Solving for Ex (15 page)

“Yeah.” Brendan cleared his throat. “So, see you after school, Ash? Mathletes?”

This time it was Brendan I forced the smile for.

if one scheme of happiness fails

The Mathletes practiced in the auditorium so that we could set up the boards—the most badassed part of Mathletes, and the one I was best at. I loved the intensity of standing at a huge whiteboard opposite some other kid and ripping through an equation for everyone to see. Since we’d gradually weeded out the less impressive contestants, only having eight official members on the team made the pressure that much more intense.

“So, uh…” Brendan strode across the echoing auditorium stage, trying to raise his voice enough to silence the three underclassmen, two sophomores and one junior, who were playing some video game on one of their laptops, and the two girls Britt and Hannah, who were upperclassmen. I knew for a fact that Britt was only here for extra credit in her Calculus class—not that she wasn’t good at it, but she didn’t care about the Mathletes. And Hannah just wanted something to beef up her college applications. Locker-room gossip was that she needed to live up to her mom’s expectations and attend Pitt and belong to the same sorority. That sort of shit drove me crazy.

Not getting their attention, he readjusted the position of the two huge rolling whiteboards we used for practice, pulled out all his dry-erase markers, and tested the ink on the board. He started scribbling an equation up there—a job the captain typically left for underclassmen. He seemed to realize this in the middle of writing it, because he turned around, opened his mouth, clamped it shut, cleared his throat with his fist to his lips, opened it, said, “Uh, guys…” then shut it again. Then he turned back to write more equations.

The cloud of flowery perfume floated up around my head to meet me as I took a seat. I hadn’t even seen Sofia sitting back there, but now she unstretched every fabulous inch of her body from her seat and strode up to the stage like she was running the show.

And, it appeared, she thought she was.

“Hey, losers!” Her tone was full of contempt, but when everyone looked up at her, she grinned that stunning grin that apparently made everyone forget what a bitch she was.

Sure enough, Britt and Hannah snapped to attention and looked at her like they were ready and willing to be her freaking slaves. And the boy geeks just started concentrating extra hard on not drooling.

“Brendan is our captain. And I am so excited to be a Mansfield Mathlete. I want to offer myself,” she raised her eyebrows and strode across the stage to touch Brendan’s forearm, “as his right-hand Mathlete. To do anything he wants.” She was always touching his damn arm. Presumptuous, and possessive. Did I see his eyebrow raise? Or was it just at the “anything he wants” line?

“So,” Sofia continued. “What do you guys do first here?”

“Um.” Brendan cleared his throat and moved his arm from underneath Sofia’s. I couldn’t tell whether he was dropping it or moving it away on purpose. “Let’s start with some drills at the boards.”

“Okay,” Sofia bubbled. “I’ll write the problems up there, and…”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Really, it’s fine. I’m still getting used to things, and then they can concentrate on getting them right. I’ll just watch today. You keep the practice problems…?”

“In my bag,” Brandon said, giving Sofia a slight smile. I rolled my eyes. Maybe she thought she was doing him a favor, or maybe she wanted to be in control of something. But she bounced over there like he said he had a dozen cupcakes and a bottle of champagne in the damn thing. She pulled out a whole thick stack of papers and plunked it down on the black stage.

“Oh, hey, actually we’ll start with the easiest short forms to warm up, since it’s only really our second meeting since getting the team together. Just the ones on the purple paper. You’ve got the whole stack there.”

Sofia plunked her bag down next to the stack and swiped some of the purple papers off the top. She transcribed problems on the boards in nearly perfect handwriting. The girls, being more senior members, were used to the form and got through each one faster, in less than a minute; the boys took a little longer.

I wasn’t a natural match with anyone but Brendan. When both the girls and the boys had gone through five problems each, his eyes flashed at me. “Now I want to show you what I expect you all to be doing at the end of the semester. Right before State. Because, with my secret weapon, we are going to make it.”

Pride swelled in my chest even as my cheeks turned red. If he wasn’t talking about me, I’d eat my shoe. He knew how fast I was.

“Sofia,” he said, and my heart stopped. No way he was talking about her. “Grab the pink pages. Those are the competition-grade ones. Those are the ones Ashley’s about to do and show you all how she can totally kick my ass.”

I beamed and hoisted myself out of the seat and strode toward the stage steps. I basically freaking bounced up there. I knew I didn’t look like Sofia, but hell if I didn’t feel like her, all bouncy and feisty and gloating.

It felt surprisingly good. Maybe I needed to channel my inner bitch more often.

“Why don’t you just have huge copies of these or something?” Sofia complained as she copied the problem on the board.

Brendan laughed. “We’re not as rich as your old school, apparently. And even if I wanted to use our funding for it, it’s more fun to do it this way, don’t you think?”

She half smiled and repeated under her breath, “More fun. Right.” Obviously this was a girl who hardly ever had to write anything out by hand. Even though her symbols were all off, her spacing weird, and the curlicues on the ends of the integral symbol that opened the problem way too flowery, I knew before she was done writing it out how to solve it. I watched Brendan’s face for the same recognition. It took him a few seconds longer, but he got it too.

We shared a glance and a grin, each held up three fingers, pulling each one down in unison as we mouthed “three, two, one…” then lunged at the boards with our dry-erase markers. The pungent scent of the ink and the mad squeaking filled the air for thirty seconds before I stepped back, fully confident when I shouted, “Pi over four!” I knew I’d completed the work faster than Brendan. But he stepped back at exactly the same time, raising his arms triumphantly and turning in a slow circle, his hair falling in his face.

I hadn’t seen him look so damn happy since that last Saturday before school started.

“Haha, yeah, okay, but let’s see who’s right,” I said, my hands on my hips. And checking the other four teammates. Mildly interested in our little competition, they were all copying the problem in notebooks and trying to sketch an answer for themselves.

“Nah, it’ll take these clowns forever to get something.” Brendan grinned. “Sof, what do you see for the answer to this one?” She flipped all the way to the back of the packet, then looked at me, her mouth wide and her eyes popping open. “Pi over four. Well,” she said, “I guess we know who the smartest girl at this school is.”

“No, no, I just have a good tutor.” I tilted my chin up at Brendan, remembering all the tricks he’d taught me last year for working the problems speedily. Thinking about all the time we’d spent together, and all the trash talking that had turned into gentle pushing around that I was always wishing would turn into something else.

“Oh, whatever, Miss ‘I-don’t-like-to-be-the-center-of-attention.’ You totally owned that! Look at you!” She smiled like the freaking Cheshire cat, but there was an edge to her voice that I knew was something other than friendly.

“Okay, that was awesome.” Brendan cleared his throat behind me and my little impromptu stare down with Sofia was broken. I wasn’t confused at all about her, even if Brendan was. She was just waiting for me to completely screw up so she could move in for the kill.

I wasn’t really worried that what she thought about me would affect what Brendan thought about me. Was I? We were best friends. I didn’t think anything could ever change that.

“Let’s move on to the writtens,” Brendan continued. “I liked your work at the boards, and I know that’s the part of the competitions that gets filmed and everyone cheers for, but the writtens haul in more points than anything. Okay?”

After a fast bathroom and water break, we each took separate desks, plunked down in the attached chairs, and began scribbling when Brendan started the timer.

“Look, Brittany, do you want to get into Columbia or not?” Brendan said, when the girls started whining. I smiled as I ducked my head. He could pull out the authority when he really had to. I hoped it was the competition with me had made him feistier, and not Sofia’s general stupidity.

Damn. I really hadn’t realized just how much I hated that girl until Mathletes.

We all bent our heads over the fifteen written questions. The point for these wasn’t to show work, but just to see who could complete it with all the right answers the fastest. Brendan slapped his down first, then, as I was walking up to Brendan’s desk to put mine down, Sofia slapped hers down in front of me.

I guess I’d been operating under the assumption that she didn’t really know what she was doing, even though I knew she’d been on the team at her old school.

I guess I’d been assuming wrong.

Brendan raised his eyebrows at her, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. He bobbed his head as he ran his finger down the sheet of paper, then looked up at Sofia. “Perfect,” he said.

She beamed, then squealed a little. It made me want to rip her throat out.

“Well, I think we have a contender for first chair here, team.” Brendan called down to everyone else in the chairs. The girls shrugged and went back to their test. They didn’t care what position they were, as long as they could stick this whole delightful experience on their resumes. The three boys wore expressions that ranged from “I can’t believe a girl is beating me” to “raging hard-on.” I guess a girl as hot as Sofia knowing her way around a math test was like a geek fantasy.

I guessed right, because for a split second, Brendan was looking at her the same way. Freaking fabulous.

As much as I wanted him to be mine, he never had been, and I’d never tried to change that. Still, I knew that no matter how hard I tried to swallow that damn lump in my throat, I couldn’t hold back the tears burning at the corners of my eyes.

“I’m just gonna…use the restroom. Again. We’re almost done, right? I’ll meet you in the parking lot,” I mumbled as I stooped down, picked up my bag, and started heading up the carpeted aisle to the back doors.

I knew I was dragging my tennis shoes along the ground. I stared down at the laces, focusing on the crisscross pattern, trying to make myself concentrate on anything other than the weird aching in my chest. I knew I was pouting. I didn’t care.

Something small and glinting silver skittered away from across the red carpeted aisle and under a seat. I knew from the color that it wasn’t a mouse, thank goodness, or I would have seriously lost it. I hesitated for another second, but kept walking. And it happened again. The white rubber of my shoe’s toe box hit another silvery something. I raised my eyes to the sloped red-velvet carpeted aisle and saw the whole thing dotted with silver. I bent down and picked one up, squinting at it in the dimmed lights, already turned down by the janitors.

They were chocolate Hershey’s kisses. I looked at the other kids, packing up their stuff and passing their papers forward to Brendan. “Did one of you losers do this?” I tried to keep my tone playful but I was really kind of freaked out. This was the weirdest thing I’d seen at Mansfield Prep in a long time. Ever, actually.

But at least it stopped the tears. The weirdness of Brendan and me and Brendan and Sofia and what was right or wrong, normal or weird, up or down was momentarily erased by an auditorium aisle full of artfully arranged chocolate spaced a foot apart in a repeating diamond pattern.

Stepping around the chocolate, I walked all the way up the aisle and out the auditorium door. I followed the trail, continuing through the breadth of the hallway, past the band and choir rooms, woodshop, and all the downstairs classrooms. The pattern of silver dots continued up one stairwell around the turn, and down the wide first-floor hallway.

They were hard to tell apart from the metallic-specked white tile of the floor, so I was actually kind of surprised when the pattern stopped abruptly halfway down the hall. Right in front of my locker.

I quickened my steps and then, from around the corner, stepped Vincent, scaring me half to death. I clutched my chest and squeaked a little when I heard a cough from behind me. The whole Mathletes team had followed me up into the hallway.

“Vincent, what the hell…?”

He just smiled that patient smile and stepped toward me, holding out an envelope.

I took it from him as my stomach flipped and dropped. “Seriously, what is this?”

He laughed. “It’s not a bomb or anything. Just read it.”

I looked down at the envelope and back up at him what must have been at least three times, then slid my finger under the flap and opened it. Inside was a square of heavy cream cardstock that said: