CHAPTER 119
Ana
AFTER MY CONVERSATION with Violet, I knew exactly what I wanted to write my Winter Paper on.
What I could never write about, while I was still clinging onto the ghost of my ex-best friend.
It was a risk. The topic that I chose.
Professor Beckham might flunk me, but inspiration struck last minute, and I couldn’t turn in the paper without emptying this avalanche that’s been piled up on me.
So that’s what I just did.
I just handed her the fifteen-page essay about…a topic that isn’t really associated to physics…at all.
_________
I just got my paper back.
And my jaw’s on the floor at the grade.
Naomi snatches the paper from my hands when I reach her room, instantly beginning to read it for herself.
When she lands on the final page, I sit there, jittery—super fucking jittery—and watch as her brows raise in surprise, reading the last page along with her.
What did all the great physicists have in common?
An idea that someone beat them to.
Everything boils down to a competition. Whether it was the law of gravity, the exact angle a figure skater had to spin, one second off axis and she’d be a pool of blood.
It’s everywhere. Competition. We shove it in the minds of young girls. Questioning their worth at a time when everything is of question and curiosity.
Madame Bovary, Daisy Buchanan, Anna Karenina.
These women all had one thing in common. They competed for the attention of a society that timed their worth, that judged their every misstep, that rejoiced in their misery, through a looking hourglass. They did it to Alice, they did it to my friends.
Like any science finding, my latest discovery isn’t anything new. Though, it’s a hypothesis I’d like to reinstate:
Competition kills. Competition rebirths. Competition destroys some friendships and welcomes new ones. And when you don’t have anyone left to compete with, you realize, your biggest obstacle, the greatest competition you had, following you like a clingy bitch, was yourself.
And once you reach the very top, you find,
No one really wins.
“An A minus?!” Naomi drops the paper down in shock. “It was probably the ‘bitch’ you through in there.” I laugh. “This was the weirdest science paper I have ever read, Ana. I fucking loved it!”
Warmth fills me at the pure look of happy surprise running across her cheeks.
“I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that you and Violet were friends,” she says with a brow raised. “Like you mean to tell me there was a time where she wasn’t a, well, I don’t want to say ‘bitch,’ but…”
“When we first met,” I say, “she was one of the sweetest people I knew.”
Naomi sits up with interest as I share memories about a friendship I once lost.
This time, it’s the good memories.