He lifted my mathlete trophies and examined them. Then he set them back on my dresser and fingered the Science Olympics medals nearby. He picked up a Rubik’s Cube and twisted the colors into a jumbled mess before tossing it to me.
I sat down on the edge of my bed and turned the colors back toward order. He knelt next to me on my bed and carefully examined a collage of photos pinned to the wall. More than fifty pictures of Gabby and Arden jumbled the space above where I slept. “You must miss your friends a lot.”
“Yeah, I do.” I threw the solved Rubik’s Cube back to him. “But I’m starting to make friends here.”
“You might still wish you’d never moved here, but I’m glad you did.”
“Thanks.”
Nate continued to look around my tiny space, like he was trying to somehow figure out who I was by examining my stuff. He stopped to examine the painting of a little girl at the beach wearing a floppy pink hat. He stared at it for a long minute before saying anything. “I like the painting, but it doesn’t have the same feel as the rest of your room. What’s the story?”
“It’s me.” I got up to stand beside him. “I was four when my dad painted it.”
“Your dad’s a painter?”
I didn’t want to talk to Nate about my dad. It had been hard enough telling him my own secrets. My family’s secrets were buried deep, and I wanted them to stay there. I looked at the painting, studying the little girl on the beach, and remembered the day my dad painted it.
I counted the rocks and seashells I found in the sand and then arranged them into orderly piles, sliding them back and forth — constructing my own crude abacus. I saw my dad standing up the beach, a large umbrella shielding him and his easel. He held a paintbrush in one hand and a thermos in the other.
I mumbled numbers to myself as the hot sun beat down on me, burning my tiny shoulders. “Daddy, I’m hot.” He didn’t answer; he just kept painting. Pictures of me hung in galleries up and down the coast. “I’m hot, Daddy. Can we go home?”
“Pretty girl.” My dad’s voice came out slightly slurred. “Build a castle for Daddy. Let me paint your castle.”
I didn’t want to build a castle. I counted and recounted the shells. “I’m hot, Daddy. I’m gonna go swimming.” I ran down the beach toward the ocean.
“Samantha,” my dad called after me. I giggled and ran faster. The cold water splashed against my bare legs and licked my shorts.
“This is fun, Daddy.” I turned back to face him.
He ran through the sand toward me. He’d set down his paintbrush, but he continued to clutch his thermos. He tripped over his own feet, too drunk to chase a preschooler, and fell face first into the sand. His drink poured out, leaving a darkened patch of sand around him.
“Daddy?” I abandoned the ocean and ran back to him, where I pulled on his arm until he rose to his knees. “I’m sorry, Daddy.” Leading him back toward his easel, I told him, “I don’t want to go home anymore. Paint your picture.” I walked back over to the pile of shells I’d constructed in the sand. I counted and recounted until my dad’s masterpiece was finished.
When he finally took me home, I went to the living room to watch TV while my dad poured himself a drink before passing out in his bedroom. He sobered up enough to cook me dinner shortly before my mom got home from work.
I turned away from the painting and back toward Nate. “Yeah, my dad’s an artist. So do you want to do homework or something?”
N
ate pulled his history textbook out of his bag and sat down on my bed. “I know you’ve got this downloaded onto your MP3 player. And you probably have most of it downloaded into your brain too. But I’ve got to read it.”
“Go ahead, I don’t mind.”
“Do you want me to read it out loud?”
“Sure.”
I studied his face as he said each word. He was so cute — and sitting in my bedroom, on my bed — that I couldn’t concentrate on the great flu epidemic of 1918. I got up and walked over to my desk, where I grabbed a sheet of paper and a binder.
I lay down on the floor with my feet in the air, and I scratched numbers across the page while Nate’s words surrounded me. I thought about Arden and all the stories she’d read me over the years. Was Nate my new Arden? Did I want to replace her? His voice was even and smooth with a deeper texture that added another layer of meaning to the tension of the early twentieth century. I liked listening to Nate read, and a part of me felt guilty about it.
Once Nate finished the chapter, he set the book down and kicked me in the side. I sat up as he reached down to grab my paper.
“Are you going to explain to me what this means?”
“It’s a fractal.”
“It’s beautiful.” He looked back at me and smiled.
I got up and moved to sit beside Nate on the bed, hoping he liked me at least a fraction as much as I liked him.
He brushed his hand across my temple and said, “I wish I could cut your head open and just look inside.”
Not exactly the pickup line I’d been hoping for. “You know I’m a person, not a lab experiment, right?”
He blushed and put his hands back in his lap. “I know, but you’re really fascinating. Will you at least tell me why you made this while I was reading?”
I shrugged. “It’s hard to explain. I guess it’s maybe like the writing
-in-rice
thing. I had to trick my brain into linking the stuff I was seeing and the stuff I was hearing to something I was touching so I could understand it better.”
“So you had to touch the paper?” He shifted to face me.
“No, I had to do math. Well, I don’t always have to do math. Sometimes I do jigsaw puzzles, or sudokus, or pretty much anything that requires complex thought and doesn’t have any words in it. If I engage my mind with something that I understand innately, it makes it easier to focus on the words.”
I pulled my knees to my chest. “Like, I understand the conversation we’re having right now. But I’m also thinking about everything you’re not saying. And I’m distracted because I’m starting to get kind of hungry. And I’m staring at that stupid smile on your face and wondering what it means. So I’m not really paying that much attention to what I’m saying. Two weeks from now, I’d be hard-pressed to recite it back to you word for word. But if I was cranking out a tangram right now, well then, I’d remember everything.”
“So basically, you like sudokus better than me.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I just said.”
He scowled. “I don’t believe it. I’m blaming all your excuses on the being-hungry thing.”
I laughed. “I’m about to die of starvation. If I order a pizza, will you stay for dinner?”
“Sure. Can we get something vegetarian?”
I called the local delivery place while Nate texted his parents, saying he’d be home late. When the pizza showed up, we sat in my living room using boxes as tables. “I know eating dinner together seven nights a week makes my family a bit atypical, but where are your parents?”
“The painter’s been out of this picture for almost a decade, and my mom’s working.”
Nate pulled his phone back out of his pocket and glanced at the time. “It’s seven thirty. How late does your mom work?”
I tore a mushroom off the slice of pizza I’d been eating and popped it in my mouth. “Being unemployed was really hard for my mom. It made her feel worthless. Now that she’s back to doing something she loves, she can’t seem to get enough of it. She’s been at the office pretty much nonstop since we moved here.”
Nate looked around our apartment. Everything in my bedroom was neatly unpacked. The rest of the place looked like we got there five minutes ago. “So your mom just dragged you a thousand miles from home, dropped you in a new school, and went to work. God, you must be lonely.”
My eyes stung. I blinked, not wanting to look at Nate or the truth of what he’d just said. Not working had been hard on my mom, but I’d loved it. We didn’t have extra money for a fancy car or designer clothes, but I didn’t care about that stuff. I cared about having a mom. During all the stress and confusion of starting high school, she’d been there. She set up meetings with all my teachers and micromanaged my life until I landed the perfect schedule.
Then she pulled me out of my micromanaged version of pseudo-happiness and just disappeared. I knew my dad would rather paint than spend time with me, but I’d never let myself believe my mom would rather work than parent too. I pushed my glasses off my nose and rubbed at my eyes before standing up and opening a box. “Do you want to help me start unpacking some of this stuff?”
Nate was plugging in the stereo when my mom finally got home around nine. “Wow, honey, this place looks great.”
“Thanks, there’s some cold pizza on the coffee table if you’re hungry.”
My mom grabbed a slice before spotting Nate.
“Oh, and this is my friend Nate.”
He wiped his dusty hands on his pants before stepping forward to shake my mom’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Wilson. Samantha tells me you’re quite the architect.”
She took his hand. “Please, call me Ellen.”
“Well, Ellen, it’s great to finally meet you. You have a lovely home, but I should probably get going soon, seeing as how it’s a school night and all.” Nate grabbed his coat and backpack. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Sam.”
I walked Nate to the door. When I turned back around, my mom was sitting on the couch eating pizza. “He seems polite. Should I be worried?”
“No, trust me, Mom. Nate’s that nice all the time.”
“Well, I certainly can’t complain about him helping you unpack. This place looks great.” My mom looked at the organized room and the stack of empty boxes broken down by the door. “But your new friend is a little more attractive than Gabby and Arden. I’m guessing I should probably be worried.”
“We’re just friends, really.”
“Quick. Name eight sexually transmitted diseases.” My mom grabbed a second slice of pizza.
I counted on my fingers. “Human immunodeficiency virus, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, crabs, human papillomavirus, and trichomoniasis.”
“Just remember those the next time this new
friend
of yours starts batting his eyelashes.”
A year ago — heck, a month ago — I would have been willing to talk to my mom about this stuff. But in that minute, in that freshly unpacked living room that my mom hadn’t even helped with, I didn’t want to talk. Nate didn’t like me the way I liked him, so he didn’t merit a long discussion about the effectiveness of birth control. If my mom was ever there, she would’ve known that. “I’m gonna go finish my homework.”
“Speaking of homework, how are all your classes going?”
I shrugged and headed down the hall. “I’m still me. They’re going.”
“Let me know if you need me to read you anything.”
“There are machines to do that. Besides, Nate read me history for like an hour this afternoon.”
“I knew I needed to be worried about that boy.”
“Goodnight, Mom.” I walked into my room and slammed the door, only half pretending to be pissed at my mother.
“Good night, sweetie,” my mom called after me. “Thanks again for unpacking.”
The following evening, Eli pulled up in front of my building at six forty-five sharp. He sat beaming in the driver’s seat of a ten-year-old minivan as I pulled open the passenger door and climbed in. “Nice ride.”
“Inheriting the mom-mobile isn’t the coolest thing in the world, but I don’t care.” Eli’s smile was so earnest and nonthreatening, I almost forgot he was a super popular basketball star. “I’m even happy chauffeuring my little brother around. I just love driving.”
Eli drove us up into the hills on the west side of town. Apparently, Kaitlyn and Lissa lived in the same neighborhood as Nate. We drove in silence for a while, just listening to bad pop music on the radio. Eli glanced at me a few times, then snapped his head back, remembering to keep his eyes on the road. “So are the rumors about you all true?”
“I don’t know. What are the rumors about me?”
“Just, you know, that you’re some kind of crazy super genius. My friend Brice is an office aide, and he heard you have an IQ higher than Einstein.”
I’d taken enough IQ tests to know that I hated them, and it wasn’t like they meant anything anyway. I’d listened to
Outliers
. I knew how little genius mattered in the big scheme of things. “I’m good at math,” I answered.
“I’m not. English is the only class I’m doing well in, and that’s mainly ’cause Mr. Donavan hardly gives any homework during basketball season. I think I have a C in algebra right now.”
I could have looked down on Eli the way all my senior friends would have, but the Brain Trust thing seemed too one-dimensional. I had a D in Spanish, after all. Who was I to judge? Maybe Eli had a learning disability too, or maybe he was just better at sports than math. That didn’t make him a bad person. “You ever watch
Sesame Street
as a kid?”
He managed to pull his eyes off the road for half a second to look at me. “Yeah, why?”
“Remember how Cookie Monster always sang, ‘
C
is for cookie, that’s good enough for me’?”
Eli sang the chorus and chuckled before pulling into Kaitlyn’s driveway. The house was a mid-century modern with a view identical to Nate’s. It didn’t have as cozy of a front porch though.
Lissa answered the door, and I spotted our art history book lying open on the couch. “Sam, what are you doing here?”
“English project with your charming sister.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” She grabbed her book and exited the room. “Kaitlyn, your friends are here.”
We went to Kaitlyn’s room. It wasn’t as neat as I’d expected, considering how perfect her hair always looked. Posters of guys named Justin covered the walls and ceiling — Timberlake, Bieber, guys I didn’t recognize that just looked like they should be named Justin. A pink scarf hung over her desk lamp, casting the room in a pink glow. A mixture of cosmetic products and silver-framed photos of her and her friends covered her shelves. The school-issued copy of
Macbeth
appeared to be the only book in the room.
“So I was looking over our scene,” Kaitlyn said, “and obviously I’m the queen in our little group. So I’ll play Lady Macbeth, Eli can be the doctor, and Sam, you can be the maid.”