November 3

It was the middle of the night when Aric came in, and I did wake up. I must have been sleeping pretty lightly, 'cause I heard Winston in the driveway and then the kitchen door open and footsteps coming up the stairs and towards the bedroom.

I didn't let on that I was awake, and I think that Aric was really tired, 'cause he almost sat on me when he sat down in bed to take off his boots. And I think he didn't know I was there until he leaned back when he was pulling off one of them, and when he had it off he petted my side and I turned my head and kissed his hand.

He got his other boot off and his socks and then he had to stand up to take off his pants and underwear, and then he took off his shirt and laid down in bed next to me. I had to scoot over a little bit, 'cause I guess I must have moved towards the center when I was asleep, and then he got on his back so I could rest my head on his chest.

Aric was too tired to have sex, so he ran his hand through my mane a little bit and it was kind of funny 'cause he was falling asleep as he did it, and he'd pet me a little bit then his hand would go limp and then he'd kind of jerk and pet me some more. I nuzzled his chest and rested my snout against his chin, and he fell asleep for good.

It was light outside when I woke up again—I guess I'd been tired, too—and I didn't want to disturb him if I could help it, so I just stayed curled up with him until I finally had to get up to pee.

When I got back in bed, he was sort of awake and I started kissing and nuzzling him and pretty soon I was on top of him and it was kind of selfish but I just focused on me.

I just collapsed on his chest when we were finally done, 'cause he'd tired me out, and I drifted back to sleep for a couple of hours and when I woke up again the sun was well above the trees.

I didn't think he'd be in the mood again but he was, and this time he rolled me over on my back and pinned me to to the bed and I let him.

The two of us took a shower together and when we went downstairs, David or Angela must have been up already 'cause there was half a pot of fresh coffee for us to share. I hoped we hadn't woken them up, but they live all the way in the basement and we weren't that loud.

We both sat on the porch and drank it, and he told me about the dress rehearsal last night and how the director had decided that a couple of the lights needed to be changed and so he had to move them and they'd had problems with the costumes and the sound cues and it had been a pretty terrible rehearsal but usually when that happened opening night would go well because everyone would remember what had gone wrong and then they would not make the same mistakes again. And he said that to top it off one of the lighting instruments had failed in the last scene and he'd thought it was the lamp but it turned out to be something else and he wound up having to hang and focus another one, which sounded like it would be a lot of work.

He said that he was sure that when he tore into it in the light shop, it was going to be something simple and dumb, but everyone was too tired last night to figure it out.

I told him that I wasn't gonna be able to see it tonight, 'cause I had cheerleading practice, and then asked if he wanted me and Meghan to come over on Friday night so we could do stuff on Saturday and he said that he wasn't sure if he'd have time, because of the play. He said that if everything went well he'd be free but that you never could tell in the theatre, plus he had some homework that he had to finish up on over the weekend.

I thought it was kind of dumb for the theatre professors to assign homework the same weekend as the play, and he admitted that it had been assigned earlier and he just hadn't done it yet because he'd been so busy working on the play. He said that half the volunteers who were supposed to show up and help him hang lights hadn't shown up at all, and so he'd had to do most of it by himself.

So I promised that I'd call him and see how things were going, and we'd figure things out as they came up. And then I got together my flight gear and kissed him and I went back to college. I was feeling kinda lazy, so I walked some and then flew a little bit but not too high.

We'd spent so much time in bed that it was almost lunchtime, and even though I probably shouldn't have, I snacked on a little bit of hay just to make my stomach happy.

I sat with Leon and Cedric and Trevor and told them that I was gonna be a cheerleader at a football game but not the next one 'cause we weren't ready for that yet, and Cedric said that he was sure that would help lead them to victory. And he said that he was going to tell Aquamarine so she could be at the game too, and then she could cheer both of us on from the grandstands.

Trevor looked through the book and found us some poems again, and he had Leon read a poem called Misgivings by Herman Melville, and that one was kind of sad, but a good poem for the autumn. And then he had me read one called Old Ironsides, which was about a ship that was at the end of its life. And I liked that one, even though it was sad, because it made me think of home.

Then he had Cedric read the Emily Dickinson poem Hope is the thing with feathers, which we had also read in Conrad's class. And when Cedric got to the end of the poem he nodded and reached across the table and brushed my mane back and said that Miss Dickinson had been a really smart lady, and Leon agreed.

He said that he never could have imagined that one day he'd be reading poetry with a pegasus while he ate lunch, and that even when he'd heard about how there were ponies now at first he hadn't believed it was real; he thought that it was just the news media lying. And after he'd gotten his head around the fact that we were real, he'd still never expected to get out of the city and get to a nice college and actually meet a pony in the flesh, and wind up eating lunch with her and reading poetry with her.

Leon said that he had better be careful or the football coach might think he was going soft, and I could tell he didn't mean it 'cause there was laughter in his eyes. Cedric said he was going to suggest that the team recite poetry during drills, or maybe in the showers after. Leon said as long as the hugging waited until he had clothes back on he was in support of the idea, and Cedric wrapped an arm around Leon's shoulder and pulled him into a sideways hug, and Leon pretended to try and get away, but he didn't try too hard.

I thought it wasn't fair that they were hugging and I wasn't, so I went around the table and hugged both of them, and Trevor, too.

I must have left lunch earlier than Anna, 'cause I didn't see her on the quad and when I got to class she wasn't there yet, and she came in almost before class started.

Professor Miller told us that there were supermassive black holes in the center of most galaxies, including our own, and nobody knew why, but scientist thought that maybe when the universe was formed stars were thousands of times bigger than they were now, and they'd collapsed into these black holes.

She said that there wasn't going to be enough time to talk more about them so we were going to talk more about normal-sized black holes, and she started by telling us how scientists in the sixties had discovered space X-rays and at first didn't know what they were coming from, and then they figured out that they might be neutron stars (which were small and energetic) or a black hole.

She told us how there were binary star systems where this happened, and the compact object was pulling gas off of the star and that was what caused it to make x-rays. And astronomers could tell by making observations if the compact object was a neutron star or a black hole.

It was a little bit harder to find black holes this way than it seemed, because the accretion disc was sometimes brighter than the star, but sometimes they were bright and sometimes they were dimmer and then you could see them with a telescope, and you could use that to figure out if it might be a black hole because of how much mass it would have to have.

And she also said that since black holes didn't have a surface, they didn't emit X-rays themselves, which was another way that you could know that they were there.

It was all kind of hard to wrap my head around.

After class, I brought my Bible outside with me and the benches by Stetson Chapel were being used, so I went up in a tree, and I started reading Galatians, which was another letter from Paul. And I guess the Galatians were being bad, 'cause he started out by telling them that, and then he told them about how he'd come to be accepted by the apostles, and then after that he spent the rest of the letter telling them how to be good instead of bad.

It was a pretty short book, and so I read the next one, which was Ephesians, and that was another letter from Paul. And it sounded like they were just starting to follow Jesus, 'cause he was giving them lots of advice on what they should do, and it was like the rules that God had given his prophets to tell the people, and I hoped that the Ephesians followed them. Because God got mad when people didn't follow His rules.

Paul talked a lot in both books about circumcision which didn't make a lot of sense to me, especially because he said that it wasn't supposed to be done but Aric had been circumcised, so did that make him a bad person? I didn't think that it did, and it didn't sound like what Jesus had said.

I went back to my room to have a snack before my meeting with Liz, and I'd actually picked up my glaive and was on my way out of the room when I remembered that I was supposed to be cheerleading and not fighting, so I wouldn't need it today.

I met Pastor Liz in her office, and told her how far I'd gotten, and I was getting close to the end—there were a lot of books left but most of them were pretty short. And then I asked her about Paul's rules that he'd said in all his letters, and how she could talk in church even though Paul said that she shouldn't.

Liz explained to me that there were a lot of different branches of Christianity, and they all had a slightly different focus. It was something that we'd talked about before, but she went into a little bit more detail and explained how some churches thought that women couldn’t be priests or pastors, while others said it was okay. She said that some religions liked tradition and keeping things the same forever, while others thought that the church ought to serve people now, and not the people who Paul had originally written his letters to, because the world had changed a lot since Paul's time.

She said that it was really complicated and that there were people who believed that the King James version of the Bible was the only correct version, even though there were multiple versions and they were all a translation anyway because English hadn't been a language when the Bible was written. And she said that for a long time the Catholic church had had their services in Latin, even though not many people spoke it anymore, because of tradition. And in some churches, priests were supposed to be celibate, while in others that wasn't important.

So it was all kind of confusing to me, 'cause it had seemed like everyone would agree what Jesus had said and what He had meant when He said it, but I guess that people might see what they wanted when they read it and not think of other ideas.

And when it was the end of our meeting I asked her how much of the New Testament was letters from Paul, and she said seven to fourteen books. She told me that there were seven books that almost everyone agreed had been written by Paul, and that some of the remaining seven certainly weren't, and people weren't completely sure on some of the rest.

I did stop by fighting practice long enough to tell Stellan and Karla where I was gonna be so they didn't worry when I wasn't there. And Karla said that I ought to bring my glaive to cheerleading practice because that would spice things up a little bit, and she told me that she was a flag girl in high school and it had been lots of fun. She said it was kind of like cheerleading except that she got to carry a big flag. And that sounded like it would be fun, too.

I went back up to the gym and I was a little bit late but they were still stretching out and so I thought I ought to do some stretches, too, especially since I'd been pretty lazy and not done any real flying today at all. And I was glad that I did, 'cause after I'd gotten done stretching my body felt a lot looser and more relaxed.

Then they started with their normal routines, and I stayed off to the side and tried to follow along as best as I could, 'cause I thought that maybe if there was one or two things that I could figure out how to do really well, I'd be able to do more than get tossed in the air. It was probably a fool's hope, but I thought that I'd try anyway.

When they were taking a water break, Sandra asked me if I could wear a uniform, so she told them to practice one of their routines when she was gone, and we went into the locker room, which was an interesting place. There were rows of lockers, where people could keep their things, and little benches that they could sit on while they got dressed, and then off to one side there was also a big shower room that would fit lots of people. She saw that I was looking and said that the teams usually took showers together but I wouldn't have to if I didn't want to, and I said that I would, 'cause group showers were fun and that was how we always did it but I hadn't thought that humans liked that.

There were some extra cheerleading outfits in a back room and she helped me try some of them on. I liked the skirt—it was short enough that it wouldn't get in the way at all. She had a vest that fit, too, but there weren't any holes for my wings and it was only gonna work if she had holes cut in it, and she said that if I was doing good by next Wednesday, she'd have it done. She said that I'd want to practice in uniform at least once because it was different than exercise clothes and then she caught herself and added 'or nothing.'

And she was a little bit upset that I didn't like the uniform panties, but there wasn't a tail-hole, so they weren't going to work for me and I said that when I'd worn Gusty's they were really uncomfortable and made me too hot.

She said she'd have to figure out if I could cheer without them, and she said that we weren't supposed to be flashing the audience even though everyone hoped that would actually happen and I thought that was kind of dumb. Nobody cared that I went around without clothes on and if somebody else wanted to, why would they care? And why would it make a difference that I was in a cheerleader uniform when the last football game I was at I was up in the bleachers cheering with Aquamarine and neither of us were wearing any clothes at all?

But I guess if I had to wear them, I would, even though I wouldn't like them. I had to wear my flight clothes even though I didn't want to because that was the rule. And I was kind of used to them now, so it didn't bother me any more.

When we went back to the practice room, Sandra started directing the cheerleaders, and I just watched until it was time for me to practice with them, and we'd gotten pretty good at the tosses so she had me try to flip in the air and it was harder than I thought it would be because I had to make it look really smooth, and so she had me do it lots of times until she said it looked natural.

I wondered if Cedric and Leon had to practice that, too.

I hadn't thought we'd spent that much time at it, but after I'd gotten good at it, Sandra called a stop and said that we were done for the night, and reminded everyone to be ready for the game tomorrow, except for me, 'cause I didn't have to cheer along with them.

Then everyone went into the locker room to change and I couldn't decide if I should or not, 'cause I wasn't really part of the team yet and I didn't know all of them all that well yet, but on another hoof it was something that teams were supposed to do together.

And if everyone had, I would have, too, but there were a couple of girls who didn't, and just left the gym in their exercise clothes.

So I started to fly towards Trowbridge but then I decided that it was a nice night and I hadn't gotten a proper morning flight in, and then I turned around and went over the downtown and when I got to the river I followed it along. It was kind of strange at night, because it was a ribbon of darkness with lights on either side of it.

I didn't have my watch on and hadn't called the airplane directors, so I had to be careful to be high enough that I wouldn't get snagged on wires—'cause I couldn't see them very well in the night—but not so high that airplanes might run into me.

I didn't go all the way out to Galesburg, but I did go over the lake a little bit and then I turned around over it and dove down until I was right above the water, and I trailed a hoof through it for fun before I started to climb back up. There were lots of lights at the dam, so I could see those wires at least.

Because it was getting towards winter, the days were getting shorter, and I thought it would be fun to take one long night flight, as long as I went along a route I was familiar with. I wasn't sure when I'd have time, though.

I landed back on the boardwalk and went inside and I was kind of tired, even though I'd spent half the morning in bed. Sometimes when you spend too much of a day being lazy, it makes you more tired than if you're actually doing stuff. So I thought I'd go to bed a little bit early, but I didn't want to right away, 'cause I needed to cool down a bit first.

So I got out my poetry collection and read through the rest of it, and I decided that I'd get a different poetry book from the library for next week.

Misgivings

Old Ironsides

Hope is the thing with feathers