The Wrong Textbook, The Right Company

April twenty-fifth. The recertification module had a deadline and Simone had flashcards. I had a textbook that turned out to be the wrong edition, not wrong enough to be useless, just wrong enough to make everything slightly harder than it needed to be, which is honestly its own kind of life skill. We claimed a break room table before the afternoon rush and spread everything out the way you do when you want it to look like you have a system.

The flashcards were Simone's idea, hand-written on index cards in her particular small print. She held each one up and mouthed the answer before checking the back, which she'd done since the first session and which I'd never asked about because it seemed like the kind of thing you don't interrupt. I got three frames of her doing it. One was good. The gold cross necklace caught the window light and I almost didn't post it because it felt too incidental to be a photograph, which is usually when something is worth keeping.

She knew the answer before the card was even fully up.

At some point the material got genuinely funny in the way dry procedural content gets funny when you've been staring at it past the forty-minute mark, and we both just stopped. Leaned back. The kind of laugh that isn't about anything specific. The timer on the folder stack caught it, which I'm grateful for, because I wouldn't have thought to photograph it and it's the truest image of what that afternoon actually was.

The moment when neither of us could explain what we were even studying anymore.

She passed, for the record. I take partial credit on the grounds that a wrong-edition textbook is still a textbook. The Carol box has been on my mind lately, I looked at it again a few weeks ago and the emptiness of it is getting hard to avoid, but that's a different post. Today was flashcards and burnt coffee and a break room that smelled exactly like every break room, and it was enough.