The Derivative of a Constant

I. Though it’s many hours before your normal bedtime, you’ve had enough blue light to last a lifetime. The clack of your laptop as it shuts closed does nothing to calm the static in your chest. You have already processed the data: your best friend’s lunch date with the "inner circle," your rival’s polished trophy, the boy from history class folding his hand into a girl’s palm like a secret. You grab your childhood bear and pull him close, hoping those digital images will diffuse out of your mind and into his polyester heart. They don’t. You are left drowning in a puddle of your own making, a single dot in an empty coordinate plane.

II. Negative parabolas fascinate you to the greatest extent; they are the true architecture of the hallway. There, in the bounce of the yellow pom-poms; there, in the stiff, arrogant shoulders of the varsity jacket. They push past you as if you are merely a fixed point on a graph, but you understand the calculus better than they do. They are all rising toward a frantic maximum, unaware that the curve eventually demands a descent. You find a cold, bitter solace in their first derivatives. Underneath the façades, their slope is already trending toward zero.

III. It’s barely midnight, the hour where silence becomes a physical weight. You have this sudden urge, a pressure in your lungs that feels like it might crack your ribs if you don't speak. You dial. “Hi! It’s Daisha... call you back!” “Hey guys, you know what to do at the beep.” “Yo, why are you calling? You know I only text.” The fourth call is a hollow, mechanical ring that never ends. You look at one wall, then the other. You have never felt more like a remainder, the number left over after everyone else has been divided into pairs.

IV. You have mastered the technique of the impassive façade; you are a gallery-grade statue of "I’m fine." But when the group in the hallway laughs, the stone cracks. You lick your lips, racking your brain for a variable to contribute, any vestige of a thought to bridge the gap, but your search yields unsuccessful. The only thing you find is a laugh, false at that, and still a full second too late. That sound, so small and pathetic in the open air, is the breaking point. You realize that you have become a constant: a number that never changes, and therefore, never grows.

V. The phone stays silent on the nightstand, but the clench of the night finally begins to settle. You are tired of calculating the downward slopes of others while your own line stays perfectly, miserably flat. You reach out – not with a grand gesture, but with a shaky tap on a screen. You text the girl who sits three rows back in Calculus, the one who also keeps her head down when the noise gets too loud. It isn't a plea; it’s just a question about a homework set you already finished. And when the ellipsis appears, three gray dots pulsing like a heartbeat in the dark, the math suddenly changes. You aren't a fixed point anymore. You are a variable, finally allowing yourself to be added to the sum.