Prime Numbers

Story by All These Roadworks (2021).

===

Shelby was struggling in college-level math, so she asked her friend Kumar, a psych major, to help her.

“What’s the problem?” he asked her.

“Well, I just have trouble with numbers,” she said. “And I have trouble focusing on study. I spend too much time thinking about clothes and boys.”

“I’ve just been practising hypnosis,” Kumar told her. “Why don’t we use it to help make a game of studying?”

She agreed, and allowed him to take her into a deep trance.

“When you are putting on your clothes,” he told her, picturing her going through her morning routine and thinking it was a good time to let her practice her maths, “you will count through the prime numbers, and you will not put on any piece of clothing until you have thought of the next prime number. You will not cheat and you will not use paper or devices.”

“You will want to study maths,” he continued. “You will enjoy spending time with people who help you study maths, and want to please them. You will find thinking about maths enjoyable.”

“And when you think about clothes or boys, you will feel ashamed, and want to be punished proportionately to how much you’ve thought about them.”

Afterwards, Kumar didn’t tell her the exact words he’d used or what he’d suggested to her, but she seemed grateful. In fact, she was very grateful - she thanked him three times for “helping...