//------------------------------// // The Lighthouse in the Dark // Story: Her Exquisite Mind // by The Shadow Knows //------------------------------// The school week steadily progressed towards the weekend, along the way offering up the diverse divertissements of Ionian philosophers in history class, operant conditioning in psychology class, and Romantic poets in English class. Crystal Preparatory Academy could be a bit stuffy in its curriculum, hewing to what Twilight imagined an upper crust liberal arts education must have been in the early- to mid-twentieth century. The gestalt struck her as a strange amalgam of rarefaction and quaintness, like a person trying to emulate the mannerisms of a historical gentry using only period television dramas for reference. Its peculiar pretensions notwithstanding, the academy certainly delivered on the vaunted quality of its education, successfully attracting and retaining teachers of high pedagogical caliber who were commensurately demanding of their students' efforts. And no student exceeded those demands as comprehensively, highly, and consistently as Twilight Sparkle. Alas, even in a school so obsessed with academic success as Crystal Preparatory Academy, it would be lamentably incorrect to assume that such achievements would in some way ingratiate her with any of her peers' social groups. Instead, Twilight's brilliance tended to foster jealousy and resentment rather than camaraderie. The academy was quite an exclusive institution, presenting an architectural façade connoting wealth and class to reassure its enrollees' parents that their children would be well-prepared to navigate lives of privilege. Exclusion was built into its very bricks and beams, whence it suffused into the students and faculty just as surely as if it were the friable asbestos or insidious radon gas that instead plagued the underfunded public school buildings. And to be exclusive tautologically meant that someone must be excluded. Twilight may have been a plum acquisition for the school as a valuable future alumna, but that did not make her much less of an outsider among its student body. Here were the hedge fund managers, chief executive officers, national politicians, and similar embryonic power brokers of tomorrow. Twilight's considerable intellect imbued her life with great opportunity, yes, but intellect was not as reliably tied to worldly success as wealth and influence, and those were the real currency of her classmates. To deviate from social expectations, trends, and fashionable fads was to not fit in, to mark oneself as not speaking the shared language of the elite, and therefore to be proven worthy of exclusion. How ridiculous that all of these "leaders" are so slavishly devoted to following what everyone else is doing, she ruefully reflected, the thought running comfortably along a mental groove well-worn from frequent reuse. The cafeteria was a veritable study in the art of wainscoting and pilasters. Its rows of identical, modern folding tables looked like interlopers that had somehow usurped the carved oaken behemoths that surely belonged there instead. The indistinct susurration of conversation surrounded her from the adjacent tables, but the chairs at her own were empty as usual. Twilight scanned a textbook, pretending the social vacuum was because she sought out solitude to study during lunch, but this illusion did not survive cursory scrutiny since her preceding class's proximity down the hall meant she was usually one of the first in the room. Solitude was not chosen by her, but rather conferred by the classmates who would prefer nearly any other table than the one she occupied. Twilight had not had much of an appetite of late. She toyed idly with her salad, favoring the tiny diced tomatoes and the squared-off croutons with her fork's attention while leaving most of the remainder. An errant thought regarding how efficiently such cubical foodstuffs could fill an arbitrary volume flicked through her mind, and she briefly considered whether any other platonic solids could tessellate a three-dimensional space without gaps. She'd have to look that up later. Shifting the lettuce eventually revealed no further cubes for her consumption. With a sigh, she picked up her tray and stood up, turning rapidly to sweep her gaze towards the nearest trash can. In so doing, her tray's motion intersected the space through which the future chief marketing officer of a regional telecommunications firm was confidently striding as he chatted with his friend beside him. In inevitable deference to the Pauli exclusion principle, all fermions involved refused to occupy the same temporospatial coördinates, and instead simple kinematics dictated that the tray flip backwards, spraying its ejecta of lettuce and salad dressing down Twilight's chest. It was a beautiful example of the statistically deterministic macroscopic interactions of condensed matter that, tragically, was completely unappreciated by all involved parties. "Hey!" Jet Set exclaimed, lurching back and instinctively raising his arms to fend off the tray. Twilight's own involuntary yelp was punctuated by the clatter of her chair against the table leg as she fell back against them in surprise. A momentary pain towards the back of her right ilium indicated where her hip bashed into the table's edge, but a sharp pain in her right ankle more vociferously informed her that her tendons were not meant to arrange themselves in quite those orientations. Twilight threw her arms back, her palms wildly seeking the tabletop for support. She winced, inhaling sharply through bared teeth as her mind registered the immediate stinging pain in her ankle. "Watch where you're going! God, Sparkle, you're a mess!" Jet Set offered her a callous stare as he extended a hand to help her up. Twilight clasped his hand, and his abrupt tug pulled her back to a standing position, one foot gingerly raised. "I'm sorry, Jet Set—" "You should be." He looked down and brushed his hands twice over the lapels of his uniform jacket. "At least you won't have to pay for dry cleaning, if you could afford it." He spared her own vest a glance, and amended, "for me anyway." He turned to his companion and, with a subtle jerk of his head motioning towards the aisle in front of them, they continued walking, muttering disgustedly between themselves. Twilight stared after them, her chest rising and falling with each little ragged breath through her mouth. The nearby students who had turned to watch the commotion had already turned back to smirk and giggle with their friends. She delicately knelt to retrieve the fallen tray, hurriedly scooping the tableware and the larger detritus of her salad back onto its surface with one shaky hand while the other grasped the chair to steady her in her crouch. Embarrassment flooded her mind, and amorphous feelings of inadequacy. A small thread of guilt for leaving the dressing there for the janitorial staff to clean up weaved itself into the mix. And of course the twinges in her ankle that lent unwelcome variety to its rising throb rendered it difficult to order her thoughts, such as they were. Rising, she took a little step towards the trash can, eliciting another wince. Yes, the minor social transgression of leaving her tray at the table was definitely preferable to the extra walking distance. She briefly imagined Rousseau giving her a conspiratorial wink, as if to say it's OK, just this once. Leaving the tray at her table, she limped to the door, emitting an occasional brief whimper when she didn't favor her ankle quite enough. No one offered her their assistance, and she certainly didn't look forward to asking someone for any. Soon enough, the empty hallway yawned before her. The bottom of her vision blurred slightly, hinting at the tears whose presence threatened, but she remained composed enough to stave them off while she hobbled gracelessly to the nurse's office. Her introspective nature began ascertaining the ratio of somatic to emotional pain that might be fueling these tears, but she cut that thought off right away, shaking her head violently as if to physically dislodge it from her brain. "No," she grunted, her voice low and shaky, "not now. Not now!" She shouldn't irrationally fall apart right now; she needed to attend to her injury, and not some ridiculous feelings that were clearly disproportionate to her current problems. She paused to gather herself, putting one hand against the wall and bringing the other up to cover the tightness that suddenly swelled in her chest. A slimy sensation met this latter action; withdrawing it, she glanced down to see a smear of salad dressing on her palm. A momentary sob escaped her, and as she stared at her now-shaking hand she cringed as another sob followed. Idiot! Stupid idiot! What's wrong with me? Turning, she put her back against the wall and slid halfway down, one leg sticking out awkwardly to spare any further aggravation of her tendons. There's no reason for this! Her breaths came shallowly and more rapidly now, and she couldn't take her unblinking eyes off her quivering, soiled hand. Get up! This is completely irrational! And then she felt it, that traitorous, wet line of warmth down her cheek, and a salty tang at the edge of her lips. She clenched her jaw shut hard, and weird plosives escaped as she struggled for control. Shut up, shut up, shut up! Half a minute passed, perhaps, as her strangled noises subsided and her breathing—though still somewhat erratic—slowed to a semblance of normalcy. She closed her eyes and covered her face with her clean hand, kneading her fingertips against her forehead. With one last sigh, she looked up and confirmed the hall remained empty. Rising once more, she continued her slow walk to the nurse, silently cursing herself. She should be normal. She should be in control. There was no reason for those emotions just now. No reason. No reason. She was reasonable. She was a paragon of reason, in many ways. Her best qualities were her reasoning, and. . . . . . . Her reasoning, and. . . . She frowned. Well, that was enough. More than enough! The world was full of unreasonable people who by and large lacked a logical, self-consistent outlook, swayed by advertising and prejudices and appeals to emotion and fads. Someone had to be the adult in the room—the mental adult, if not the physical one. That was she, along with whatever insufficient fraction of people were like her. There was nothing wrong with her at all. The world would be efficient and just if everyone were like her. If everyone liked her. That reformulation rolled around in her mind for long seconds. And it hurt, it hurt so much to be like this, to bear the weight and responsibility of her intellect, her purity of reasoning. To never be understood, to have no one: to be at worst bullied and hated, and at best ignored. To not know how to reach out to others. To not even be interested in the interchangeable sea of faces whose thoughts and lives might be so petty and small and duplicative and unreflective and pointless as SunPrincess believed. And it hurt to realize she thought that, to know with conviction that most people were just unthinkingly going through their lives, and to begin considering that perhaps these people weren't really worth knowing. It hurt because that must mean she was some kind of monster, because you weren't supposed to think things like that. And the fact that she did meant that there was something so very, very wrong with her and so alien inside her mind that she must barely be human in anything but form alone. Though that didn't mean SunPrincess was a monster, of course. Twilight didn't know enough about SunPrincess's thoughts to formulate a comprehensive understanding of her worldview, so it wouldn't be right to think that about her. Whereas her own thoughts. . . . And of course Twilight was biased about SunPrincess, though right now she merely noted it clinically—detachedly—and disregarded its importance. She was used to having different standards for different people, since people were so varied in ability and temperament. People were typically so unskilled in so many areas of obvious importance when contrasted with herself. So it was natural and healthy to have high standards for herself, wildly different standards for herself. . . . She didn't understand other people, she didn't think like other people. She couldn't understand their joys and pains, and seemed accidentally adept at causing far more of the latter than the former in anyone with whom she nontrivially interacted. Sometimes, she felt she would give anything to be normal. She would rather be stupid and happy than brilliant and . . . this. She could melt into that sea of meaningless people, and find happiness in the comforting banality of their companionship. She was jealous of people for whom she had so little respect. No, not respect! Most people were worthy of respect. Maybe she was evincing . . . pity? Disinterest? Arrogance? Hatefulness? her mind treacherously supplied. God, how she hated herself. She hated being this crude simulacrum of humanity. This miscreated, incompletely realized thing, missing so much of what makes a person a person! Her other eye, having missed out earlier, decided to invite its own tear to the party. But Twilight was fine now. Definitely fine. She felt too dulled to feel more than a generalized sadness and a bitter self-loathing, and that was an improvement, surely. She brushed the tear away without so much as a sniff. She was fine. Everything was fine. Twilight's parents heard about her lunchtime misfortune from the high school nurse, though neither they nor the nurse were aware of anything but her physical ills. At home, they met her with worried looks and a not insignificant amount of sympathy, and fussed more than was really necessary now that her ankle was bandaged and fitted with a splint. The nurse had deemed crutches unnecessary, which was perfectly fine in Twilight's eyes. She would have detested any accoutrements that might predictably embolden schoolyard bullies. Though the physical benefits of a bookish, sedentary life were generally dubious, Twilight was glad that there would be virtually no deleterious effect on her hobbies. Were she more athletically inclined, she would doubtless be disappointed in her inability to engage in free-throw field goals, five-pointers, or what have you. Conversely, reading and light scientific experimentation would surely not be unduly affected. These small mercies were not enough to brighten her mood, however. After a pensive dinner in the dining room with her parents, she excused herself directly to her bedroom upstairs, and spent a tedious hour immersed in her own disagreeable thoughts. Her laptop's speakers remained silent, with no notification to herald SunPrincess's presence online. Sighing, she eventually swung her feet off her bed and padded quietly down the hall to the bathroom. Dental hygiene was important before bed, and a mirror would help her examine the bruise where her hip had hit the table. She repositioned the mirror on the door of the medicine cabinet above the sink. Craning her neck and contorting her body into an awkward contrapposto, she saw that the contusion wasn't too bad. An ugly blotch, to be sure, but in an inconspicuous location, and merely skin-deep after all. Just like beauty. She peered into the mirror, meeting the young girl's gaze. Her doppelgänger's eyes were tired, her hair frazzled. There was a tightness in the jaw muscles there, and when she released the pressure of a nervous bite she hadn't realized she was maintaining she saw the other girl do the same. They both shivered in displeasure at all the myriad little signs of their anxiety and weariness and sadness and loneliness and . . . "Heh. Two was enough, I think." Twilight glanced towards the door. Somewhere beyond it, her father had just tiredly responded to some quiet statement of her mother's that Twilight hadn't caught. Her mother must have replied in whispered tones, because her father's slightly louder voice continued on after a pause. "Her brother Shining was easier, of course. Sometimes it feels like he was a practice run for the more difficult one." Twilight tensed at that, then relaxed when she heard his next response. "Of course not, I wouldn't have traded it for the world. But raising a genius isn't easy." "I worry about her," her mother said, just loud enough for Twilight's straining ears to hear. "She can't help it, Velvet. Remember the therapist when she was a kid? He said there isn't any way to—" "Our daughter doesn't need to be fixed!" Her mother quietly seethed, spitting out the last word. The girl in the mirror opened her eyes wide, and took in a sudden, shaky breath through her mouth. "I didn't mean—" he rejoined, placatingly. "You promised you wouldn't—" "Well maybe we should," her father hissed. "You're already going to be mad at me anyway. It's not 'just how she is,' it's going to follow her through her entire life: career, family, everything! It's not wrong of me to not want her to suffer." "Stop it, Night Light! She isn't some broken thing that just needs to be fixed. She's—" "For heaven's sake, it's not part of her identity! It's a problem, like any other mental—" A door slammed. "Velvet. Velvet!" Twilight heard the jiggle of a door handle, and her father's heavy sigh. The other girl was shaking now, and out of habit Twilight reached her right hand up to claw nervously at the fabric covering her heart. The other girl simultaneously did so with her left hand. They both let out a choked sob, quietly so they wouldn't be heard, and neither tried to hold back nor wipe away the start of her tears. Twilight left the girl there. She crept down the hall to her room, closed her door, and walked jerkily to her bed. Lying down on her side, she pulled her knees up close to her body and drew the blankets over herself. She let the quivering sobs wrack her body, an inescapable pall of desolation falling over her with dark finality. She was broken, broken and unlovable by anyone except her family who basically had to love her because of genetics and oxytocin neuropeptides and social constructs and evolutionary psychology, and her entire life was going to be like this, and she could never change and never understand and always be so very wrong inside and wrong to others and wrong wrong never right just wrong! She would always be so careless with people, stupid and careless, the stupidest most idiotic genius who will always hurt people and always do the wrong thing and never understand, never understand anything at all! Her face was wet with streaming tears now, and she held herself close, curling up on herself as tightly as she could, as if her own touch could substitute for the comforting touch of anyone who cared. And she couldn't talk with her parents. And SunPrincess was offline. And she needed someone right now more desperately than she could remember, but there wasn't anyone. No one. There never was. No one. She froze, her shaking momentarily arrested but for the tense vibration of her hands, and drew in several gasping breaths. She rose unsteadily to her feet, and withdrew from her purse a small slip of paper. This is wrong. I'm in no state to talk to anyone. No one wants to see me like this, let alone a total stranger. Twilight stared at the unfamiliar phone number, surmounted only by the the single word of the girl's name. Stupid idiot! I know it's the wrong thing to do! She stifled a quick series of breaths that had threatened to break into another sob. Retrieving her phone from its charger, she donned its wireless earpiece. Selfish! Self-centered! She doesn't want to deal with this! She slipped back under her covers and dialed the number, breathing in shallow gasps. I'm going to subject her to this and ruin everything. I really am a monster. A callous, selfish, terrible— The call connected, and there were what might be the sounds of someone turning atop a mattress. She heard a refined voice tinged with sleep. "Hello? Who is this? I'm sorry, darling, but I don't recognize the number." "Rarity," Twilight croaked, and she immediately dissolved into incoherent, heaving, gasping sobs.