This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, incidents, emotions, thematic revelations, etc. are products of the author’s imagination (that she will hopefully one day sell and capitalize upon). Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. (By purely we mean truly, thoroughly, nearing 100%, downright asymptotic!)
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There are 366 days in a year. There are 366 days in a year. There are 366 days in a year.
I repeated it over and over in my head while doing jumping jacks. I had a test the next day—my first test of third grade. Things were getting serious. I had seen on television somewhere that if you do jumping jacks while studying you remember information better.
The next morning I bit my nails as I stared at the final portion of my test.
There are 60 seconds in a minute. There are 60 minutes in an hour. There are 24 hours in a day. There are 366 days in a year.
Satisfied, I got up and confidently handed in my test.
When I received the test back three days later, a bright red X struck through my final answer. A harsh “365” glared at me, red as blood on the page.
I was pretty sure I read 366 days somewhere—sure enough to talk myself into asking my teacher about it. She was an old, mean woman with hair the worst shade of gray, and I was pretty convinced that she hated me because I stole more than twenty Hershey’s Kisses from her desk one day and left the wrappers behind as evidence. I tentatively shuffled up to her desk right before recess and told her I was pretty sure there were 366 days in a year because I had read it somewhere.
“No, there are 365 days in a year. Well, actually, I guess you have one year every four years with 366. Maybe you’re thinking of leap years. But generally, there are 365 days. The leap year is an exception. There are 365 days in a year.” Her response was clipped and annoyed. I walked back to my desk with my head held down in shame.
I remember thinking that once every four years seemed a little frequent to be an exception and that I deserved partial credit. I was right 25% of the time, and 365 was right only 75% of the time. I’d been snubbed. Except, I probably didn’t actually think all that. I didn’t care about leap years at all. I just cared about getting the right answer.
—
Many years later, I found myself in an intense brawl with the Reading and Writing section of the SAT. Practice exam after practice exam, I picked the wrong answer. “You have to pick the answer that is MOST right!” my SAT tutor kept saying. I was a miserable pile of teenage angst, and I wanted to burn the creators of the SAT alive.
At the time, I had a guitar-playing, bleached-hair, skinny, skateboarding sort-of boyfriend. One fateful evening, about two weeks before my SAT, he convinced me to do shrooms with him.
Some fifteen minutes after the third time I said “nothing’s happening” out loud, I ran into some gnomes. “What are you looking for?” I asked them, although I don’t think I spoke the words out loud. “We are looking for the best answer!” The gnomes looked odd, like they weren’t supposed to be gnomes, but I thought that gnomes were what you were supposed to see when you did shrooms so that is what I saw. Anyway, I do know one thing for sure about being on shrooms—the ground is wobbly.
—
A year or so later, I was sitting on some slimy beach rocks with the first boy I ever really loved. He asked me if I read magical realism.
“Of course, who do you think I am?” I responded. (I had no idea what magical realism was).
When he scrambled away to investigate some fish that had just jumped out of the water, I looked the term up on my shattered phone. Book titles came up before I could find a definition, and I was forced to hastily put my phone away as he came back.
“Have you read Kafka on the Shore?” I asked him when he got back.
“I love Kafka on the Shore,” he said.
“This moment reminds me of it,” I said.
“How so?”
“Oh, uh, you know, like, because we’re at the beach. Like Kafka.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess. No, yeah. Like, the metaphor is now,” he nodded seriously.
“Yeah. Exactly!” I was quite pleased with myself.
Kafka is never on the beach once in that book. But it didn’t matter, because the boy cared a lot more about impressing people with his robust literary knowledge than he cared about me. We continued to talk about his music taste and his childhood and his mommy issues and his passion for fighting for menstrual rights in developing nations. The whole time I fought back drool.
—
Many, many years later, I am old and dying. My family is packing up to depart to a different planet. On the new planet, every year is exactly 365 days, not 365 and a quarter. No one’s quite sure why, but everyone is thrilled about it. I think it has something to do with the settler’s accents. The air is just a little thicker over there, and they pronounce one-Mississippi more like one-Misssssissssippi.
The spaceships depart on March 1st. Everyone is wildly hungover from celebrating the final leap day they will ever have to endure the previous night. I lay on my deathbed which is in a room with very big windows: the last, great, physical manifestation of my hard-earned money. For most of my life, I was a lawyer. All my money was made from half-truths. I became less haunted by this every day as my assets increased.
In my free time before I die, I read books about law and fiction maybe once or twice a month to impress my Goodreads followers who are still alive. My favorite thing about fiction books is how short and simple and false the disclaimer is at the beginning. It is a constant comfort. At some point I found myself staring out my big windows trying to justify them. Every truth is partial. If partial truths are lies, every truth is a lie.
“PUT THAT SHIT IN PREMISE CONCLUSION FORM!!!!!” My philosophy professor suddenly yelled in my dream. Okay!
Premise 1: Every truth is partial. Premise 2: All partial truths are lies. Conclusion: Every truth is a lie.
“Great. Better. But are the premises true?” my professor asked.
As I frantically racked my brain for an answer, I woke up in a cold sweat.
“What were you dreaming about?” the girl lying next to me whispered.
“Oh, uh, you know, the philosophical implications of leap years.”
“Enough with the pretentious pseudo-intellectual bullshit,” she laughed softly next to me. I turned over and smiled at her.
“What do you suggest I dream about instead?”
“Veritas,” she whispered, giggling. Truth, in a language I didn’t understand.
I laughed too.
Kayla Reifel ’26 (kaylareifel@college.harvard.edu) is the Arts Editor of the Independent.