Slum Online Read Free

up at the flickering fluorescent light overhead. The patter of raindrops against the windows. The squeak of chalk on the blackboard. Whispers that died before you could guess where they’d come from. It all formed a pastiche of sound FX over the music playing in my headphones.
    My logic instructor, Professor Uemura, loved tracking attendance. It was a real fetish of his. He would hand out cards at the start of each class and collect them after the bell rang to dismiss us. If you brought the card with you, you could show up right before class ended to turn it in for full credit. The trick was having the right card; he used about twenty different kinds. So despite the fact it was the first period on a Monday morning, the classroom was full.
    Most of the students sat hunched over their desks, dutifully transcribing the lecture notes from the blackboard to their notebooks. A handful of people were lower still on their desks, busy trying to make up for the sleep they’d lost getting to class. I was the only one in the room looking up at the ceiling. I stifled a yawn. Professor Uemura continued scribbling on the board. He could crank out a page’s worth of notes every two minutes. The man had a real gift for writing on a blackboard. Some of his lectures came dangerously close to filling up twenty pages.
    On the desk in front of me were a limp sheet of wide-ruled loose-leaf paper and a blue attendance card. The paper was only a quarter full. Five minutes in I’d given up on the whole thing. The real mistake was embarking on such a noble endeavor in the first place. In the time it took me to write down one character, he’d written somewhere between three and five. For each line I copied down, he got another two lines ahead. When the eraser came sweeping down in a remorseless arc over the words I was still struggling to copy, I knew I was done with my mechanical pencil for the day. Since then I’d been lost in the world of portable music.
    Had I known this professor would be such an attendance Nazi, I’d never have taken the class. My friends had lured me in with assurances of easy credits. Sure, all you had to do was show up. But showing up meant subjecting yourself to ninety minutes of paint-dryingly boring lectures.
    I flicked my mechanical pencil with my index finger. It spun across the palm of my hand, slick with humidity and sweat, rotating about 45 degrees too far before it went tumbling across the loose-leaf paper to land on the desk with a hard clatter. The guy in the chair in front of me shifted slightly in his seat. The fluorescent lighting cast a pale green shadow on his shirt. I felt a faint breath of warm air caress my cheek under the weight of the stagnant air.
    I hated rain. Elementary school had been a string of field trips played out against a backdrop of rainy days. Our athletic meets were regularly rained out and rescheduled from the weekends to Wednesdays. The first time I worked up the courage to tell a girl I liked her, an unseasonal typhoon was roaring outside. I later broke up with said girl during a driving rain that fell all day. On the day I learned I failed the college entrance exam, and a year later when I finally passed it, a drizzle so fine it fell like mist from a humidifier blanketed the city. I’d even heard from my mother that on the day I was born, a nasty day in late June right in the middle of the rainy season, the air had been a thick pea soup, damp and clinging.
    So I was generally unpleasant on mornings during the rainy season. That I had previously acquired the particular variety of attendance card handed out today—and thus had shown up at the beginning of class for nothing—did nothing to lighten my mood.
    “This seat taken?” It was a soft sound, barely enough to derail my train of thought. I looked up from the desk. “Your bag. It’s taking up a seat.” She took a deep breath, chest rising, falling. The gentle curve of her bangs brushed restlessly against her forehead. A