Forever Changes (8 page)

In homeroom, Brianna said to Adam, “Hey, do you know anything about spreadsheets?  Like how to set one up?”

“Absolutely,” Adam said.  Somehow she’d known that he was going to say yes.  “I’ve got all my magic items from my Everqu—yeah, I’ve used spreadsheets before.”

“Do you think you could explain it to me?  My dad is starting his own business, and I’m trying to help him set up one of these things.”

“Oh sure!  How about after school?”

“Great,” Brianna said, and then realized if Adam came over, Dad would tease her and she’d  say no, we’re just friends, and Dad wouldn’’t believe her.  “I’ll meet you in the computer lab.”

“Oh.  All right.  Those computers are ancient, probably two or three years old, but I guess they’ll probably do.  The principles are pretty much the same.”

“Okay!  See you then.”  This didn’t really count as social, but it would be the first time she’d ever spent time with him outside of class or homeroom.  She hoped it wouldn’t be  awkward, especially since she was committed to be at MIT for the interview and info session at the same time as him.

After school, Brianna found her way to the computer lab to reserve a computer.  It turned out she didn’t need to, since there were only two other people in the lab.  She guessed pretty much everybody but her had a computer at home.  And, come to think of it, even West Blackpool trash like her actually did have  a computer at home now.

Adam arrived and sat down.  “Oh my God, they’re still running Windows 2000.  Well, like I said, it’s all pretty much the same as far as the spreadsheets go, but I mean, wow.  This is some really old stuff here.   Okay, let’s start this up …”

As Adam was clicking, Brianna’s phone rang.  Melissa.  “Hey Mel,” she said.

“Help me. Please help me.  I’m freaking out. Again.”

“Okay.  I’m up in the computer lab.  I’ll be done here in …” she looked at Adam.

“I give you my fifteen-minute guarantee,” Adam said, smiling.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll be right there,” Melissa said as she hung up.

“Okay,” Adam said, and he began explaining how to set up a spreadsheet.  Brianna took notes and was glad that Adam was able to explain things so clearly.

She was bent over her notebook and scribbling away when she felt a hand on her shoulder.  She jumped and spun her head around.  It was Melissa, who laughed.

“I told you I was coming,” Melissa said.

“Yeah, I know.  You just startled me.”  Adam was looking up at Melissa with his mouth hanging open.  “Oh, Melissa, you remember Adam.  He’s helping me with some computer stuff.”

“Hey,” Melissa said.  Adam said hi. It was the first time Brianna hadn’t seen him dumbstruck by Melissa’s presence.

“I’m sorry,” Melissa said.  “I knew I was going to get home and freak out, and I just need you to help me understand this stuff so I can at least start my homework before I call you in a panic.”  She was pulling out her notebook and opening it, and Brianna realized Adam was waiting to finish doing her a favor.

“I’m sorry, Mel, I just, I asked Adam to help me with this thing, and we just need about ten min—”

“It’s totally cool,” Adam said.  Brianna looked at him.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“Definitely.  I mean, you know, Kirsten Dunst—well, she likes me to call her Kiki– doesn’t usually call until four, so I’m all set as long as I get home by then.  She gets jealous, you know.”

Brianna laughed.

“I thought she was with some musician,” Melissa said.

“Yeah, well,” Adam said, “she
was
.”  He gave this self-satisfied smile and took out a book.

Brianna was only about a minute into her explanation of  Melissa’s pre-calc homework when her phone rang.  Stephanie.

“Hey, Steph, I gotta call you b—”

“Bri, are you still at school?  I gotta make up a math quiz in ten minutes, and I really need to ask you something.”

“Computer room.”

“Where?”

“Third floor.“

“Be right there.”

Brianna was just getting into the explanation groove when Stephanie arrived.

“So, okay, I have this quiz,” she said, “and I am totally lost—this whole slope of a line thing.”

“Take a number!” Melissa said.

“Hey, it’s Bri’s alphabetical order buddy!” Stephanie said as she spotted Adam, who again was doing his open-mouthed act.  For just a second, Brianna felt like she could look through Adam’s eyes and into his brain, but his gross fantasies didn’t interest her.

“Good afternoon,” Adam said, bowing slightly.

“Hey, Adam, maybe you could do slope of a line with Stephanie while I do cosines over here,” Brianna suggested.

“Happy to help,” he said, obviously not quite able to keep his eyes away from Stephanie’s chest.

Stephanie pulled a chair up just a little too close to Adam.  Why did she do stuff like this? It’s not like she was really trying to flirt with him—to say he wasn’t her type was like saying Brianna was occasionally a little bit under the weather—but it was like she just couldn’t help it.

“I mean,” Adam said,  “I don’t think Kiki will mind.  What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, right?”

“Who’s Kiki?” Stephanie asked.  “Is she like your girlfriend?”

“Well, she
thinks
so,” Adam said, “But, you know, she’s gettin’ a little clingy. I’m thinkin’ I might have to cut her loose.”

Melissa and Brianna cracked up.

Ten minutes later, Stephanie and Melissa were ready to face their respective math challenges, and not long after that, Brianna felt like she knew enough about spreadsheets to help Dad put his together.

“Well, thanks,” Brianna said.

“Hey, any time,” Adam said.  He did not add that this was the closest he’d ever gotten to girls this hot, but then again, he didn’t have to.

Brianna had gotten the spreadsheet set up for Dad, but he still had questions, so over the next few weeks, Brianna kept having to ask Adam stuff.  He was always nice about it and explained everything really clearly.  “Maybe I’ll get myself a custom bike,” he said on Wednesday.  “I’m learning a lot about the nuts and bolts of the business, so to speak, and I think the bike might really match my bad boy image.  Not to mention the tattoo.”

“You have a tattoo?” Brianna asked flatly.

“Well, not yet.  I’m still in talks with the artist.  I can’t decide between a flaming skull on my chest or else just the permanent mascara so I can get that Captain Jack Sparrow look.”

Brianna thought it would take a lot more than eyeliner to get Adam to look like Johnny Depp, but she didn’t say anything.

On Thursday morning, Brianna bit Stephanie’s head off about nothing while they were having munchkins, and when Adam walked  into homeroom she actually felt her fists clenching.  “Ready for that MIT info session?” Adam asked.

No wonder she was so tense.  She had forgotten about it, but obviously she’d remembered it on some level because it was making her grumpy.

“Yeah,” Brianna sighed.  “I’ll be there.”

“Cool,” Adam said.

“Isn’t the session happening right when Kiki usually calls?”

Adam smiled.  “Kiki’s so last week.  Now I got Jessica Alba stalking me.  I wouldn’t be surprised if she shows up just to keep an eye on me.”

“I don’t know, Adam, you and these possessive girls.”

“They know a good thing when they see it,” he said, and just for a second, Brianna thought she could see his smile turning into a grimace, as though the pain of all his dateless years  was trying to leak out.

            After school, Brianna hopped in the Sunfire and began the drive to Cambridge.  It wasn’t until she got to the tollbooths at the end of the bridge that she realized she’d been too busy thinking about the info session to even think about driving off the edge.

She sat in traffic for what seemed like forever, and when she got to the campus, she drove around for fifteen minutes looking at the little map they’d sent her and trying to find a place to park.  She seriously thought about bailing—between the traffic and the lack of parking in the whole godforsaken city of Cambridge, it was clear that she just wasn’t meant to get there today.  But she could picture the look on Dad’s face when she said, “I drove all the way to Cambridge and bailed because I couldn’t find parking.”  Yeah, that wasn’t going to play.

The info session began in a conference room.

There were about fifteen kids sitting around a conference table, and some woman from the admissions office  at the head of the table.  Adam was sitting right next to the admissions lady.  He gave Briannaa little wave.   She nodded her head at him without waving and sat in the only empty seat, next to a girl whose nametag said she was “Chiquita.”

            Brianna didn’t know how to feel as she listened to a guy named Zach talk about student life at MIT.  On the one hand, she had to admit that it was kind of exciting to think about just being somewhere where she could totally focus on what she was good at.  It would be like taking only the parts of school that she liked.

Except for the people she liked.  Melissa would be across the river at BU and might as well be a hundred miles from here. Stephanie would be at UMass-Dartmouth or Lowell if she was lucky, North Shore Community College if she wasn’t. Brianna would be here with Adam.  Maybe not everybody who went here was like him, but it hardly sounded like the fall of the Roman Empire party that Eccles had talked about.

The admissions lady—her name was Chia-Wen–stood up and started talking.  “Of course,  the advantages of an MIT education don’t stop when you graduate.  Our graduates have the highest starting income of any alumni in the greater Boston area.  You become part of an alumni network that includes major players in the top research universities and the top companies in software, biotech, and pretty much any other technical field you can think of.”

Here we go again, Brianna thought.  In high school, everyone’s always talking about college.  And apparently in college, everyone talks  about life after college.

It was time for the tour, and they filed out of the room.  “The guys aren’t much to look at, huh?” Brianna whispered to Chiquita.

Chiquita looked around and smiled.  “Yeah, it’s a pretty sorry selection.  But when I’ve got my biotech job and my six-figure salary, I’ll have options my communications major friends won’t even be able to dream of.”

Brianna laughed, even though she was jealous.  It must be nice to be able to take the long view like that.  As the tour went on, Brianna started listening to snatches of conversation as people walked by.  “… too much attention to the signal,” a tall guy was saying to a short girl, “when the real action was in the noise!”  They both laughed.  “The whole time I was using the wrong coefficient!” an Indian guy was saying to a white guy.  It seemed like everybody was talking about math, and she could tell by the looks on people’s faces that they really loved it.  In spite of the stuff about job prospects, this was a place where she might be able to immerse herself in math.  Her brain felt the way it felt when she did a puzzle or solved an equation: buzzing, contented, good.

Her imagination strained at the end of its leash, and, for the first time in months, she let it run free.  She pictured herself as a student here, wearing a maroon sweatshirt with white letters and thinking about problem sets, thinking about physics, surrounded by smart people and staying up late and eating bad food and sleeping in a dorm and making friends and having all the guys she knew bugging her about when Melissa was coming over again.

Brianna was so caught up in her reverie that when the tour ended and Adam came up to her and said, “Hey, do you want to grab some coffee after our interviews?,” she told him sure without even thinking about it, because grabbing coffee at five in the afternoon was the kind of thing that cool college students did. Still buzzing with excitement, Brianna sailed through her interview, rhapsodizing about the beauty of math in a way that would have made Eccles proud.

It was only after they sat down that Brianna began to regret her decision to have coffee with him.  After they’d talked about the tour and their interviews for about five minutes, there was an uncomfortable silence.

“Um,” Adam said, “Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”

Brianna wanted to smack herself on the forehead.  Idiot!  He’d asked her to coffee so he could reveal that he liked her. Who would she talk to in homeroom?  Who would be her ally in Calc class?

“Yeah?” Brianna said.

“Well, I … God, this is so embarrassing … I guess I was just wondering if you thought I might have a chance in hell with Stephanie.”

Brianna really wanted to laugh with relief that it wasn’t her after all, that they could still be friends.   But she couldn’t laugh, because he’d think she was laughing at the idea of him having a chance with Stephanie.  Which was pretty laughable, but it would be mean to laugh.

It would also be mean to say the first thing she thought, which was, “maybe if she forgets her contacts and you have a bottle of tequila,” but she wasn’t sure if that was meaner about Adam or Stephanie.

“Hmmmm …” she said, stalling.  Because how do you tell a guy no, you don’t have a prayer without hurting his feelings.

Uh-oh.  Too late.  Adam was looking at the table like it was the most interesting thing on earth. “I know, I know, it’s ridiculous.  Just forget I said anything, I know she’s not really–”

“Well, here’s the thing,” Brianna said.  “I really wish she would go out with you, because she’s a really good friend, and she deserves somebody as nice as you.”  Adam looked up with a hopeful expression on his face.  “But right now, I mean, she seems to only be interested in guys who are stupid and treat her like dirt.  And you’re not dumb and you’d probably be really nice to her, and I wish for both of your sakes that that was what Stephanie wanted, but right now it’s not.”

Adam was obviously happy that Brianna had said some nice things about him, but he still looked embarrassed that he’d shared his impossible dream and found that it was, in fact, impossible.

“I mean, have you seen the guys she goes out with?”

“Size and IQ of oak trees,” Adam said grinning.

“Pretty much.

“Yeah.  Well.” Adam said.  “Her loss, I guess.” His face looked really sad for a second, but then he recovered, forced a smile  and said,   “I’ve always got Jessica Alba as a fallback.”

“That skank?”

“Hey, I know she’s not much to look at, but she has an inner beauty.”

Brianna smiled, and they silenty polished off their coffees. “Well, look, Dad’s expecting me for dinner, so I should head out. You want a ride?”

Traffic was nightmarish, and for a while they just listened to the music:  Love’s
Forever Changes
. They didn’t talk, they just listened.  She was glad they had this album in common, especially because listening to it was a lot easier than the conversation they’d just had.