I fiddled with my pencil as the professor droned on about the trivial matters concerning the study of art. It was one of the only classes that irritated me, English was another one…
"Mr. Cooper!" I heard the grizzly man say. I looked up and felt thirty pairs of eyes on me.
"Yes Professor?" I replied. He looked at me over his spectacles.
"Are you listening to me young man?" he asked. In truth I really wasn't, I could care less about the thought processes that drove Picasso to pick up a brush and make a series of colorful scribbles.
"Yes sir, I'm really quite fascinated, please carry on." I said my voice had yet to drop so it wafted through the room in an eerie manner.
The man nodded and carried on with his lecture, moving on to the different types of strokes used in one of his self-portraits.
He was mid-sentence when the bell rang. I rose, my lanky arms struggling to gather up all my things and head to my last class for the day: English.
I detested this class with a passion I hadn't known since Timothy Gorelov had dumped my chocolate milk down bathroom sink before shoving my head into a toilet. I shouldered my backpack and began moving, hauling open the heavy wooden doors that were keeping me from the main stream of students.
University life suited me… or at least the academics did. I never understood social dynamics very well, so I was just the oddball on the outside looking in. I had never thought I was missing much, it was just an unnecessary set of paradoxes and problems to be solved and while I was always up for a challenge I knew I would never ever be able to figure out the chemistry and physics that went behind human interaction.
I remembered as I walked down the hallway, negotiating my way through thousands of bodies, how many sleepless nights I would go through attempting to understand and recreate relationships with my fellow homo sapiens. Over time I had just taken to observing and mimicking, but success had evaded me.
There was no formula for emotions and it irritated me that I, Sheldon Cooper, fifteen years old, could not understand something as simple as what to do when someone walked up to you and introduced themselves.
I came to a halt in front of my classroom and entered. A small group of young adults, they stopped talking to stare at me as I walked in and put my bag down. The teacher was gone and I turned to them, "Do any of you know where Professor Clarke is?" I asked.
One of them cleared their throats. "Erm, yes, I do believe he went for coffee. But, aren't you… you're Sheldon Cooper." I nodded impatiently.
"Yes, this would be one of the universe's few truths." I said, utterly unimpressed with the extent of American adults' vocabularies.
"You're fifteen and studying for you doctorate here." A girl piped up. By this time I was tired of listening to them spit out obvious statements so I took a seat, ignoring them, and opened my laptop to attempt to pull up this week's assignment.
I worked in silence until the teacher entered; he smiled at all of us brightly before turning to the chalkboard and writing our assignment:
The Ideal Companion in more than 3 pages
I frowned at the board, the ideal companion? I racked my brain, this was exactly why I hated English class, they asked questions I didn't have the answer to and I couldn't learn on my own.
I raised my hand tentatively and the man turned to me. "Yes Mr. Cooper?" he asked.
"I, er, don't quite know what you mean. The ideal companion, like a friend?" I asked. He nodded.
"Exactly, I want it by the end of the week." He stated. I frowned even more.
But I don't have any companions or an idea of what an ideal one would be. I said to myself. The rest of the class passed by in a haze and when I boarded into my mother's station wagon later that afternoon my mind was whirring, focused on this new problem.