“Sarah? You still haven’t tugged at your fish sticks.”

  Fish sticks. She giggled. The words had always made her giggle, even after years of being served them for dinner when her mother was in a rush and couldn’t think of anything else to give her. Running the numbers in her head, she wondered how many she’d eaten over the years. If, on average, she ate 8 fish sticks per serving and had 4 servings of it scattered over a week, that would come to 32 fish sticks.

  32 fish sticks times 52 weeks brought the number to 1,664 little sticks of fish per year. When one multiplied that by 12, the amount of years she’d had them since she was 6 or so, that brought the total of fish sticks munched, devoured and eaten over childhood and adolescence to 19,968.

  She felt it was probably higher. In fact, it probably should be higher, considering how she’d gradually been taught basic mathematics using fish sticks by her parents at dinner when they couldn’t make her eat her veggies. Then, by the time of secondary school, when she was struggling with algebra, she would envision herself solving the equations using fish sticks again and again until she’d mastered the formulae and solutions.

  It had worked. A crazy plan like that had worked, and all it involved was learning algebra with fish sticks. Sarah realized that if she ended up studying mathematics at university, her roommates might end up one day discovering that she’d turned into a living fish stick overnight while trying to force herself through a breezy textbook or two.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  Sarah looked up from the opposite end of the table. Her mother, Miriam, was a late-forties professional dentist with blonde, middling-length hair, which she had only recently decided to grow out on a whim after one embarrassing faux pas in front of her daughter at last year’s New Year’s Eve party with friends. With her military buzz cut, she’d looked so out of place among the other partygoers that she’d decided to let her hair down. Literally.

  “No, there’s nothing wrong.” That was a lie, of course. She’d been in a daze ever since meeting with Jonathan Hahn earlier on in the afternoon. She did not like how quickly she grew infatuated with others, especially with men. They were still acquaintances, of course, but Sarah knew that eventually it would bloom and blossom into something more.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Boy trouble?” Mother asked. She knew Sarah had never had “boy trouble” before, but there’s always a first time for everything. She’d never met Sarah’s father until they were both in the Navy, and even then she’d had at least half a dozen partners before him when she was her daughter’s age.

  They’d served their contracts out together, and then Miriam had decided she was the brains in the relationship, and felt it was better for her to build a career outside of military hierarchy while her husband stayed home to look after his young daughter. Once the baby years were over, he enlisted back in, and then, when Sarah was 7, he was killed during a botched raid on a Somali pirate hideout that had gone horribly wrong.

  Even at a dinner like this, nearly a decade down the line, there was still a seat that was left absent between them. Such an emptiness gnawed at Sarah from time to time. For her mother, she felt it was astronomically worse.

  “No, nothing like that.” Sarah lied again. “Just all these exams. And homework. And other things.”

  What other things could there be? Sarah thought. What other things would trouble an 18-year-old girl’s mind besides boys, homework and exams? Truancy from school? St Ithaca’s would’ve phoned up by now if they’d felt it was that important.

  Her mother, as skilled in dentistry with needles as she was in the Navy, would usually poke and prod and try to puncture her way through Sarah’s defences verbally when at dinner like this, but decided she would not do that this afternoon.

  Maybe Sarah, for once, was finally able to deceive her mother over not having something as silly as a crush. Getting up, she told her mother she was going back to her room to figure out the roots of a few more stem words for Latin. At times, going back to Latin felt even more frightening than having to deal with her mother trying to pry her way into her boy troubles.

  “Have fun,” Miriam said.

  Yeah, have fun. Sarah murmured to herself. Going up the steps with a cup of water in hand, she found herself trying to sum up the stoic wisdom she’d read about to help her through these next few tedious hours of translation and transliterating and deciphering big large blocks of Greek text. Even coming across a loan word or two was enough for her to crawl on all fours to a corner and sob.

  If this was what a degree at university was to look like, she was all but certain she did not want to go anywhere near its perimeter in a 150 km radius. Of course, that meant living off an English Channel island, considering how many god-awful universities were cropping up recently, but that would be enough for her if it meant escaping academic hell.

  There had to be another choice. One that allowed her to stay clear of textbooks and academia, while also enabling her to live beyond New Yates.