Read Afterthought: A Sententia Short Story (The Sententia) for Free Online Page A

helped a little. Today, the push-ups felt better than the run, though the shower felt best of all.
    Without looking, I grabbed the top thing from the left-hand side of each drawer in my dresser and slipped them on before I went to rehang my towel across the hall. My aunt still folded and put away my clothes without my asking, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to have to ask her because I didn’t want to have to explain. She probably knew anyway which was why she did it.
    It wasn’t that I was too lazy to fold them myself. I wasn’t too lazy to do anything, and I did countless things I didn’t enjoy on a daily basis, by choice. Like push-ups, and drinking black coffee. The first was for convenience, the second for simplicity. And because I didn’t like milk. My aunt said what I liked was torturing myself.
    But the clothes, that was different. It was the order. If I had to fold the clothes or even look at them in the dresser, I could tell you immediately if they were in the same order as the last laundry day, and the one before that, and probably every laundry day since I was fourteen and half years old.
    It drove me crazy.
    I didn’t want to care, but I couldn’t not see it. On my worst days, I thought it would be an even bigger gift to give up my Sententia abilities. What would I really be losing? One was a secret away from getting me killed and the other was slowly driving me insane. People always seemed to think the “photographic memory” was just the greatest. How easy it must make my life. Those people drove me fucking crazy too.
    But if I was being honest, probably I’d be worse without it, even though with the infinite memory came the borderline OCD. More than borderline. If I was being honest. It was why I wore basically the same thing all the time—so I wouldn’t have to think about it or look at what I pulled out of the drawers. It was why I hated a mess and why every stack of books in my room, whatever was in it, was arranged in order by the last four digits of each ISBN. To everyone else, it looked random, which was the goal.
    Change meant some kind of mess was coming.
    And that was why I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
    In the kitchen, I made breakfast while I continued to obsess. Uncle Jeff was gone, so I couldn’t talk while he listened, and Aunt Mel was already downstairs. She’d left a muffin for me though, so I ate that while I fixed eggs and toast, poured some juice. I sometimes wondered if my mother would have left muffins, or made my breakfast. My aunt probably would have told me, though I’d never ask her a question like that. When I’d gotten old enough, my dad and I had made breakfast together, but even back then Aunt Mel had always brought us muffins.
    My mother, and what she would or would not have been like, was an old concern, its edges dulled by the accumulated years of my pulling it out and tucking it away, forever unsolved. It was far less shiny than the problem of the new student. What I couldn’t work out was why the secrecy. Why Constance Stewart’s presence and the hint dropping that she knew would do this to me, and that I had way too much pride to ask for more details about.
    No one showed up at Northbrook or Webber by accident. Or by surprise. It was part of my job to make sure that didn’t happen. Sententia family trees grew in my memory and I tended and watered them with care. Aunt Mel was better at seeing the connections, but I knew all the names and dates. If I thought long enough, I could match all the relations. And that was the thing—there were no missing relations. Everyone I expected at Northbrook was already here.
    But there would have been no reason for my involvement, or Dr. Stewart’s keen interest, unless the student was Sententia. Except if we didn’t know about him, he didn’t know about himself. So who was he?
    To figure it out, I had to find him.
    “ Or her ,” Aunt Mel reminded me. “I don’t know why you’re so convinced it’s a