November 15
I'd wound up on the outside of the bed this time, and Aric was in the middle and he had his arm around my barrel so that I wouldn't fall out. My back and dock were a little bit sore from last night, 'cause I don't think that either of them was supposed to bend quite like that, but it had been worth it.
I flicked my tail against Aric's leg and he loosened his arm enough that I could slide sideways out of bed and make a graceful cat-like landing on the floor, and that worked out well enough but I got some of the blanket tangled up in my hoof and pulled that off of them, too.
Meghan must not have known I slid out of bed on purpose, 'cause she stuck her head up over Aric's shoulder and asked if I was okay, and I told her that I was, and then I lifted my hoof off the blanket so that they could pull it back up over them. And I stuck my nose back in bed and nuzzled Aric's chest and then kissed his stomach and I would have kissed Meghan, too, but she was too far away.
I stretched out my back and wings, which were also kinda cramped from me sleeping on my side, and then I flew up and landed on the bed kind of diagonally across Aric and Meghan, and I had my head towards her so I could kiss her good morning, and just then her telephone alarm went off and Aric reached over to get it and was bringing it back to her but dropped it and it fell down between the bed and the wall. Aric got out and said that he could move the bed back, and then Meghan got out of bed too and crouched down and reached underneath. She asked Aric if she was going to find any magazines that she shouldn't find under there and he said that if she did she'd better share them with him.
I'd gotten out, too, 'cause I'd been on top of both of them, and Meghan's rump was right in front of me so I stuck my nose forward and goosed her and when she got her head back out from under the bed, I said that Aric had done it, but I don't think that she believed me.
She turned off her telephone and got the shampoo out of her duffel bag and then went down the hall to the bathroom and a moment later I heard the water turn on, and I looked at Aric and he shrugged and said that he guessed that we were taking a shower now and that girls were weird and maybe I should go in there first.
Meghan had left the door open, though, so she must have meant for us to go in, but I hopped up over the edge anyways and she'd already started to soap herself, and she leaned down and kissed me, and then started putting soap on my back and I asked if she was mad that I'd goosed her and she laughed and said that she was going to get me back sometime when I didn't expect it and I might regret going around pantsless all the time, and so I nuzzled her hip and then she started soaping up my back and then Aric asked if it was okay for him to come in, too, and she pulled back the curtain and let him come in, and he had to stand at the back until she was done washing me and then she washed him, too.
I got out last so that I could shake off, and then I went back to the room. Aric was just sitting on the bed and Meghan had a towel wrapped around her head and she told me to get up next to her and then started to preen my wings, and when she was done she got one of the brushes out of her bag and groomed my coat, too.
She told Aric that he needed to buy a hairdryer, and he said that there wasn't much point to it because his hair was short enough that it dried on its own so he wouldn't have much use for it, and Meghan said that if he bought one she'd show him something really sexy that he could do with it, and I was curious what that might be but she wouldn't tell me, either.
I brushed her hair for her, and Aric went down and made coffee, and then Meghan got dressed and picked up her duffel bag and we had a cup of coffee before getting into Winston, and I wanted to ride in the back 'cause it felt like a good day to be outside, so I flew up and landed in the back and I stuck my hooves up on the front of the bed, 'cause Meghan had opened the sliding windows.
Aric drove kind of slow so that I wouldn't slide around, and it was a lot of fun riding in the back. It was like the Mustang that Mister Salvatore had gotten, but even more open, and I thought that if I could bring down a cloud and put it in the back it would be really comfortable. I wasn't sure what would happen to a cloud if it was in the back of a truck, but maybe if we had time someday I could find out.
He turned into the Trowbridge parking lot, and I thought of flying out and meeting him on the other side of the building, but I didn't, 'cause maybe he'd worry if I suddenly disappeared. So I waited until he was parked and then got out, and Meghan did too, and we both kissed him goodbye before going inside.
I was sure that Peggy would help me with my lab coat but I didn't know if she was awake yet, and then I thought that I might as well not fasten it until I was at breakfast, and I told Meghan I'd meet her there—she had to leave her duffel bag and get her class books, and I had to get ready for the lab.
Peggy wasn't in the room, so I put on my lab coat by myself and left it open, which meant that I wasn't going to be able to get my saddlebags on very easily, so I just carried them to breakfast in my mouth.
Meghan had beat me to breakfast, so before I went to get food I put down my saddlebags and let her button up my coat, then put my saddlebags on and everyone at the table who hadn't seen it before was kind of amazed by how I did it. I didn't think it was that amazing; after all, foals could do it with just a little bit of practice. But then I thought it was pretty clever how they could work all the different kinds of fasteners on their clothes by themselves, so I guess it was just being in awe of somebody or somepony who could easily do something that you couldn't.
The waffle-maker was still broken and there was no omelet chef, so I just had eggs and oatmeal again, and that was going to be all until I found that they had a bunch of sliced fruits as well and that was something that they didn't have all that often, and I kind of wished that I hadn't gotten so much other food, 'cause fresh fruit was really good. I got some red melon and orange melon and green melon, and some strawberries, too, and I piled them on my plate around my eggs, then went back to the table to eat.
I was really full by the time I was done eating and it felt even worse 'cause of the lab coat wrapping me up, and the girth strap on my saddlebags, too. And I probably shouldn't have eaten that much, but I wasn't that sorry that I had, and after I'd leaned down and loosened my girth strap a bit, I felt better.
I walked across the quad to the Dow building, and went downstairs to the lab. And we did some more alchemical experiments about the colligative properties, and we had lots of data to record so I was pretty busy.
Professor Brown stopped us while we still had a while to go and said that it was time to blow something up, so he took a pumpkin that he had and said it was a little late for Halloween but he hadn't wanted us to get bad ideas for our decorating. You could see where it was cut, but he hadn't taken any of the pumpkin out, so it looked like a normal pumpkin if you didn't look too close. And then he took off the top and put a cup full of crystals that he said were calcium carbide inside, and poured some water in that, then stuck a fuse inside and put the top back on. And he asked if anyone in the class knew what was going to happen next, and a couple of people raised their hands and said that his reaction was making acetylene gas. And so he told us all to stand back and he lit the fuse then closed the glass shield, and we watched as it burned down and went into the pumpkin, and then there was a really loud bang, and the mouth and eyes blew out of the pumpkin and what was left of the cup was burning, and it looked just like a Jack-O-Lantern, which was really neat.
He said that our final lab report was due on Friday, at the end of class, and that was the end of the lab.
I was so happy that I was done with my lab coat forever that I took it off in the hallway outside class, even though that meant that I had to take off my saddlebags and put them back on again. And I kind of wanted to leave it there, but I thought I'd better give it to Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn in case there was another pegasus who wanted to take a lab and was about my size. So I folded it up and put it across my back, and I told Lisa that I'd have the calculations done tonight and I could come by her room after dinner and give them to her, and she said that was a good idea, because we could go over them then and she could write it up tonight and then tomorrow we could look over the lab report and make sure that everything was correct.
And when we got up outside, I forgot that I had the lab coat on my back and took off, and it stayed on for a little while and then slid off my back and came unfolded and I dove down and grabbed it in my teeth before it could hit the ground or get tangled in a tree, then climbed back up and over Dewing, flew over Trowbridge, too, and landed on the boardwalk and went inside.
I got about halfway done with the physics lab and I didn't want to get started on the next problem, because I'd have to stop halfway through before I could go to lunch, so instead I went to the library and took the Ogden Nash book back and found another poetry assortment that looked interesting, so I took that to lunch with me.
I sat down with Trevor and Cedric and Leon, and we talked about how classes were ending soon and Cedric said that Aquamarine still had classes after Thanksgiving, so he was going to stay with some friends in Lansing to be with her before she had to leave, which I thought was really nice of him. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me that their classes would end at a different time than ours did, although they'd started at a different time, so I should have thought of that.
Leon said that he was going back home, and he was going to just relax until at least the Monday after Thanksgiving, and then he was going to get bored and find something to occupy his mind over the rest of break but he didn't know what yet, and he said that maybe he'd drive to Lansing to pester Cedric, or else he'd buy a plane ticket to the Caribbean where he could sit on a beach and be bored while looking at pretty girls in bikinis. And Trevor said that he was going to catch up with his family, and one of his brothers had decided to get married and was having the wedding in December, because that was when the whole family would be back home. And he said that I'd inspired him to find out if there was a library where he could give poetry readings, and that he might even write some of his own.
And I told them what I was going to be doing before I went back to Equestria, and then admitted that I didn't know where I was going to live, but I was sure that my helpers had figured out something and if they hadn't, that my friends would give me a place to stay, and Leon said that I could add one more to that list of friends, because his mansion got lonely sometimes. Cedric said that he didn't see how that was possible with a butler and a groundskeeper and a maid and a chauffeur, and Leon said that they were too serious all the time and none of them knew poetry and he'd also forgotten to mention the cook.
Trevor had been looking through my book, and he said that he had found some poems that were good for today, and he read the first one, which was called Clouded Morning, which was about a foggy morning. And then he gave it to Leon, to read Who Has Seen the Wind, and Cedric said that I could see the wind, but that wasn't true; I couldn't see it. I knew what it was doing, but I never saw it.
Cedric got to read a poem called Lost, and then I got to read one called Radar Data #12, which was kind of strange, 'cause I kept picturing the weather but it was about more than that, and Cedric said that he thought it was sad, but he wasn't sure why.
I flew across the quad again to Astronomy class, and sat down next to Anna who had gotten there before me.
Professor Miller taught us more about the beginnings and end of the universe, and how to show it on a graph, and there was a new letter called omega which was the density of the universe and depending on what it was would depend on what the universe would eventually do.
And she explained how we could look in the past to figure out which line the universe was on, but you had to have a different view of redshift, because light could also expand with the universe. And she said that distance could be converted to time which sounded completely wrong, even though she'd explained how it worked. But then I thought about it some more, and I suppose I could say that I'd flown for a day or I'd flown a certain distance and if I always flew at the same speed, it would be the same thing.
She said that for it to work, astronomers needed to find really bright stars, and they had. Those were called supernovas, and they were stars that were sometimes brighter than whole galaxies, and then she showed us a new graph which was the first one but it had been changed around, so she had to explain what they'd done before she could show us observations.
That graph had lots of bars on it which were called error bars, because of things that astronomers didn't know, but you could see how none of them were on the lines she'd showed us first, which had been a surprise and astronomers had to figure out what it meant. And it was that the universe was getting bigger faster.
The reason why, she said, was because only four percent was matter and light, and about a quarter of it was dark matter that we didn't know exactly what it was, and the last three-quarters were dark energy and nobody knew much about that, although Einstein had thought that it existed but nobody believed him back then.
Then she told us more about supernovas, which were gigantic exploding stars in space that were sometimes so bright that you could see them during the day. She said that there hadn't been any nearby since the telescope had been invented, but in case there were, they would be too bright and blind human telescopes, so there were special blinders that some telescopes had just in case one happened that was close.
And that had given them a problem, because while the universe got less dense as it expanded, the dark energy stayed exactly the same, or maybe there was even more of it and so the universe kept expanding faster and faster, until there got to be so much dark energy that galaxies came apart and then stars and then everything would come apart, and that was called the Big Rip. And that was kind of worrying, although if it was true it would be billions of years in the future before it happened.
When I got back to my room, I finished up the lab and then I went back through and looked for mistakes, not only in calculations but also in moving my work from the notes to the formulas, 'cause I wasn't sure that we were going to have a lot of time to go over it. Lisa probably had other finals that she had to study for. And then I started reading through my Astronomy notes, just to make sure that I wasn't gonna forget anything for the finals.
I stayed on my bed reading through my notes until my neck started to get sore, and then I decided that I'd fly around a little bit before dinner, because I hadn't done that today. And I thought I'd just go over downtown again, but this time I put on my flight gear and took my radio so that I could tell the airplane directors what I was doing.
I went out along Lovell Street, instead of along Main like I usually did, and as I got close to Bronson Park, I saw a bunch of police cars with flashing lights, and also the WWMT van was there with its antenna up.
I couldn't figure out what was going on until I got closer and saw people holding up signs that said things like Love Trumps Hate and Commit to the Common Good, and there was a woman with a bullhorn that was leading the crowd in chants, and I remembered that there was supposed to be a protest, and I had never asked Mister Salvatore if I could go see it.
Hopefully, he wasn't down there, and if he was, hopefully he wasn't looking up.
I circled around the perimeter of the park and looked down at all the people there, and it reminded me of the #freethenipple protest that I'd gone to in Colorado Springs, except that these people looked angrier and they all had their shirts on.
There were metal fences set up along the edge of the park, and there were some people on the other side of the fence yelling at the protesters. And the police were patrolling the fence in case any fights broke out.
I didn't want to get involved with them, so I flew back to campus and landed in front of the dining hall and went inside for dinner.
Once I'd gotten my food, I sat down at the table and told everyone what I'd seen.
Christine asked if I could pee while I was flying, and I said that I could, and she said I should have flown over the fence-line and peed on the Trump supporters but I thought that that would be really mean, and I'd get in trouble, too. The only one I might have done that to was the angry man from Walgreens, and I hadn't seen him.
Peggy said that instead I could have gone to Taco Bell and had a bunch of bean burritos and cropdusted them, and she said that I wouldn't get in trouble because I couldn’t really be blamed for having gas. But I said that I wasn't supposed to have gone at all, so I'd get in trouble for doing that, too, and I didn't want Mister Salvatore to yell at me.
Christine said that it might be fun to go after dinner, because one thing she'd always wanted to do was incite a riot, and Sean said if she did, he wasn’t going to bail her out of jail, because violence wouldn't change anything, and I thought back to the World War One book and said that I agreed. She told him that he wasn't any fun, but she wasn't being serious.
I left dinner a little bit early, so that I could go to Lisa's, 'cause I didn't know what time she usually finished dinner.
I hadn't seen her when I returned my tray, and when I was going back to my room to get my notes, I looked up at her window and saw that the lights were on, so either Jessica or her were home.
It didn't take me very long to get my notes and I didn't want to bother with my saddlebags, so I just grabbed them all in my mouth and went across to DeWaters, then knocked on Lisa's door, and a moment later Jessica answered, and I nuzzled her and then she invited me inside. Lisa was sitting at her desk working on her folding computer and she had ear-speakers in but she took them out and turned around and I came over and sat on her bed and put my work on her desk, where we could look at it together.
She didn't find any mistakes, so the extra time I'd taken had paid off. And she said that she'd finish it tonight and have it ready for us to look at tomorrow, and I kind of wanted to stay around a little bit longer but she was working and Jessica had gone back to her desk and she was working, too, so I thanked her and went back out to my dorm.
I didn't really have anything else to do tonight, so I practiced making all the math letters until I was good at them, and then I made cards with all the formulas that we had learned on them, because that would help us review tomorrow. And I had to re-make a bunch of them because I'd started out making the formula too big and had run out of room, and when I'd written it on more than one line it just got confusing. It took me a while, but I got every formula done, and I could take them with me tomorrow to math class for when me and Sean were studying.
And then when I was done with that I got kind of fidgety, 'cause I still didn't know exactly what I was gonna do after Thanksgiving, since my helpers hadn't told me yet. I didn't think that I was going to be able to live in the dorm, and even if I could I wouldn’t want to because there wouldn’t be anybody else there and it would be really lonely. I probably should have called him or else sent him a computer letter, but I didn't, 'cause I was sort of thinking that if we didn't talk about it it wouldn't happen. That was really a foal's way of thinking, but I couldn't help myself.
So I got out of my chair and went over and nuzzled Peggy, and she reached her hand down and petted my mane, and I sat down next to her and rested my head against her side and whenever she didn't need both hands to work, she'd pet my mane or scratch behind my ears and that was really comforting.
It was pretty late when she finally got done with all her homework and she asked me if I we were going to go trotting tomorrow, and I said that we should, and promised to wake her up.