Love and Other Unknown Variables (6 page)

2.4

T
he footsteps bounding down the stairs can only belong to Charlotte. Becca does not bound. Becca drifts.

I run my fingers through my fine hair, still wet from my shower, willing it to look all casual messy-like. There was a bed-headed guy in one of the movies Becca and Charlotte watched over the weekend, and Charlotte kept saying she’d love to run her fingers through his mane. I’m not sure I can achieve his look, though, since my hair feels more like yellow duckling feathers.

Giving up, I grab my pencil and hunch over my notebook. I’d probably pass out and split my skull on the hardwood floor if her fingers were tangled in my hair anyway. I hate Hollywood.

“There you are,” Charlotte says, leaping from the bottom step into the kitchen.

“Me?”

Charlotte’s smile is teasing, and even though I know I’m alone in the kitchen, I glance over my shoulder to be sure she wasn’t talking to someone else.

“Yes, you.” She comes closer and plops down in the chair beside me. “Becca says you have a compass.”

I narrow my eyes at her.

“You know. The stabby-end thing I can make perfect circles with. It’s called a compass, right?”

I nod, eyes still narrow.

Charlotte squints back at me, her face a mirrored mockery of mine. “Don’t look so skeptical. I need to borrow it.”

“For math?”

She wrinkles her nose and her bow-shaped lips pucker with the movement. “Not for math. Obviously, I’m planning on murdering someone with it.” I snort, and the sound seems to delight Charlotte, even though my ears are now volcanic. She chuckles and smacks at my shoulder. “I’m drawing something and my circles are seriously shitty.”

I erase a stray mark on the page, trying to keep my mind on the numbers before me, not the image that just flashed through my mind of me running my fingers through Charlotte’s wild curls and pulling those bow lips toward mine, teasing them open with my tongue.

Holy crap. Numbers.

Numbers = good. Hard-on in front of Charlotte = bad.

Charlotte leans closer, her shoulder pressing against mine, her perfume of sweet vanilla making the math in front of me blur. “What’re you working on so intently that you’re just going to ignore me?” My breathing has gone shallow and I may pass out when she breathes the word, “Dude,” along my neck. “What the hell is this?”

“Calculus.”

“Nuh-uh. I’ve seen calculus. I’m
in
calculus. This is—I don’t know what this is.”

“Really advanced calculus.”

Charlotte studies the formula I’m working with. I allow my eyes to flick toward her face for just a fraction of a second, taking in the way her brow pinches together making brackets along her forehead.

“It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She smiles at me, a sunrise.

“You understand it?”

“Hell no.” She does the nose wrinkle thing again and I have to turn back to the page in front of me. “But I don’t have to get it to
get it
. You know?”

I shift away from her, running a sweaty palm down the thigh of my pants. “No.”

Charlotte holds one finger up, a gesture for me to wait, before she scurries up the stairs. I copy a new problem into my notebook. I could work solely on the computer, but I like the way the paper feels under my palm as I work through the numbers, finding the solutions I need. I’m a quarter of the way through when she reappears, clutching her sketchpad.

She opens it and holds it out for me. “Do you understand this?”

The page is covered with oranges, reds, greens, and yellows. It’s like smudges of each color, bleeding together in a multitude of shapes. It doesn’t look like anything at all.

“What’s to understand?”

Charlotte doesn’t respond. She simply holds the picture steady for me to study. The more I look at it, the more I can see, though. Suddenly, it isn’t just colors, but fall leaves in the mountains.

“Is it leaves?”

One of her brows lifts and she tilts the page to examine it. “Perhaps.”

But when she shows it to me again, it’s no longer leaves, but fish in a pond, like the Koi in the lobby of that hotel I stayed in once. When I blink, I see Mrs. Dunwitty’s rose garden at its peak.

And suddenly, I get it.

It’s a million problems all in one, and every way I work it I get a new solution. It’s beautiful.

“May I?” I ask, reaching for the sketchpad.

She captures the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth as she considers. After handing it to me, she sits and begins fidgeting, her fingers tapping softly against the underside of the table as I turn through the pages. Without thinking, I grab her restless fingers, tangling them with mine like the colors in her sketch. Her hands relax, but her whole body goes rigid beside me.

“Sorry,” I say letting go of her hand, ignoring the stuttering of my pulse. What was I doing? I’ve spoken to this girl a handful of times and here I am trying to hold her damn hand in my kitchen.

Now that I’ve let go, she starts to wriggle again.

“Am I making you nervous?” I meant looking at her sketchbook, but the way she blinks like I’ve snapped at her makes me wonder what she thinks I could have meant.

Charlotte takes a deep breath that hitches as it travels up her spine like it’s catching on snags along the way. “I’m not used to sharing. It’s always been easiest to keep things close.”

I want to know what things she’s keeping so close. I want her to unpack them from inside herself, perhaps making room for…what? For me? This is ludicrous. I should hand her back her sketches and walk away.

I push my own notebook toward her instead. “It’s only fair.”

She chuckles and glances down at the open page. “What’s this?” Her voice is soft beside me. She’s pointing at the problem I was working on moments ago. In it, I’ve had to use the symbol for infinity, but I drew her tattoo instead. I didn’t even realize I’d done it.

“Trying to figure me out, Mr. Hanson? Think you’ll get extra credit?”

“I—” I’ve got nothing to say. I stare at the symbol I’ve drawn with the word hope bound up in its endlessness. There are many ideas in mathematics that we know are true, even if we’ll never be able to solve them. Too many. They’re the paradoxes that make math so beautiful.

Charlotte feels like that. Like a problem I’ll never really figure out, but that I know is just right for me.

She leans her shoulder into mine. “You and me, Charlie, we’re on the same team—both artists. We just work with different mediums.”

Now it’s my fingers that can’t be still. Charlotte eyes them as I drag one hand up and down the metal spiral binding of her sketchbook and simultaneously tap a rhythm against my thigh with the other hand. She reaches for the one tapping between us, clasping it lightly in her own. Without another word, she begins flipping through my notebook, her eyes skimming the formulas. I wonder what kinds of things she’s seeing in them.

I wonder what she sees in me.

2.5

M
s. Finch is on time the next day. She leans against the blackboard and waits for the tardy bell, flinching when it finally pierces our ears.

“Shut your traps and listen up.” She sets down her coffee, opens up the book, and reads. When she’s finished, she turns on the projector and today’s notes appear on the screen behind her.

Paradox is…

She’s about to launch into her lecture when a hand juts into the air near the front of the class. Jenna Barker has a question.

Ms. Finch nods at her, and Jenna’s reedy voice whispers, “Should we be taking notes while you’re reading?”

“Why?” asks Ms. Finch.

Jenna’s tiny hands flutter by her sides. She turns to look at Misty sitting beside her, and I can see her face flushing. Jenna isn’t so good at speaking in public, but man, she can race through a genome project like lightning.

Misty takes over in her brash voice. “Don’t we need to have notes for the test?”

Ms. Finch’s brow pulls forward for a second before she smiles. “Oh, no, this novel is just to enjoy. There’s no test.”

A snort escapes from me. “No test?” It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard a teacher say. There’s always a test. Too late, I notice all eyes are on me.

“Something funny, Mr. Hanson?”

I look down at my hands and shake my head.

“Wait. Wait,” Greta says in a panicked whine as her face drains of color. “We’re not being graded on this?” She indicates the pages of notes from the last week. “I mean, wait.” It’s like listening to one of my dad’s vinyl record albums. Every so often the needle gets stuck in a groove and skips so that a word repeats over and over.

James surveys the chaos in the room and turns to me with one of his giant toothy grins. He mumbles, “My mom will not care for this. Not one bit.” But it is one of those loud mumbles meant to carry. And from there it grows and grows into a chorus of whining voices, many of them aimed at me, pleading, “Say something, Charlie.”

Ms. Finch is watching us, mystified. I can’t help but realize how insane our complaints are because there couldn’t be an easier assignment than to shut our traps and listen up.

The noise around me is peaking. James is looking victorious. The class is a united front on this issue, and they want me to join, sign my name on the Declaration of English Sucks. Shit, even Charlotte’s John Hancock is all over this thing—well, not the English sucks part, but she’s definitely signed off on the annoy Ms. Finch clause.

Charlotte cannot be my sole reason for joining this fight. I fight for math and the Brighton way. I am Mathman, able to solve tall problems in a single, well-calculated bound.

God, that’s lame.

If I lead my classmates, will Charlotte come to my room again to congratulate me?

I grit my jaw to banish the idea of Charlotte anywhere near my room before I can stand at my desk. The class turns in unison to look at me, their pleas falling silent on their lips. Ms. Finch watches me with interest. I want to apologize to her for some reason. Instead, I clear my throat and stuff my hands in my pockets.

“Ms. Finch, why waste our time with the novel if there is no test?”

There. I’ve signed my name. Happy?

The class nods and begins to murmur again. All eyes are on Ms. Finch. She takes out the novel in question and leans on her podium. “You think experiencing a brilliant piece of literature is a waste of time?”

I shift my weight from foot to foot. “Um…yes, ma’am. I guess I do.”

Ms. Finch’s face pulls into a look of disgust.

Stupid libido thinking it’s so smart. This is so going to blow up in my face. Everyone is quiet as we wait. My palms begin to sweat and my knees wobble.

Or maybe this has nothing to do with my southern hemisphere. Maybe my standing up today is the result of the way Charlotte looked at me, in the dimness of my room last week, like I’d be some kind of hero if I helped distract her sister. And the way her fingers, cool and soft, felt in mine as we sat in silence at the kitchen table last night, thumbing silently through the pages of each other’s minds.

Ms. Finch studies the book in her hand, running her fingers over the cover. Looking up at the whole class, she asks, “So you
want
a test on this novel?”

There’s a wave of nodding across the classroom.

“If we listen to the story, then we should be fairly compensated through a corresponding grade.” I sound like some ridiculous cartoon using every fifty-cent vocabulary word I’ve ever learned, but I can’t stop myself. “On the first day of class, you said that you knew all about us. If you want to motivate us, you’ve got to grade us.”

James snorts.

Greta exhales, a small sound like,
ohhhhh
.

I cross my arms across my chest to keep my hands from shaking as my ears burn. Ms. Finch’s forehead wrinkles, and she nods a few times. And for a fleeting moment, my chest seizes, thinking I’ve convinced her.

“No. No test,” she says. Without another word on the subject, she begins her lecture for the day.

I slowly take my seat. On the one hand, I’m glad there’s no test because I haven’t been paying attention to the novel. On the other, Ms. Finch has demonstrated once again that she is the one with the power in this classroom. We’re at her mercy.

I’d forgotten about the whole Revolutionary War that followed the signing of the Declaration. I’d forgotten that signing was only the first step. It’s not like John signed his name all huge and the king handed over the keys to the country saying, “Right then, you win.”

We’ll have to
earn
our independence.

---

T
hrough some sick twist of fate, my locker is on the humanities hall, right beside Ms. Finch’s office. She sings when she works. Toneless and nearly tuneless songs seep out around the closed door into the hall. I would laugh, but there’s something earnest about this private singing.

Suddenly, the song ends, and Ms. Finch steps out of her office. She slings her red bag over her shoulder and sets her empty coffee mug on top of the lockers while she locks the office door. Turning to leave, she spies me as I’m willing my locker to devour me.

“Afternoon, Mr. Hanson.”

I drop my
Advanced Theories in Physics
book (a good eight pounds) on my foot and swear involuntarily. Jedi mind trick:
You heard nothing.

I bend to retrieve the book, and when I stand I notice that she’s looking at me like she’s trying to see inside me.

“So, it’s you this year, eh?”

“Me?”

“Big man on campus. Top dog. King of the class. Crowned head of the seniors.” She rattles off a list of titles. I look at her stupidly. Ms. Finch stops listing and looks surprised. “Wow. You don’t even know, do you?”

“Know?”

“You’ve been chosen.”

“For what?”

“Greatness,” she says, hiking her red bag up on her shoulder and stepping closer. Her scent is all around me, but something is missing. Charlotte’s is full of so much more.

“They want
you
,” Ms. Finch says pointing her car key at my chest to accent the last word, “to take me on.”

It hits me. I don’t give a crap what “they” want. High school is a holding pattern. All I’ve ever cared about is the future. “They” can piss off.

Charlotte
has chosen me, though. Hell if I know why, but she said as much the other night. I stood up to be counted for Charlotte.

Ms. Finch sizes me up one more time. “I’m glad it’s you.”

I flush like a star-struck tween, trying to knit together the threads of our conversation so my mind stops wandering toward Charlotte. “Why?”

“You’re a smart boy. I can see that. I bet you’ll make this interesting. Just remember,” she says solemnly, “‘with great power comes great responsibility.’”

I’m frozen like a jerk.

“The great Stan Lee. Spiderman? You must know it.” She grins and the flash in her eyes stops my heart. A challenge? Charlotte did say she was all about being some sort of Superteacher. I guess it’s a bigger victory to take down a fighting bull than to tip a sleeping cow.

While I stammer for a reply she heads down the hall and leans on the double doors, opening them to the afternoon light.

“See you tomorrow,” she calls before she dissolves into the glare from the autumn sun.