April 8
I stayed in bed a little bit later than I meant to: Meghan has curtains over her windows that block out more of the light, so I didn't realize what time it was until her telephone started sounding its alarm. I cocked my ear over and her shirt was flashing, then I realized that the telephone was under it.
She shifted around behind me, waking up, then reached over and picked up the phone and turned it off. Then I asked her what time it was and when she told me I hung my head. Not only was I not going to have any time to fly, but I was going to miss my morning shower or breakfast, and I had to choose which one.
I told Meghan that I had to go because it was late and I had to get in line for the shower before it was too late, and she just pointed her finger towards the open door of their bathroom. Well then I felt dumb.
I asked her if she wanted to go first, and she said we could share so that way we'd both have time for a shower and breakfast. That perked my ears right back up, and I said that was a really good idea.
She got the water started and I hopped right in but she hesitated outside the shower curtain and I'd already gotten my head and back and tail wet and she still was just standing there, then she finally took her panties off and got in the shower with me.
At first she was a little bit quiet and shy, and she twitched when I picked up the shower-cloth and started rubbing soap on her back, but pretty soon she started to relax and enjoy it.
Working out a good method was kind of complicated. The bathtub was narrow with high sides, so I had to only lift one wing at a time for her to clean them, and she used too much soap so it took a while to get all the lather out of my feathers. And I couldn't get much higher than the curve of her back without standing on my hind hooves which meant that she had to stay pretty still and when I got around to her front she had a hard time not moving as I was washing her, especially when I got to her breasts.
She had to sit down so that I could shampoo her hair, and the whole shower took longer than it would have if we'd both been working efficiently, but I didn't mind. (Most ponies would stand nose-to-tail and take turns washing one half of each other at the same time, then the other, and that was pretty quick.)
Meghan groomed me and I brushed her hair, then she got dressed while I was preening my wings. Then since we were already together, we sat at the same table for breakfast, too.
Sometimes it was hard to decide who to eat with, so I usually went with the same pattern every day. I hadn't shared a table with Meghan in a while, and I hadn't eaten a meal in the dark room in a while either. I suppose I could come up with some kind of a schedule so that I could spend time with all of my friends, but eating together was the kind of thing that depended on mood, I thought.
When we were done and it was time to go to class, I stood up on my hind legs and kissed her and I could feel how much that was making her blush, which was really cute.
I was kind of distracted sitting through math, both 'cause I was still thinking about Meghan, and 'cause I was also thinking about going to Michigan State University tonight. Plus what Professor Doctor Sir Banerjee was talking about was pretty simple stuff—exponential growth and power laws—so all I really had to be alert to was the terms and symbols used to describe it.
Some of the students had trouble understanding it (and it's not completely obvious), so he said that if you had a test tube with one bacteria in it, and then after one minute you had two, and then after the next minute you had four, and so on; when it was half full how long would it take before it was all the way full, and a couple of students started to try and figure it out on paper but Keith raised his hand right away and then I realized that it would only be a minute even though at first thought it felt like it would be longer. And he also talked about Metcalfe's Law which is also called the Network Effect, and it’s an important thing for computers.
When I left class to go to lunch, it was snowing again. Not much, just little flakes drifting down, but why was it still snowing in April?
Professor Amy had us all give a summary of our reports, and then she asked each student to name one possible flaw in our method. For mine, I said that I had only asked one pony and she could have been lying to me (I didn't think she was, though). Then she asked us to think of how we might verify the information we had been given, but that wasn’t a question that had to be answered in class.
Well, mine was pretty easy because I could find out what all the different Unicorn letters were and then try and write Equestrian words in them and then look them up in a Unicorn dictionary or even ask another unicorn to read them, and if Gusty was telling the truth, than those words would be real words; if she was lying, they wouldn't be.
She concluded class by telling us to read the chapter in our books about beauty in the Kayan culture.
I probably should have read that right away, but Peggy was back and after I packed my saddlebags for the weekend and made sure that I had tickets (it was really convenient that Peggy's printer could make them, so I didn't have to go to the train station) we spent the rest of the afternoon talking.
She offered to drive me to the train station, which was really nice of her, but I decided to just fly instead. It wasn't very far, and it would make up for the exercise I hadn't gotten in the morning.
It was both scary and exciting to be on the train all by myself. I had been a little bit worried about how crowded it might be, but there weren't a lot of people on the train and so I could sit wherever I wanted to, and I could even put my saddlebags on the seat next to me. I didn't like wearing them when I was sitting because that wasn't very comfortable.
After we left Galesburg, we slowed down and then stopped in the middle of nowhere for a while, and I thought maybe the locomotive had broken, but then I saw a freight train go by right next to us, and then we started moving again.
Right while we were stopping for the East Lansing station, I saw another train that was pointed right at us, and I could see from its lights that the track it was on crossed over ours. I couldn't make out much else of it, because it was dark, but when I got off my train I could hear its engines working, and there were enough lights that I could see it crossing over our track. I probably could have kept watching it, but Jenny and Aquamarine had come out on the platform and we hugged and then walked together back to their dorm room and settled in for the night.