The Truth About Girls (Vol. 3)

by TheMareWhoSaysNi

The Most Stupid (Yet Useful) Bet Ever! (part 2)

Twilight had spent the whole night drafting a work program. Although what the Guiding Class learned was a little more sophisticated than the classes given to other students, she had made sure to find a good compromise between what Rainbow Dash needed to remember and what herself needed to see in more depth.

The impression it gave was that she was really more involved than the one person who decided to start on those intense reviews. All day long, her friend had been just like herself and Sunset Shimmer even reported she had seen her snoring during her mathematics class, which led to a tough lecture from their teacher.

Fun as it had been, it was now over. If she wanted her chance in front of this Gilda lazybones and her cheating techniques, she had to show willing, and seriously.

And so, as soon as her athletics club was over, Rainbow Dash was seized by Twilight to go to CHS’ library. She repeated how much she needed a tonic before getting it started, but it didn’t change anything.

The others were going to Sugarcube Corner and offered they started their reviews there, but the dark blue-haired teenage girl refused. It was too noisy and she was sure her friend wouldn’t be focused enough.

“Have mercy! Just let me have a pomegranate and blueberry ice tea first!” she begged as the rest of the gang was already getting away.

“You can have a can at the vending machine.”

“Twilight… Vending machines only sell hyper-caloric stuffs!”

“Not only. They also sell water and plain cookies.”

What could she answer? If she really was hungry and thirsty, she could be satisfied by the offer. Of course, it was a bit stern but as an athlete, she was used to it, wasn’t she?

Dragging her feet, Rainbow Dash resolved to follow Twilight to the library where, she had to admit, she rarely went. When she dared venture it, it was because the other girls were already here, and each time she had to do researches for a presentation or homework, she preferred the comfort of her bedroom and information hunting on the Internet.

Her friend was in her element here. Each time books and studies were at issue, anyway, her eyes went starry, and she could spend her whole days searching through the shelves, or leaning over her lessons.

She settled herself at a table in the center of the room, where there was no way they could not been glimpsed or seen. As if she wanted everyone to see Rainbow Dash being serious, busy reviewing. Obviously, she couldn’t care less about what it could do to her reputation. And the year was almost over, so her reputation no longer really mattered. Didn’t it?

“Fine”, Twilight claimed, taking her possessions with a big smile. “What do you want to start with? I have a program for each topic.”

“I don’t know”, Rainbow Dash answered, grumpy and shrugging.

“Come on, there must be a topic you need to review more than the others… For example, I can remember you’re rather good at literary and History analysis, but you’re weaker in mathematics and sciences.”

“Try straight out bad, instead!”

“Alright. Let’s say we’ll start by mathematics.”

“Awesome! My favorite topic!”

“And please, enough with sarcasm.”

Looking away, Rainbow Dash mimicked her friend’s words with a grimace. She wanted to pass her exams and to win her bet, but what didn’t put her in the best of dispositions was the fact she had to satisfy herself with fizzy water and plain cookies when, right now, she could have been devouring a linseed muffin, drinking a good fresh ice tea at Sugarcube Corner, and relax a little before get it started.

Twilight’s favorite technique was of course writing flash cards with which she would review afterwards. She had retranscripted something like fifty for Rainbow Dash, covering everything they had learned since the beginning of high school. And yet, she thought it wasn’t enough.

It wasn’t her friend’s opinion, as she opened her eyes wide seeing the cards in question.

“You want me to remember all those formulas in two weeks? Are you out of your mind?”

“No, of course, not. You also got all these”, Twilight claimed proudly, showing her the cards she had already written for the other topics.

Rainbow Dash looked at her, raising her eyebrow. She didn’t want to hear about sarcasm but she was a good preacher for the cause of bad faith.

Reluctantly, she started to read the first card with perplexity. Right under her eyes, there was nothing but things she already knew yet she felt like they were written in Russian or in another language which alphabet was impossible to decipher.

Meanwhile, Twilight was reviewing her own flash cards with a wide smile, focused, and convinced her friend was as well.

So, this was her idea of amazing reviews together? Reading those damn flash cards in Cyrillic and nothing else? She could as well have done it home!

Back when she needed help to catch on her backlog after her stay in Green Haven, Twilight already had made her review but the method was completely different. It always hadn’t been easy but she had eventually caught up, despite her temporary disability to run because of her thigh’s injury, which meant she couldn’t rely on sports to help her compensate her gap in some topics.

Rainbow Dash sighed and made her pencil roll over the table. At first, it only was out of despair, until she realized she could copy a melody this way, and decided to try to play one of her favorite song. At the same time, she was shaking her head and thumping her feet, and quickly, completely forgot why she was here exactly.

It was her friend clearing her throat which got her out of her little fantasy.

Arms and face crossed, Twilight was staring at her. Immediately, Rainbow Dash tried to put things right, placing her hands behind her back, a clumsy smile plastered on her face. But obviously, from the face of her friend as upset as before, it probably wasn’t that convincing.

“What on Earth are you doing?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Well, that’s the problem. You shouldn’t be doing “nothing at all”, but be busy reviewing. Do you really want to have to say Gilda she’s your master?”

No, she didn’t. But she couldn’t help it. She needed something to keep her stimulated, and reading stupid flash cards had her more bored than interested. And she felt as if nothing would print into her mind with this method. In general, she liked to review with the music on, and the melody, some lyrics or musical parts were like guiding posts to her.

Of course, this method didn’t convince Twilight at all when she told her about it. In her opinion, it was impossible to remember anything if the mind wasn’t a hundred percent focused on what there was to learn. The rest were nothing but distractions and distractions were what came after reviewing.

--------------------------------------------------

Hopeless. It had been a week now she had started to review for the exams, and each and every of Twilight’s dearest methods had revealed to be useless with her. Reading her lessons out loud? She would fall asleep or get so restless her friend would lose patience. Flash cards? The worst – she could never focus. Underlining what was the most important and copying it afterwards? She never could sort out what was important and what wasn’t.

The young woman had insisted: listening to music while reviewing wasn’t a working method. As soon as she would have passed the exam, she would forget everything. Rainbow Dash didn’t know what was the problem until Twilight explained her she would never be good at university if it happened.

Rainbow Dash took a deep breath, and looked at how much she still had to review, disheartened. She knew she had to do it, that she couldn’t give up, for herself and because of her bet with Gilda. There was no way she could call her “my master” in front of the whole school! Just to think about it made her want to scream and kick something.

So, she was shaping balls with the leaves she had taken out of her notebook and threw them against the wall. The floor surrounding her desk was filled with balls of crumpled papers that Tank could hardly avoid. Her immediate frustration really was the only thing this could satisfy.

It came to a point where she was starting to think Gilda was right about her, and she was nothing but a featherbrained idiot. What else could explain the fact she could never remember anything she wrote down?

This got a wriggle on her legendary proud! To be awesome yet stupid wasn’t really an amazing thing. Not that she wanted to be an egghead just like Twilight… But a bare minimum would already be a good start!

When Rainbow Dash checked at the time and realized it was more than nine, she understood it was no use insisting for tonight – again. She would never win her bet with such a lazy brain!

She pressed her head against her desk, arms dangling, and sighed again. Living the life of a hardworking person was harder than she thought. How could Twilight, Sunset Shimmer, Soarin and all the others spend so much time reviewing topics? She always wanted to do something else, like watching a movie or a game on TV, reading a Daring Doo novel, going for a run, playing basket, doing a split, snuggling Tank, eating… In short, anything except reviewing.

She had to get it together. If she was so stupid, then why did she have so many friends who were so smart? She knew she was unstoppable once determined. When she was in front of a crowd of people she had to motivate, she knew what were the words which would stimulate them all. And she was smart in the strategies of team sports, which proved she was able to think. Even if not in an academic way.

Except it was this kind of knowledge that was required to win her bet. No matter which angles she looked at the problem, she always came back to her disability to remember anything with the traditional learning methods.

In desperation, she decided to seek some comfort with someone who’d be able to understand her.

Rainbow Dash took her smartphone, and went on her bed to call, far from all those nasty books and notebooks which tortured her since last week.

“Hey, Dash, how are ya doin’?” Applejack’s voice asked through the receiver.

It seemed to her that her best friend, just like Pinkie Pie, had her own method when it came to reviewing. She often confessed her she neither could remember anything the traditional learning way. She had to do related exercises, in the field, but she never outlined anything nor did stupid flash cards.

“I’m a bird!”

“What?”

“I’m a bird. With a very small brain and very little neurons. And I’ll have to call Gilda “my master”, like in a very bad epic movie!”

On the other side, she heard her friend sneer in that very particular way of hers – deep and smelling like straw in a barn. If even her best buddies made fun of her, she could never make it…

“It’s not funny, AJ!”

“’Scuze me, but… Yar no bird, Dash! Sure, yar not smart in the Twilight kinda smart, which doesn’t mean ya don’t have a brain. It just means ya don’t learn this way.”

“That’s the problem… I don’t have the slightest idea about how I learn. According to Twilight, if I play music to have guiding posts, it would work but not for long enough and it’s nonsense to learn anything you’re going to forget afterwards. It means I’ll have to learn it all over again and I don’t want to do that!”

“Ah can’t help ya for that. Yar the only one that can find yar own method and how to remember stuff appropriately. Sorry, Dash…”

“Tsk, don’t apologize! I know you’re right.”

She sighed. Well, it hadn’t helped much but at least she was feeling a bit better about herself and her abilities. And it already was a great thing.

“Thanks, AJ. You probably don’t realize, but you did me good…”

“Yar welcome. What friends are for, uh?”

When she hung up, Rainbow Dash put her phone on her bedside table, next to the picture of her and her mother.

She remembered… Firefly used to spread out huge white leaves on the living-room table, and armed with nothing but a pencil, she calculated from memory trajectories for planes. The leaf, quickly, was filled out with mathematic signs which Rainbow Dash couldn’t decipher at all. Sometimes she asked her husband to correct her calculations, and most of the time, they already were correct.

Rainbow Blaze used to do the same, but on a black board which was in his office.

Her parents hadn’t received the same type of education at all, since one had always done things on her own and the other went in the best schools of the country, but both had in common their love for physics and mathematics that probably drew them together when they were younger.

Instead of inheriting their knowledge and methods, she had inherited from her two parents of their audacity, their toughness in business and in sports. If she was proud of it until then, today she was thinking that maybe she hadn’t been that lucky.

Her phone vibrated, and Rainbow Dash took it slowly. Soarin. He wanted to know how well she was doing with her reviews.

She was tempted to lie. He might not look like this at first – especially when an apple pie was put under his nose – but he also was rather smart. In the academic way (but not only). Just like her mother and her father, he was fond of these long complicated calculations… What a shame he had to get lumbered with a girlfriend such as herself!

And, eventually, she told herself it was best to tell him the truth.

Instead of answering his message, she pressed against the small green phone beside his name. A few tones rang before he picked it up.

“Dashie? Is everything alright?”

“I’m a bird.”

“Got issues with your reviews, don’t you?”

It always was with a sense of awe she welcomed his way of understanding her innuendoes with ease. If there was someone knowing her well, this someone was Soarin! The girls also knew her by heart, of course, but she wasn’t going to call them one by one – especially not Twilight.

“I bet you! I can’t remember anything. No method is working for me, and AJ said I had to find mine, but I don’t have time to find one, the exam’s next week and I NEED to pass. Without cheating.”

“But if you can’t seem to remember anything, the issue’s still here… Don’t you think you might as well find your own learning method?”

One of the good thing about Soarin was that he knew how to stick her nose into what was wrong, but with enough diplomacy for it not to burst out into conflicts – like it often happened with her father, for example.

“There’s so many different ways to learn… First, is your memory rather visual or hearing?”

“I don’t f**king know that! But I’m able to remember the very details of some shots from movies just by watching them once, does that count?”

Silence. Rainbow Dash sighed. Of course, it didn’t count. It was fun, but could in nothing help her with her reviews. Unless maybe she would film her formulas of mathematics in black and white and low-angle, in the Welles fashion.

“Don’t you want to come?”

Once again, silence. It was rather unexpected, undoubtedly. But by realizing she would surely lose her bet and humiliate herself, she had thought that now things were bad, she might as well ruin them completely. And it was best to be in a pleasant manner. What would be better for that than spending some time with her boyfriend?

“At your place? Now?”

“Well, yeah. It’s too late to hope I’ll learn how to learn anything tonight… Ah, but maybe you’re already in your jammies and everything. And you have exams as well… Forget about it. That was a terrible idea.”

In reality, she was really aggrieved. It had been a week since she hadn’t seen him at all and had thought it would have been a much pleasanter way to waste time than by depressing on her supposed stupidity while staring at her mother’s picture. She hadn’t taken into account every parameter. What a smart person would probably have done.

Argh, she hated her thoughts tonight!

“In fact, I’ve just finished my own reviews. I wanted to order a pizza and watch TV. Have you eaten yet?”

“Nope”, she answered with a smile in her voice.

“In this case… Don’t move. I’m coming with something to sustain you.”

“Don’t forget your jammies!”

“I won’t. This pizza… Mozzarella and Parmesan cheese with sweet peppers, as always?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll be here in half an hour.”

When Rainbow Dash hung up, she was smiling again. It didn’t make her smarter, for sure, but at least she would spend a real moment of sheer relaxation, the first one since she had run this stupid bet with Gilda.

Tomorrow was another day, and just like Scarlett, she thought she could think about finding her own method tomorrow. With a clear head. Between the comfortable arms of the sweetest boyfriend of the world.

--------------------------------------------

Last night was the best moments of her entire week. With Soarin by her side, she’d been able to forget about all her troubles under his kisses and between their giggles. They did nothing reprehensible, but Rainbow Dash didn’t need this in order to relax and forget everything. Just sharing a bit of tenderness with him was enough. Tenderness and a delicious pizza from Intermezzo, the best pizzeria of Canterlot.

When she opened her eyes in the morning, she was feeling good, as if she had slept on a cloud. It was rare enough to be noted.

On her alarm clock was written nine and a half, not that late for such a professional of lie-ins on weekends. Yet her smile widened into a larger one. It meant she still had time to be with Soarin.

She turned around in her bed, while stretching out, ready to nestle herself against her boyfriend’s comfortable back, and instead, met face to face with the emptiness of the nearby pillow, with only the printing of his face and a few strands of hair. She hadn’t dreamed that night…

Sitting up straight to look around her, Rainbow Dash then realized that, right beside the pillow, was a small blue Post-it which hand-writing she immediately recognized, along with a fake flower he surely had picked from the bunch on the living-room table.

“You were sleeping so blissfully I couldn’t wake you up. I’m gone to review my own exams as well before going to work. Keep it going with your work! I’m certain you’ll win that bet. PS: if you’re a bird, then you’re a phoenix. I love you. Soarin.”

Rainbow Dash smiled again. Sometimes, he was able of an adorable candor which could seem surprising coming from an athletic big fellow like him. She knew that was the way he had always been, even back when he was only a skinny kid the other boys used to make fun of. What probably would exasperate her coming from another, with him it could make her heart melt down in a way she wasn’t sure she liked, all while knowing well she didn’t hate it at all.

Since she was alone, she was tempted to go back to bed. A glimpse at her opened shutters and the bright sunshine convinced her otherwise. She would go and run around the neighborhood, and then she would start to find a useful way to review, and too bad if it wasn’t a conventional one!

She stretched out lengthily then got out of her bed, putting her feet into her slippers. Not really caring about her surroundings, she walked out of her room, and climbed the stairs towards the second-floor bathroom in order to wash her teeth.

It could be surprising that she had such a habit even before breakfast. But one of the things she could scarcely bear was the sensation her mouth wasn’t clean after eating. The girls made fun of her because she even brought her toothbrush and her toothpaste at school.

She filled her glass, put on the paste… Her lids half-closed, it was a bit difficult for her to surface from what was waking up early for her.

Only when she leaned over to spit out her toothpaste did she notice the Post-it on her medicine cabinet. An historical event was written on it, along with its date. The handwriting, once again, was Soarin’s.

Frowning, she finished rinsing her mouth, before realizing the whole bathroom was filled with Post-its like this one.

Rainbow Dash raced out of the bathroom, hurtled down the stairs and went back in her bedroom. Each corner of the place was decorated with Post-its, with different notions she had to learn on them, straight out of her school program.

It went the same way in her living-room, the wide family room, the kitchen… And she was ready to bet it also was the same in every other room.

Since she couldn’t wait to be back up in her room, she grabbed the wall landline phone which was in the kitchen, and made Soarin’s number.

He picked it up almost immediately, as if her call was expected.

“Oh… Looks like you’ve found my “surprise””, he said in an amused tone.

“Well… I did… What is this?”

She wasn’t so stupid she wasn’t aware this was related with her reviews, but what she didn’t really understand was the approach of all this. It was nice to decorate her whole house with Post-its – thankfully her father wouldn’t be back home after the end of her exams – but she didn’t know what it would change to her situation.

“It’s very simple. You’ll see… This is called a Memory Palace. Last night, on the phone, you told me you could remember the least details of a movie shot even though you’ve only seen it once.”

“Yes”, she answered while nodding at the same time.

“It means your memory’s photographic. It’s a really rare gift, you know… It’s even contested.”

“What’s the connection with your “Memory Palace”?”

“It’s a very effective way to remember many things, especially when your memory’s photographic. You have to plan the way you move through your palace, then associate a notion to an item or a placement in said palace. Then, when you’ll retain this plan it well, all you’ll have to do will be to mentally walk along inside by following your itinerary and you’ll remember everything.”

Soarin could feel that, on the other side of the line, his girlfriend was skeptical. He had been too when he’d been told about this unconventional mnemonic way, and quickly, he’d realized these associations made sense and really worked.

“I’ve organized everything for it to be simple and as optimum as possible. Each floor represents a module and each room a specific topic from this module. This way, you won’t get muddled up and when you’ll have to use your Memory Palace, you’ll be able to go from one floor to another without doing the whole itinerary from the beginning. I can promise you it works. And you have nothing to lose, anyway, haven’t you?”

No. Indeed, she had nothing to lose. Every other method had failed and it was out of question she would get trapped by Gilda and her smartphone cheat. She knew one needed to take risk in order to succeed. It was the same during an important game. Caution wasn’t always a synonym for victory.

Comments

[Midday Giggle]

6:35 p.m.

Soarin's so smart And this "Memory Palace" speaks to me, because of Sherlock of the BBC, he has one too.

(Now I'm going back to reviewing for my own exams, hehe...)

[Dusk_Writer]

Hopefully this method works out well, Soarin's such a sweet person!