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It is 6:35 AM.
It is always 6:35 AM.
Sometimes the world gives the appearance of it being not 6:35 AM--being, for instance, 6:36 AM, or 3:45 post meridiem--but you're wise to its tricks. Any non-6:35 o'clock you see is a ploy to trick you into lowering your guard. You hear a noise in the bushes, you go to investigate, and bam, it's 6:35 AM again.
There's no rest, no respite, there is only 6:35 AM.
Day after day after day.
(although the etymology suggests some manner of seaborn ne'er-do-well, like Long John Silver or Captain Jack Sparrow)
--but can infer the meaning from Context Clues.
"Why do you have a lockpick?"
You're feeling a bit wary of giraffe-girl. She did just break into a locker in front of you. And while you're certainly grateful she did in this specific case, it reveals a disturbing ability.
But your discomfort goes further than that. What she just did, you didn't expect at all.
How, then, can you anticipate what she's going to do next?
Sufficiently harmless creatures, like cats and tiny dogs, can be unpredictable without being frightening. They can even be simultaneously cute and vicious. With bigger animals, though, and with humans, you feel safer when you can fall back on your Phil Connors clairvoyance to know in advance what they're likely to do.
Are you forgetting your base rates? Sanity check with made up numbers:
Most people can't pick locks. Let's say one in a hundred. Probably those who can, are disproportionately criminally inclined--temperamental and uninhibited. Let's say that however likely standard-issue humans are to have tools--ability--inclination--, volatile people are five times as likely. For five in a hundred, or one in twenty.
Now suppose that ten percent of the population are volatile in the relevant sense. That sounds about right--a lowball estimate, if anything.
By your understanding--using these guesstimates--the same way how on observing that someone's dangerous you can expect one chance in twenty that they can pick locks--, if you observe that someone can pick locks you can guess that there's one chance in... one chance in two that they're dangerous.
Maybe you should try to avoid existing as a feature of giraffe-girl's mental world.
"In particular, I wanted a way to open my locker without having to enter the combination! Did you know that if you shave just five seconds off something you do twice a day, you'll save five hours over five years? I'm rounding of course, and it's an overestimate because there's weekends and summer break but it's an underestimate too because I bet you're saving more than five seconds in the median case and way way more in the average, locker opening-outcomes form a fat-tailed distribution, uh, a distribution with one fat tail, and the 99th percentile bad outcome is really annoying and the 99.9th percentile bad outcome is you have to get a janitor to open it for you and you're marked tardy and that'll ding your grades because people assigned worse lockers should have worse GPAs that's an accurate assessment of their scholastic merit there's some real equality of opportunity going on speaking of which do you need to get going because if you do you should."
Giraffe-girl comes across as earnest. And friendly and smart and interestingly novel and if you were inclined to debate her on the value of pinching seconds--just to kick the idea around, you don't exactly disagree--you'd say "the time passes just as quick either way" and there's a part of you which wants to know how she'd respond to that and a part of you which--hope springs eternal--is convinced that she'd hold up her end of the conversation and that you'd learn things from her and that she'd be interested in learning the things which you already know and there's a part of you which feels like a sunflower growing towards the light that leaks through a boarded window and always feels this way and always has that hope dashed.
Realistically, half of your impression is pure halo effect, because you like her hat and subconsciously like her hair, and another half is that you're caught up in her energy, and the final half is that someone is actually talking to you and when was the last time that happened?
Does any of that quintuple your confidence in her? Probably not.
But in any case, giraffe-girl helped you.
But it doesn't seem like she took offense?
She runs off with a wide smile and an "I've got to get to class!" and an "I'll see you in PE!"
You don't wear a watch, or carry a phone, but Sundew Meadow Middle has carved into your soul an intuition for how long five minutes lasts. If you don't yourself run, you'll be late to first period.
You feel a very stale sense of urgency.
But what power fear once had over you--and what power you, through fear, had over yourself--was broken by long exposure. The minute-hand of the clock pushes against your back, propelling you forward, but inertia resists it--you will be swept over, dragged beneath the wheels.
You begin walking.
The bell rings.
You are now tardy. If you appeared in your seat this very second, you'd be no less tardy. (You know; you've seen teleporters try.)
If you spent ten minutes doing something else, you'd be no more tardy. Knowing this doesn't slow you.
You don't really care whether or not you're marked tardy. That's not the thing which moves you. You don't care whether or not you're learning. You don't care whether or not you're passing classes.
In your life, the bell rings and you walk from one room to another. It's not any deeper than that.
You arrive before your name is called in the rolecall. The teacher makes sure you know she didn't miss your entrance and that you'll be marked late nonetheless. This fails to deeply affect you; you're riding out the clock. The teacher says more words. You hear them without listening. An indeterminate amount of time passes. Now an assignment is being passed around; you take one and pass the rest of the stack on. You write your name on it, and the date in month-day-year format--11/12/13. If giraffe-girl hadn't been at your locker writing those three numbers would be a strong candidate for the highlight of your day. When you are done with the assignment, the class is told, put your heads down silently on your desks. No, you may not draw. No, you may not read. This is so the teacher can tell when everyone is done. It is, you are told, the most efficient way to use class time.
The assignment has questions on them. You read the questions. They don't seem hard.
You doodle giraffe-girl's hat in the margins. You doodle other things besides. You wait for all but one person to put their heads down, at which point you begin to worry that he's doing the same thing and waiting on you, so you put down yours (but he doesn't his).
At the end of class, you submit your blank assignment.
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