even though she knows that it'll only be 6 hours of sleep. Tomorrow she'll be sleeping in class, and when she's fully refreshed, she'll be distracted again. And the numbers on her watch will say the wrong time. She swears it's the wrong time, because a minute isn't that fast, and 2 minutes aren't that long.
30 minutes isn't supposed to feel like a few seconds. When she sings a 2-minute song in her head 10 times, it's not supposed to add up to an hour at all. She'd always thought everybody felt the way she did, thought the way she did, but it seems everyone is, like, always aware of time. They say it's kind of impossible to not be constantly aware of it.
Kierra wishes she knew how to count. She's always tried to learn, but it seems like numbers don't like her very much.