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Bella attends her classes with faultless punctuality, every time. She sits in the second or third row on an aisle in the middle section of seats, in the classes that take place in big auditorium lecture halls like the main section of Bio; she's willing to put herself closer to the professors in smaller classes like OS and of course her flute chair (third; she hasn't been quite ridiculously showoffy enough to climb beyond yet) is assigned. But right now, she is in Bio, learning tidbits about auxin and tropisms that the textbook didn't cover fully. She's running at about one and a half speed, just enough that she can trivially listen to and process the lecture against her memory of the text while also permitting some mind-wandering. She liiiiiikes her cognitive speedup power.
"Recalcitrant electrons," says Janine.
"...I think that's a what, not a how," says Bridget. "And also possibly more information than I needed."
Janine giggles. "Homework," she clarifies.
"Whew."
"I'll bite. How are the electrons being recalcitrant?" asks Bella.
"They do that," Bridget says sagely.
Janine giggles again.
"But electrons aren't actually logically inconsistent, yes? I mean, if they are, someone needs to revise their axioms of logic."
"No, I think this is just me making a silly mistake I haven't found yet," says Janine.
"Yeah, that happens too."
"I used to do that sort of silly little thing in trig all the time," Bella said. "I kept turning SOHCAHTOA into various kinds of spoonerism."
"Me neither!" says Janine.
"I got it memorized eventually, but it didn't help when I needed it - it got to the point where I reconstructed the mnemonic based on what I knew about the functions," says Bella.
Bridget snorts. "I think that's what we call an ineffective teaching aid."
"It seemed to help some people," Bella shrugs. "Just not me."
"Can you name any of these mythical people?" wonders Janine.
"Jessica used it all the time," Bella says. "She was who I used to study trig with the most. And the guy who sat behind me talked to himself under his breath all the time, and he seemed to lean on it pretty heavily."
"It does happen," says Bridget. "In fact I dare say we're the outliers."
"None of us in this room are typical people, I daresay," Bella says. "Probably half the folks who make it to Stanford aren't. The people we went to high school with are normal - for our socioeconomic classes, anyway."
"No one I went to high school with was memorable," says Bridget. "At least not after this long."
"Did you go to an unusual high school of some kind?" Bella asks Janine.
Bridget quirks a smile. "That sounds interesting."
"Extremely!"
"Okay, so your high school doesn't count. I went to public schools in middle-class neighborhoods," shrugs Bella.
"My school had many advantages, but no kind of normality was ever one of them," says Janine.
"I went to a big normal school in Phoenix and a little normal school in Forks and met normal people there," laughs Bella. "And a statistically typical number of abnormal ones."
"A mix. You've met Alice, of course, so there's that, but Jessica and Angela and Eric were pretty normal. Angela I even still email occasionally."
"Who is this Alice of whom you speak?" asks Bridget.