Let's Taco 'Bout That

There is nothing more beautiful than waking in the morning to the sound of birdsong. Seeing gentle beams of light escape from behind curtains just to illuminate the warmth of covers is one of life's greatest joys.

I assume so, anyway.

I wouldn't know, because when I awoke one morning in May, it was to the earsplitting shrieks of an alarm. I rolled out of bed and onto the floor, blindly searching for the source of the endless beeping. There's nothing quite like crawling around in the darkness at 4:30am and searching for something. Gollum had it rough. I made my way across the room, finally finding my phone and shutting it off.

Blessed silence. All I wanted was to cocoon myself in my comforter and never emerge, but, unfortunately, I had things to do. The first being, namely, to get up off of the floor.

I sighed and stood up, immediately regretting the decision. I swayed and gripped the top of my dresser. Apparently, five-ish hours of sleep isn't enough. Good to know. I edged my way through the blackness towards the light switch, trying to avoid the corners of the bed, which were also black and consequently invisible.

I made it to the far wall without incident. Nailed it! I thought, just before tripping on the textbook I'd left on the floor the night before. I bumped into the wall, accidentally finding the light switch in my attempt to catch myself. I congratulated myself on my godlike skills of balance and flipped on the overhead light. I had the foresight to shut my eyes before doing this, so I wasn't blinded for more than a few moments.

I rummaged through my closet, making the strategic (read: unusual and uncalled for) decision to wear something other than yoga pants before making my way to the bathroom. I glanced up at the mirror, meeting my own sleep deprived and slightly crazed stare. Yikes. Hello, Shrek. 

After my shower, I poured the equivalent of four shots of espresso into a mug.

I took a sip.

I'm gonna die, I thought, before guzzling the rest of the mug's contents.

The sun hadn't yet risen, but I was already out the front door and headed to the bus stop. It was a Friday, and Agriculture classes were canceled that day, so there were only a few other students seated on the bus. I stared blankly out the window across from me, thinking about nothing. After a few minutes, it occurred to me that there was a student sitting there, and he was looking extremely uncomfortable. I snapped back into the present.

The bus stopped and I stepped out of it, psyching myself up to walk the quarter mile to the Agriculture building. The coffee helped. It was almost 6 by the time I walked in. I located the professor in charge of registering students' names and put mine down on the list.

"Alright then," I said, looking up at him with my pen still on the page. "What do you need me to do?"

"I... Uh..." He cast about for something to say. "... didn't expect any students to be on time, so... I don't have anything right now for you."

He gestured to a nearby group of tables and chairs. "I guess you can just sit here for now."

"Okay, thank you," I said, sitting down. The whole point of being here was for extra credit and, as long as my name was on the sheet of students who earned it, I didn't really care how I spent my time. I could afford to waste it. And, boy, did I.

Over the next half hour, several other professors made comments in passing about how unexpected it was that a student was on time. I wasn't entirely sure what I would be doing to earn this extra credit. The professors I asked gave me vague answers and, when another student did end up arriving, she didn't know what we were doing either.

At a quarter to seven, a sufficient number of other students had arrived, and I was told to go into Exam Room 202 with the professor of horticulture who would "probably have something for you to do". She was a tall, thin, woman with long and curly blonde hair. She wore cat-eye glasses and an earth toned dress with a gigantic shawl wrapped around her shoulders. When she spoke, it was in a soft, cute, and mystical voice that honestly kind of weirded me out. But she brought breakfast tacos, so I got over it.

She assigned me to a small group of students who would be giving early college entrance exams to high schoolers.

"The first one starts at 7:15," she told us gently. "So please have everything set up by then."

She glided smoothly away with the rest of the tacos, her long dress whispering as she left. I'm not entirely convinced her feet were on the floor. There were three other girls in my group, and only one guy. Before getting to work, we introduced ourselves. I'm going to say that they were called Deborah, Bethany, Megan, and Dave for no reason other than that those were their actual names. We set up posters for the students to analyze and organized the exams we were to distribute.

Deborah, Bethany, and Megan were all smiles. They laughed as we taped down the posters to the desk at the back of the room, making jokes about how they couldn't use tape properly and needed Dave's help. They gushed about how attractive my satchel was and appeared to be excited for the day to begin so that they could earn their extra credit. None of us had met before, but you would have thought they had known each other their entire lives.

It was almost exactly seven, and I felt like I was about to enter hibernation. It wasn't until I began having thoughts like seven months isn't that bad that I realized it was a problem. Note to self: don't be sleep deprived and caffeine addicted before walking a mile and setting up an exam room. Your metabolism doesn't like that. It was a weirdly specific mental note to make, but I found it helpful.

"I'm gonna go get a Starbucks," I announced to the room. "Does anyone want anything?"

The girls looked at each other and shook their heads in unison.

Dave raised his hand slightly.

"Actually... I'd like one."

"Cool. What do you want?"

"Here's five bucks. Just get me anything."

"No, really. What do you want?"

Dave seemed momentarily nonplussed. Then he gave me a detailed and very particular request. The nearest Starbucks was within walking distance of most buildings on campus (a wise marketing decision), so it only took a few minutes to order our drinks separately and make my way back. Nevertheless, I only had two minutes to spare before the prospective college students were set to arrive.

Upon my return, I set the contents of my left hand (my coffee, my wallet, my phone) down on the desk in front of him. Now that I was less likely to drop anything, I placed his change on his receipt.

"Heresyourcupheresyourreceipt," I recited in one breath. Walking up hills with a deadline is hard.

"You don't have to-" he began, indicating to the change I had already handed to him. He looked down at it in mild surprise. "Well, okay."

Why on earth would he not expect his change back? That's kind of sad. I turned around, towards the front of the room, intending to put my things back in my bag. As I did so, I noticed that Deborah, Bethany and Megan had their arms crossed and were whispering  to one another in a decidedly unfriendly and conspiratorial way. The moment they realized I had turned around, they immediately changed expressions to something either pleasant or neutral and fell silent.

OOH she gave BACK his CHANGE, I thought in an annoying falsetto voice, which made me grin into my coffee. It was apparent that their prior friendliness to me had been mostly an act. I didn't mind. I was only there to get extra credit anyway.

The doors opened, and the first of the high school students filed in. Megan, Dave, and I directed them to their seats ("Those of you doing the first part, sit at the front."). Bethany and Deborah stood at the front of the room, nibbling on the remains of donuts that they had gotten who-knows-where. When the students were seated, the girls set down their donuts and passed out exams.

We had been told very explicitly that these high school students weren't allowed to speak while they were on campus (gotta keep those exams secret, right?), and these children looked as though it was true. They were solemn and tired-looking. The oldest one there couldn't have been more than sixteen.

It was depressing, and I didn't enjoy it. One girl in the third row of desks looked up at the front of the room, biting her pencil anxiously. I smiled at her.  She slowly smiled back, and, after tapping her face with the pencil, began selecting answers with greater enthusiasm than before. The next time someone looked up, my smile was received the same way. I felt the three other girls' eyes on me as I did this, but they said nothing to me and were content to mutter amongst themselves. By the end of the exam's allotted hour-and-a-half, the students didn't look completely miserable. A few even smiled at me on their way out of the room.

Bethany, Deborah, and Megan were sitting on the professor's desk in the front of the room, staring at their phones, when the next group of students arrived. They made no move to get up when Dave and I started seating people. He and I passed out the exams. I followed the same pattern I had begun with the first group of students: smiling when they looked up, walking around the room to make sure that no one tried to cheat, and sipping from my coffee all the while. By the end of this exam, the three girls were refusing to acknowledge my presence, opting instead to leave the room for long stretches of time.

The third and final group of high school students filed into Room 202. Deborah, Bethany, and Megan began to laugh and whisper to one another in the middle of the students' exam. They were charging their phones and had formed a semicircle where they were showing one another the source of their laughter. Dave glanced at me, but I was already in the process of crossing the room. I approached their group and said in a low voice, "They're trying to take an exam. Quiet down, please."

I received two blank expressions and one annoyed one in response. But they did quiet down for a time. It wasn't long until their silence was broken yet again and they were giggling loudly with the intent to distract. This happened twice more. With each interaction, the teenagers started looking up from their exams more frequently to watch.

Then it was over. We were informed that no more students would be arriving. Bethany, Deborah, and Megan promptly left. Dave and I had the honor of cleaning up the room by ourselves. With that done, I found the professor of horticulture in her office.

The door was open. She was seated at her computer, surrounded by piles of books and papers, focused intently on whatever she was typing. Her cat-eye glasses glittered from the screen's reflection. Plants hung in the windows and were displayed across shelves, some blooming, some not, all meticulously cared for.

"Professor," I said gently, trying not to startle her.

She jumped, her shawl catching on the side of her chair.

"Ye-yes," she stammered. Her voice still retained that mystical quality, though, in that moment, she resembled more a deer in headlights than someone who had experienced the otherworldly.

"I'm just wondering if there's anything else I'm supposed to do. I was part of the group in Room 202-"

"Oh," she smiled graciously. "No, you're done. Take a shirt."

"Take a-  What?"

"A shirt." She gestured vaguely behind her at a stack of large boxes. "They're back there somewhere."

I found the indicated box behind a large potted plant and began to rifle through it, finally selecting a blue shirt that pleased my inner twelve-year-old and made me exhale through my nose. It read Texas State Horticulture on the front and gardeners do it with hoes on the back. I left her office.

I stepped back into the exam room for a moment to tell Dave that he could leave, and thanked him for helping me. He responded in kind, and I went home.