Nothing But the Truth (12 page)

Janie’s house is exotic. Flamingoes are exotic. Pattypuses are just weird. Still, I try “exotic” on, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all word. Now, “normal”—that’s a bargain basement word I wish I could wear every day. While Jasmine’s changing, I’m busy trying on adjectives: Striking, no. Beautiful, definitely no. Strange, perfect fit!

I hear a clinking sound as Jasmine throws something into her backpack. My eyes bug out when I see that she’s wearing cropped, black workout pants and a tight, long-sleeved shirt, not pajamas. She heads for the door.

“We’re not supposed to go out after ten,” I say. As soon as my words are out, I could kick myself. Do I sound like mini-Mama, a prim and proper prude, or what?

“No, we’re not,” says Jasmine. And without another word, Jasmine leaves with her backpack, shutting the door so quietly I barely hear its click.

And then “we”—my white self and Asian self, my skinny self and flat self—close our eyes and fall even wider awake. How can I sleep knowing that I’m nothing but a stay-at-home tease who never strips down enough to let anyone see the real me?

16
Truth Theorem

S
o much for thinking
I escaped lectures. Math Camp begins with one.

Why did Mama pay good money so that I could get lectured when I could have stayed at home for the same privilege and saved her a bundle?

Professor Drake, decked today in hip, red glasses, stands in front of the blackboard. Written on it: “There are ten kinds of people in the world—those who understand binary num bers and those who don’t.”

Spare me the math humor at nine in the morning. (One-Zero, it’s a binary number. Get it? There are ten kinds of people in this camp, those who are laughing and those who aren’t. Ha ha.) But the rest of the campers are cracking up like the professor is a stand-up comedian. He nods, grinning at his appreciative crowd (minus one), and then launches into an overview of the curriculum.

“Later on, we’ll be studying the mathematics behind the three-by-three Rubik’s Cube,” Professor Drake says, lifting the red, orange, blue, green, yellow and white puzzle.

Eager faces, all bright-eyed, are glued onto him as he tells us that since this cube was unleashed onto the world in 1974, some 100,000,000 copies of it have been sold. Normal people—that is to say, people who play with it for fun—scramble up the cube and then try to return it back to its original state. But we, on the other hand, are going to use this toy to learn about Group Theory.

I’m half-tempted to raise my hand and announce that I solved the Rubik’s Cube when I was seven years old. Mama was driv ing us on an endless road trip to the Northwest since we couldn’t afford airplane tickets and she wouldn’t drive on the freeways, and I was rotating the squares one way, and another way, when I noticed, oh my God!, all the colors had found their way back home. That was the one and only time Mama had actually talked herself into believing that I was a certifiable genius. Her smiles at me have never been wider. That just made her disappointment so much more acute when I walked out of the IQ test, labeled above average but nowhere in the heady realms of potluck envy.

The happy campers around me laugh, even Jasmine, who looks remarkably refreshed for someone who got less than four hours of sleep last night. I suppose if I focused on the professor with a few of my brain cells, I might be giggling at his math jokes, too. Chances are, no matter how witty I found the man, I would not be staring at him with awe the way Anne is. Drooling, I should tell her, is never particularly becoming. Still, I have a pretty good idea what the hero of Anne’s romance novel is going to look like.

Slouched in his seat in the second row with his legs stretched in front of him, Stu is the math babe starring in my
own romance novel. Too bad the only relationship Professor Drake wants us to have in class is one with numbers. He scans the room of math acolytes, checking to see if we are all tracking with his math puns. Hurriedly, I chuckle, too, as if I’m in on the joke when the truth is, I’m the only math joke among these math jocks.

What I loved about geometry last year was how there’s no single right answer to the proofs. Any statement that ends in the theorem is right. So while twenty-three pairs of eyes are on the professor and Jasmine’s are on Brian, mine return to my open notebook and my new-and-to-be-proved Truth Theorems.

Given:
Jasmine is a Chinese-American, soon-to-be se nior in high school.

Prove:
Jasmine is like no Chinese-American girl I know.

So where did Jasmine go last night and what was she doing for two hours?

While the professor moves on to a mini-lecture on Number Theory, I turn to a fresh page and continue my own theorizing.

Given:
Hapas are hybrids.

Prove:
I am a strange hybrid.

So why would anyone think being hapa is cool?

About half an hour later of scribbling furiously (twenty-four note-takers, and one note-writer), we are dispersed into five geek pods for a problem set. These are also going to be our groups for the Research Project, which we’ll be working on for the next four weeks and presenting at the end of camp.

Over in the row closest to the blackboards, Anne’s chest is heaving and her cheeks are rosy as she points to something on her paper. The way her boy minions are salivating, it very well may be Anne’s “just sex” scene, but I’d bet it’s “just math” that is getting their juices flowing.

My math potluck group includes Stu of the Burly Calves, his roommate, David Watanabe, whose razor-sharp cheekbones would make Janie go green with envy, and Ben Aguilar, with hair dyed pumpkin orange. O, lucky me, Malibu Barbie gets herself assigned to our group after pointing out that I’m the only girl in my own math harem. Let’s be honest, she can’t resist the magnetic force known as Stu. But even Katie is tackling the problem set like it’s math manna from Heaven after a nine-month fast at the high school level. When her eyebrows lower into a scowl, I clue in that something’s trespassing in my territory.

Then, my eyebrows lower, too, because I realize I haven’t turned my Truth Theorem over. Stu’s written: “Given: Because hapas are way cute.”

I blush and bite my bottom lip. Is that a general statement
about all mixed-race kids, or a specific statement about me? I’m too embarrassed to look Stu in the eye and almost miss one of the teaching assistants strolling our way. Stu flips over to a fresh page in my notebook for me, and I whisper, “Thanks,” before I put on my best studious Asian studybug face.

It works like a feng shui charm. The assistant walks by us, nodding with approval without actually checking our work. Two and a half Asian kids hunched over a problem set = excess brain power.

Ever since fourth grade when Steve Kosanko pointed out during math that I was a weird combination, I’ve hated anything to do with numbers. How many different ways can you combine the genes from an Asian mom and a white dad to create an oddly tall and gangly daughter? (One.) What’s the probability of getting Mama’s math whiz gene? (High.) What’s the probability of inheriting any of Daddy’s genes? (Unknown. I’ve never met him, haven’t heard about him, and can only guess.)

But now, studying Stu while pretending to study the theorem on my desk, I embrace all sorts of combinations and probabilities. What is the probability of Anne hooking up with that redheaded math champ who was staring at her last night like she’s the Empress of Equations? What is the probability of me dating Stu? The way Katie is glaring at her paper, pressing down so hard that her pencil is on the verge of snapping in two, I’d say the probability of that white girl being jealous of hapa me is pretty good.

17
Model Minority

T
he math jailers have
us so busy computing that pretty soon all we’re doing is chewing and spewing math. Some more than others. Anne has thrown herself into this college lifestyle, pretending to be a full-time Stanford student, not a summer camp wannabe. She was practically in tears that the math library closes at five during the summer, wailing that she wasn’t going to have enough time to complete our month-long Research Project. I could be mistaken, but think I heard Professor Drake mumble something about this being a summer camp presentation, not a dissertation.

I’m pretending to be a Stanford student in a different way. Every day after my one-on-one with a teaching assistant to review my daily problem sets, I take off on a long run, exploring the campus. I’ve already made a full circuit around Campus Drive, and yesterday, I checked out the Mausoleum where the Stanfords are buried. Creepy.

My foot is tapping the common room floor like it’s phantom-running the Dish, the trail in the foothills behind
the campus I’m planning on doing today with Jasmine. We’ve got a small window of opportunity before our “man datory field trip” to the swimming pool with the rest of the campers. Thank goodness it’s not some truly exciting activity, say bird-watching at the crack of dawn or something.

Time is ticking, but Brian is clicking his mechanical pencil thoughtfully like he’s got all the time in the world. What’s hard not to see is the disappointment in this Stanford grad student’s eyes. Brian’s look so clearly reminds me of Mama that I bow my head and stare at the hangnail on my thumb. My shoulders tense as I prepare for a lecture, but instead Brian asks a question, one that is worse than any lecture: “Why aren’t you trying, Patty?”

I play dumb, which isn’t hard after dumbing myself down since ju nior high. “What are you talking about?”

“Well,” he says, tapping his fingers on my problem set like it’s the problem, which I suppose it is. I see the obvious mistake I’ve made on the equation. “I just get the feeling that you’re afraid of being good in math.”

My reaction is second nature, honed after years of denying my math potential. Since seventh grade, I’ve denied that I’m good at numbers—or anything else that makes me like my math-aholic accountant of a mother. So now I say, “I’m not good in math.”