Solving for Ex (22 page)

She may not have considered them real friends, but I had seen enough of their behavior—hovering near her at lunch, staying away from any guy she got within a ten-foot radius of—that I knew they were her crew. Afraid of her. Would mess with me if she told them to. Maybe she couldn’t confide in them, but that was a whole hell of a lot more than I had.

“You’re different,” she continued. “Quiet. You don’t have that many friends, so you don’t gossip.” She sighed, and I wanted to slap her. “Except Brendan. He really is so cute. And you’re his best friend, and I care what you think.”

What I thought was that I wanted to slam her head into the mirror. “I think…I want him to be happy. You know?”

“Good.” She smiled at me, but there was a challenge in her eyes. “See you at Mathletes.”

Ω

My stomach churned all of seventh period. I couldn’t get the image of Sofia’s gloating face out of my mind.

Did he know I considered that camera mine? Did he even care?

My feet dragged like lead the whole way to Mathletes. One in front of the other, each step laborious. Today we were in a classroom, so we could take the paper tests to see who qualified for State. I knew I’d get one of the best scores, but still, the sooner these tests were over, the sooner I’d be on the team, and the closer I’d be to getting the Mathletes on my resume and competition season behind me. And seeing Brendan much less. Especially Brendan with Sofia.

I knew I was getting there earliest. My plan was to get there, sit in a desk, keep my eyes forward, kick butt at the test, dominate at the board problems, get formally picked for the team, call Kristin to pick me up, and spend the night in my room mourning my camera. Brendan’s camera.

Instead, I walked into the classroom, and the first thing I saw was Brendan standing against a wall, and Sofia leaning into him with one palm on the wall, the fingers of her other hand hooked in his belt loop. One of his hands resting in the small of her back. Her mouth firm on his. Their tongues moving together.

I really had to throw up now. Heat flooded my chest, then my face, and I felt so dizzy I had to sit down in the same front row desk I originally meant to. Maybe this wouldn’t look like it bugged me that much after all.

All I knew was that, as I plunked down in the chair, I made a strange swallow-choking sound without meaning to. Somehow, I managed, “I’m sorry, I—” before Sofia’s head whipped around and, registering my presence there, she rubbed her lips together and gave the slightest smirk before acting surprised. “Oh, my God. Ashley.”

Brendan didn’t meet my gaze. Instead of trying to look at me, or saying anything, he crossed over to the teacher’s desk that he always commandeered for these sessions, and shuffled some papers around. Ten seconds later, the rest of the kids trying for the team trickled in. Two of Ashley’s friends, and four regulars, two under class and two upper class.

Vincent’s head popped into the classroom, and he smiled at me. The lazy, complacent, gorgeous one that I definitely didn’t have time for. He’d pulled out of the running for the State team after his scores on the regional tests, which we’d taken weeks ago, were in the lower half. “Hey, Ashley.” After about two solid seconds of that smile, he called, “Hey, Sof. Coach canceled practice today. Want me to wait around? You’ll be done soon, right?”

“Twenty minutes, tops,” she said, and Brendan looked up at her, cocking his head. Vincent nodded his assent and ducked back out of the classroom, giving me one less distraction for taking these qualifying tests. Thank God.

“Twenty minutes?” Brendan said. “No way that’ll be enough time to do boards and paper…”

“Well, I was thinking,” Sofia said. The other six people in the room stared at her with either the drama of anticipation or complete and total boredom. “I don’t’ think we need boards at all.”

Both Brendan and I stared at her like she was on crack.

“The scores mostly come from the exams anyway, right? We’ve worked really hard on getting correct answers on our own in the time limit, but not so much on showing our work in front of everyone. Not so much on competing against each other.”

“We definitely need to work on that…”

“But,” Sofia interrupted, “it’s not going to be the best indicator. Let’s get the fastest, best scoring individuals on the team first, and then worry about training for boards later. Besides, isn’t the paper test the one that State gives you to qualify for the competition in the first place? Everyone in the country takes the exact same test, right? It would be the most fair way.”

Brendan froze in his shuffling of the stacks of paper. I could practically see the gears turning in his head. “You’re right. It would be fair. The board work is more about training and practice.”

“I’m good at the boards,” Sofia said.

She wasn’t. I’d seen her get frustrated at board exercises when Brendan wasn’t watching. She might have started out with showing the right work, but always ended up taking shortcuts and arriving at the wrong answer. Or no answer.

Brendan nodded. “Okay.”

“Like I said, I’m just thinking about what’s most fair for everyone.” She shot me a pointed look.

She may have been really bad at boards and really great at written problems, but she was still taking a real gamble by betting that she’d beat me at those.

Sofia continued, “Everyone knows we have the best students and smartest captain in the state. I just think we owe it to you to develop the strongest team to represent him.”

Brendan sat up the slightest bit, and I could swear I saw his chest puff out. Sofia leaned in and whispered something in his ear, and he sat back and laughed, then looked at her with the damn mooniest eyes I’d ever seen on him. I felt short of breath, then wanted to vomit. Skittishness rumbled down my limbs and I just wanted to get out of there, be anywhere but there. This stupid, beautiful, math-smart girl had sauntered into Mansfield Prep and invaded the only safe place I had on earth with the same bullshit I’d run away from.

“Okay, Sofia makes a good point. Let’s try this method of choosing. It’s one hundred percent fair and equal. I heard that’s how Northanger does it, anyway, and their team is…formidable. And I know some of you totally kick ass at boards, so if the results are at all close, we’ll go to that. Okay?”

Sofia raised her hand and started talking before Brendan even acknowledged her. “Just answers, right? Because that’s how it is at the competition? They never ask for shown work.”

“Are you kidding me? We should totally show work,” I said.

“But the thing is, Ash, Sofia’s right. They don’t have you show work at the competition,” Brendan said, starting to hand out the papers. “There are hundreds of us. No way can they check work.”

I spent about half a second realizing that these two unfortunately, abysmally had a point.

“Okay,” I said, clicking new lead out of my pencil and poising it over the paper Brendan handed out. “What are we doing for time limit?

“Ten minutes for twenty questions, just like they do at the competition.”

I nodded. That much, I knew I could do.

Sofia held up her cell phone, which showed her stopwatch app. “I’m keeping time.” She looked around at Ryan and Britt, her friends who were also trying for the team, and who I’d heard seriously kicked ass in their AP Calc class, and the crew of sophomore boys who were trying to skate on this year who looked like they’d been training for this since preschool.

“Okay,” she sang, “Ready…set…go.”

The sounds of frantic pencil scratching filled the room. I glanced over at that damn sophomore crew and noticed them filling pieces of scrap paper faster than should be human. Meanwhile, Sofia sat perched in her seat, looking calm and perfect, the bitch.

I stuck my head down and got to work. It was a pretty solid mix of calculus problems, graphs, and word problems. I actually didn’t need scrap for most of it, even though I did feel steadier showing my work. By the time I’d reached problem 19, which was a pretty complicated calculus proof, I was proud that my brain could still work through it so quickly at the same time I knew that time had to be almost up. Problem 20 was an easy algebra equation, and my brain practically sighed with relief.

Sofia’s alarm went off, a ridiculous bell-like tinkling sound that made me feel suddenly murderous toward fairies and woodland sprites. She held it up and trilled, “Time’s up!” Brendan looked up from his desk, where he’d finished the questions minutes ahead of time. He grinned at all of us. “Did you all finish?” Everyone nodded. Some of those damn sophomores finished before me, too, and one looked especially smug.

“Okay, we’re swapping papers for grading,” Brendan announced.

Britt raised her hand and sputtered, “But—”

“Of course I’ll check them after and make sure,” he said. “But I just want us all to be able to leave this session with some idea of the team and the alternates. Okay? Let’s just pass ’em to the person behind us.”

Sofia stretched her prefect tanned arm behind her to hand me the paper. “Have fun,” she said, smiling. Something in her expression told me that she understood exactly how little fun I’d be having looking at her damn stupid paper, that was probably half wrong for how little work she did on that scrap paper in front of her. Bitch face back on, decorated with a slight smile.

I passed my paper back and accepted the copy of the answer key Brendan handed me. I lined it up with Sofia’s, checking number for number. The first three were correct. The fourth and fifth. All of them. Even the sixteenth, out to the seventh decimal point.

“Impossible,” I muttered, glaring down at the paper, scanning the answers I’d already checked for some mistake. Some eraser mark and rewrite, even. None. This couldn’t be right. Could not.

After a minute or two, and three obsessive rechecks from me, I whispered, “Impossible.”

Sofia whipped her head around and hissed, “Is there a problem?”’

I stared at her. “How did you get a perfect score? You barely showed your work, you—”

“Shut up,” she said. “It’s hard work. I’ve worked my ass off for this.”

I glared at my camera bag at her feet. She sure had, but not by studying math.

Brendan lifted his head from his desk. “We all finished? Pass ’em up here.”

There was a lot of shuffling of papers, and alternately stuffing things into bags and staring up at Brendan. I tried to read Ryan’s face, since he’d graded mine, but he didn’t even look at me. He was way more interested in something on his phone. He was pretending to be cool about this, but we all knew that being members of a state-renowned Mathletes team would be one thing that could separate us from the pack on college and scholarship applications. This was a big deal.

Brendan shuffled through the papers, laying them out in front of him. “Okay. So it looks like…one sixteen, one eighteen, one nineteen, and one—whoa—one perfect score.” He smiled up at Sofia, nodding. “Nice work. Sofia’s the first spot…then Britt, Daniel, and Mohinder.”

He glanced up at me, then stared at the papers again. “Nice work, everyone who made it. Great try, to the rest of you. And next year…” He looked up at me, but I’d already stood up and practically run out of the classroom.

her mind was all disorder

I made it all the day down a hallway and around a corner, out of sight of anyone who would be wandering the halls after school, before I just had to stop. I leaned against a wall full of lockers and realized I was gasping for breath, even though I hadn’t been walking that fast. Then, the tears started to pour down my cheeks.

I was a junior, and if I wanted Mathletes to have any impact at all on my college admissions, making the state team this year was my best shot. And I hadn’t. Now I’d probably be going to that ridiculous community college down the lonely, twisting road from my parents’ house, spending the next four years living in my old bedroom and dodging the triplets. Trying to avoid all the assholes who had tormented me and, instead of going to the community college, would be staying to work in town, or worse, going to decent colleges and coming home on vacations to smirk at me and ask me why I wasn’t doing the same.

But no matter how obvious all those things were to me, I couldn’t get rid of the image of Sofia leaning into Brendan, transposed with that stupid freaking perfect score I marked in red pen at the top of her nearly pristine test. And my camera bag resting comfortably next to her designer shoes.

If I couldn’t make Mathletes by working my ass off, and if I couldn’t get Brendan to be interested in me by being his best friend, what could I do? This combined with the entire previous year meant I was pretty much a failure at life. Things absolutely couldn’t get any worse.

Until they did.

Brendan came walking around the corner.

I pushed myself away from the wall and swiped my fingers under my eyes. “What do you want?” I didn’t even look at him, but his scent felt like it filled the entire hallway. I wanted to touch him and run away, drown in his presence and get as far away from it as possible, all at the same time. So I just froze, caught in the middle. Like I’d probably be forever.

“I could hear you crying all the way down the hall. You’re my best friend, you know? I want to make sure you’re okay.”