The Score
by Lillian Hammerstrom
Adebjia raises her hand, her french-tipped fingernails dancing in the dusty shafts of fluorescent lighting emanating from the drooping ceiling of her philosophy classroom. She has the right answer. She knows it’s right because she read it online the night before. But it’s her own idea, because she’s about to say it and no one else is.
Her opinions are always correct. They must be; she’s spent so much time thinking about them.
The body keeps score… but her mind feels like a meticulous high school basketball coach on a power trip, squeezing every technicality he can, begging the referees for a foul at every light shove or minor infraction. Being a basketball coach is his side hustle, though. That’s important to note. He works from 7:00 in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon as an accountant—he takes a 30-minute lunch—and drives over to the local high school in his freshly washed, white Toyota Prius, which gives him an Eco Score when he drives in a manner that saves gas. He’s always running late for practice, but that doesn’t stop him from driving at a pace that fills molasses with envy.
For Adebjia, every action deserves a score. Every thought merits a calculation. Everything she does is a win or a loss, a subtraction or addition that amounts to who she is as a person.
And at this point, if she is merely a sum of numerical abstractions, is she anything?
She is still in class. The professor glances toward her, his eyes shifting behind thick rimmed glasses. She sees a glint of something there, or is it a shadow? Some apprehension toward her coming words? Or mere boredom directed toward the monotony of his profession? Maybe she’s witnessing an existential crisis unfold right in front of her eyes, a teacher on the verge of a mental breakdown that will destroy his career forever…
“Yes, Addie?” he asks, and Adebjia almost jumps. “What do you think?”
What does she think? Would it be untruthful to say that she thinks exactly what she read? The information she found on the Internet was certainly divulged by an individual who spent some time formulating an opinion, an interpretation of the content she was tasked with exploring on her own. And what they said makes perfect sense. Adebjia cannot disagree. Whoever wrote such an eloquent, well-crafted analysis must have been correct. She knows because she read the writer’s bio on Wikipedia.
Adebjia rolled the question over and over in her mind, caressing every curve of her professor’s words within the folds of her fat, pink brain.
What. Do. I. Think?
Do. I. Think?
I. Don’t.
What is she, if not an amalgamation of a hundred opinions, a thousand analogies, a million thoughts that speed through her mind at a mile a minute? Perhaps she is just that. A thought, a sum, a score.
But that’s okay. Because keeping score has gotten her this far. So why start thinking now?