The Index Cards Were Color-Coded. I Brought Chips.

There was a quiz. A real one, the kind with a sheet, a deadline, a posted date that I had been aware of for three weeks and had been treating as someone else's problem until forty-eight hours ago. Simone knew about it too. Simone had, it emerged when we both ended up in the break room at the same time, prepared index cards. Color-coded index cards. With a system.

I had brought a bag of chips. This is the full accounting. I sat down at the round table across from her and the index cards were already arranged in some kind of grid I did not fully understand, and I reached for the chips before I even put my bag down, and Simone looked at me the way she sometimes looks at me, not unkindly, more like a scientist making a note. She held up one of the cards. I ate a chip. Neither of us said anything for a moment. The September light was doing something nice through the one window, which I noted because I always note it, and it landed on her green-coded stack and made it look almost official.

Exhibit A. Your honor, the snacks were relevant.

I did eventually look at the cards. Some of them were actually useful. I wrote two things down on a corner of a napkin and those two things were, it turned out, on the quiz, which I would like the record to reflect. Simone got more right than I did. She will be gracious about this, which is its own particular form of devastating. We sat in there until the light shifted and the overhead fluorescents took over and became the honest break-room lights they actually are, and somewhere in there the phone Simone had propped on a stack of folders fired and caught us both mid-laugh about something I can't even reconstruct now.

The camera caught us right when it stopped being about the index cards.

The chips were finished. The index cards survived. I am considering, as a personal development initiative, buying one color of highlighter. Just one. I'm not making any promises.