//------------------------------// // May 20 [Kalamazoo Sleeps] // Story: Silver Glow's Journal // by Admiral Biscuit //------------------------------// May 20  I didn't get out of bed until Peggy's telephone alarm went off. I should have, but I was nice and cozy and Meghan had wrapped her arm around me, and I told myself that I didn't want to move and risk waking her up. But if I didn't get up, I wasn't going to get to go flying, and I did consider just skipping it today. When Peggy had gone off to the shower, I wiggled out from under Meghan's arm, and that didn't wake her up, so I nosed her shirt up a little bit and kissed her on the tummy, and that did wake her up. She pushed me back and sort of scooted away so that she could sit up. I told her that I was going flying but I would be back pretty quick so I didn't miss my shower time. She said that she'd left all her shower stuff in her room, and I said she could use mine, but she said that she'd rather go back to her room where it was more private. So I said that I would go there when I was done, and that made her happy. She leaned down and kissed my nose, and then I tilted my head back just a little so we could have a proper kiss. Then she helped me get dressed and put on her own pants while I was getting permission to fly. It was another nice clear day out, but this time I stayed low because the grumpy man was on the radio again. As I was taking off, I thought about the radar picture he was seeing. I couldn't see any airplanes, but the big ones were really hard to see if they didn't make clouds. I flew around below the tops of the tall buildings in town, where airplanes weren't allowed. I circled around a couple of them, kind of playing a flag race in the air, then I chased a couple of cars down the street for fun, before I turned around and went back to campus. I stopped off in my room first to leave my flight gear behind, then told Peggy I was going to take a shower with Meghan, and happily went down the hallway, down a flight of stairs, and then out to the roof boardwalk. It was a perfect place to fly to DeWaters from, and I don't know why I'd never thought of it before. She opened the door when I knocked, and said that we had to wait because Becky was in there. It wasn't too long before she was done, and Meghan went in and turned on the shower and started getting undressed while I got in and rinsed off the lather. Then we brushed each other and went to breakfast together. I told her how Aric had cooked yesterday, and Angela had helped. She wanted to know if I was going to live with him for the summer, and I said that I didn't know—I hadn't asked him if I could. I really needed to think about it, but I didn't want the school year to end, and I guess in my mind maybe I thought that if I didn't make plans, it wouldn't. That was stupid, of course; school would be out when it was supposed to whether I had a place to stay or not. She said that maybe I could stay with her if it was okay with her roommates—she didn't have a really big place, but I was small and didn't have very much stuff. I kissed her again as we left the dining hall, and she went off to her class and I went to mine. Professor Sir Doctor Banerjee started teaching us a new way to find fractals, and he started out by giving us a different equation and showing how it would work on squares, because they were simple. And he explained how it would have to be contractive, or shrinking down. He wrote out a couple of proofs, which I really like seeing. Proofs demonstrate that something that you think is true is true all the time. Plus, it's fun to see if I can figure out what the conclusion is before he gets there. I think if he just wrote it all out, it might be boring, but he always keeps pausing partway through and asks the class what we think is going to happen to one of the variables as he goes on. Once we had finished the proofs, he showed us pictures of iterated triangles, and then he showed us how to completely map out a table of the values. Then he showed us for the rest of class how to make things with them, like squares that turned into a triangular shape, and he showed us how to do it for a fern, and he said that over the weekend we could practice and see how to write out other fractal shapes. At the very end of class, he told us about a book called Fractals Everywhere, in case we wanted to learn more about the proofs. I made a note to get that after I returned the World War One book. I went to the mail hut after class (which I should have done before but I was having too much fun with Meghan to think of it). There were a bunch of letters there, one from my sister and one from Aquamarine and one from Comcast and one from Discover. I sat down to read them all. I read Aquamarine's first, 'cause I was surprised that she'd sent it so quick after getting mine (I was surprised she'd even gotten mine). But it turned out she'd sent it a couple of days ago, and they had just passed each other. She said that she was done with school already, which I hadn't expected. I had two full weeks and then finals before I was done. And she said that she had a nice apartment with Jenny—it belonged to a bunch of students who were going to be away for the summer and they were subleasing it. She said they were called The Hamptons, and they weren't too far from where she had lived before. It was above a bunch of stores, which reminded her of Ponyville, and that they had a balcony and the railroad tracks were right by her room, too. That sounded pretty nice. I wish our room had a balcony, then I could fly right off of that and not have to go down the stairs and outside before I could take off. My sister wrote that it was kind of boring without me, and that a lot of the mares on my team really missed me. She said that my little cousin was asking her if I had seen any of the big metal sky-ships, and if I had could I send a photograph of me next to one? She said it had been a good year so far; she'd flown south with a bunch of the girls at the beginning of spring and helped to wrap up winter all up the coast, ending in Baltimare, where a group of northern pegasuses took over. She said that they all talked funny. And she told me that the Crimson Bounder had been lost in a storm. They'd lost their masts and their lookout Helia had flown to the nearest pegasus patrol and they were able to rescue everypony before the ship sank. Some of the crewponies were hoping to sign on to the next merchant ship that made port, while the captain and her mate had gone to Baltimare to get another ship built. Both Discover and Comcast asked me to buy things that I didn't want. They had little envelopes inside that were called sassies that you could send back without a stamp, which I kept so I could send them a letter saying that I didn't want their credit card or cable. At lunch, Joe amused us by only talking Japanese, which he said was for practice. Sean started talking back to him in Klingon, and pretty soon the two of them were laughing because neither of them understood what the other one was saying. We ignored them. Professor Amy picked up where she had left off in her lecture, almost as if we hadn't had a day off earlier in the week. I guess everyone had said what they wanted to say, because this time she got right through it pretty easily. I sort of knew what she was going to say, since I'd stayed after on Monday and asked, but it was nice to have her go over it again. Then she said that we were going to have a test, and she said that she wanted us to be honest; they were all true/false questions, and we were going to grade our own tests so nobody else could see them or what we'd written. And as proof of that, she put a wastebasket with a special cover on the desk. She showed us two dozen pictures and had us answer if they were a particular thing or not. Then she told us all the answers, and said that we were to remember our score and then fold our papers and one at a time put them in the wastebasket, which ate them. Then she asked if anybody had gotten a perfect score, and nobody raised their hands. Professor Amy said that was proof of what she had been saying. And a couple of people complained that she had given hard examples, and she said that she'd make it easier, then, and she asked each one of them to guess her ethnicity, and neither of them were right. Then she asked if anyone else wanted to make a guess, but no one figured it out. So she said she was a Bosniak, and nobody in class knew what that was, either, and she got a sort of sad smile on her face and suggested that we Google it. I was going to start reading my World War One book after I finished writing letters, but Christine and Sean and Ruth and Rebekkah all came over and were playing cards and it would have been rude to just ignore them, so I joined in, and pretty soon we were making enough commotion that Kat came down, too, and we had a three-way game going with me and Sean and Christine, and a four-way game with the rest of the girls. We switched around, making the two winners of the four-way and the winner of the three-way play a three-way, and kept on rotating like that until we'd played a bunch of hands and had a few drinks each, and it wasn't until almost eleven that everyone finally drifted off. I flew over to Aric's house, and when he was getting undressed for bed I mentioned the poem about the city at night, and he put his pants back on and said that it was time I experienced it, then. It was a perfect night, and the moon was full. So the two of us walked through the neighborhood and by the college and then through downtown. There was a different feel to it; there weren't so many cars and most of the stores were dark but there were lights on in apartments above them. We went all the way to the railroad viaduct, and he said sometimes when it rained, it flooded and cars got stuck underneath. Then we went up and over, and I said that I thought it was dangerous because a train could come, and he said that was what made it fun. I thought that was pretty bold for someone who couldn't fly away. We went back along the other side of the main street, then up to the top of the parking lots next to the hotel, where we could see all of Kalamazoo stretched out around us. I had to stand up on the wall, 'cause it was too tall to see over. He told me to just listen, and I did. At first I didn't really hear anything, but then I started to notice that even here in the middle of town there were bugs chirping, and every now and then I heard a car's radio pass by, or people down on the street below talking as they went past—some of them were really drunk, too. Lights in the hotel went on and off, and I heard a car below us start up and then it sort of faded out as it descended through the levels. I don't know how long we were up there, but I was yawning a lot on the way back to his house, and it was really tempting to just turn away when we went by Trowbridge, but I still wanted to spend the night with him. By the time we got back to his house, I was swaying on my hooves, and I was in bed as soon as he had opened the bedroom door. I remember putting my head on his chest when he got in bed and thanking him for walking with me, then I fell asleep.