Solving for Ex (6 page)

“Yeah,” he grinned, “That’s what I said.”

I knew something about that wasn’t right, but my drive to bring up another topic of conversation was way too strong to let me push something less important.

“So it looks like Brendan and Sofia got friendly pretty fast on the cruise,” I said, wondering how I could have thought that something that forward could ever sound like a casual ask.

“Okay, see? That’s where we’re not close. Because I do not get involved in my sister’s love life. Line drawn. Right there.”

“Who said I was talking about her love life?”

“Is there any other reason you would bring that up?” he asked, his grin now turning playful. “Whatever. The point is, I don’t know anything.”

We were most of the way to the lunchroom before I realized that we’d walked the whole way together. There were two interesting things about this: First, girls’ heads turned for Vincent like the boys’ heads turned for Sofia. Second, Vincent was only looking at me.

“So, this Mathletes thing,” he said.

I almost jumped when he spoke; I was too busy thinking about why he was walking with me. Way to look like an idiot, Ash.

“Tell me about it. It’s pretty cool, here?”

“Yeah, and if you get on the team and we go to State, it’s really good for your college applications. Like, basically guaranteed to one of the better schools.”

“And that’s why everyone’s so obsessed?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Except me.

“What about Brendan? He seems cool.”

This, I could hear in his voice. He was saying that Brendan seemed too cool to be a Mathlete. I shrugged. “He just loves it. That’s it. And, yeah, he wants to go Ivy League. So…”

“Okay, so show me the ropes?”

“You want to join Mathletes?”

“Why not? I’m good at math, and it’s cool here. And you’ll be there, right?”

My cheeks blazed red as I dipped my head in a single nod. “I will be there.”

“Then so will I,” he said with a smile. This one seemed genuine.

all favourable to tenderness and sentiment

For the next few weeks I sat in Mathletes practice, but I wasn’t really there. Solving equations and problems was so soothing that it was like a drug to me, and sometimes I used it that way. I could handle the drills during the Mathletes practices themselves. Sofia spent them flirting with Brendan the entire time, dragging her flower-perfume cloud through the room, asking questions that, judging by the speed with which she scribbled down the answers to the problems on the written practice, she damn well knew the answers to herself. I could barely stand it.

Brendan had put me to the task of doing drills at the boards with the underclassmen while he floated around working on individual writtens with the veteran members of the team, who didn’t need that kind of practice anymore. This was good for two reasons: One, it kept me too busy to watch Brendan standing so close to Sofia for an entire ninety-minute practice, and two, it gave me a chance to show off my mathematical prowess. In my best daydreams, Brendan saw me working out a complicated calculus problem or geometry proof, dragged me home after practice, and pulled me down onto his bed with him, recounting highlights from my performance during our own private one.

Now, however, my focus was in a different place. Don’t freak the hell out and either scream at Sofia or sink back into depressionland. Or both. My dry-erase marker squeaked against the whiteboard as I jotted down the main steps in my strategy for finding area with a Riemann sum. “Guys, we’re finding area using a series of rectangles, which is theoretically infinite in this case, right?” I waited for most of the underclassmen to look like they got it. “Okay. So we’re actually using the revised formula for area, length times height. The limit as it approaches infinity of the sum of i equals one to n of f of xi times delta x. So n stands for…?”

“The number of rectangles,” everyone answered.

I beamed. “Good. Good, you guys. And then, the xi will be equal to…”

“A plus i delta x,” a kid named Mohinder answered immediately.

“Okay,” I said. “Yes. Excellent.”

Brendan looked over at me. I turned and gave him a little thumbs-up, and he smiled. And for a moment, the math centered me, and gave my mind somewhere else to focus besides on Brendan and Sofia and the particular chemistry that everyone could see between them.

It worked outside of practice, too. Each step of a problem was one more thing I could control. See Sofia walking in the hall, dream up a proof to solve. See Brendan smile and hug her, state the givens. Watch her laugh and touch his arm, state the theorem. For every five seconds that passed, work another step. If I got as far as solving it, duck into the bathroom and take a deep breath. And come up with something more difficult for next time.

So help me God, if they ever kissed, in front of everyone, I might end up solving the freaking Hodge Conjecture. At least then the Millennium Prize people would give me a million bucks and I could take a nice, long vacation.

Too bad solving those damn problems didn’t get me any steps closer to solving my love life. Every day that Brendan got cozier with Sofia was a day he stepped further away from me, and left me dangling at the edge of the black hole of depression that he’d been the one to drag me out of in the first place.

Brendan was my lifeline, and I had no idea how I’d handle things if I lost him.

By five weeks into the year, we’d whittled down the twenty kids interested in being Mathletes to the eight we’d need to compete in regionals with quizzes, drills, and the general pain in the ass that was twice-weekly practice.. Even if it was kind of a big deal at our school, Mathletes wasn’t big enough anywhere else to warrant an invitational competition, and so we’d had the AP Calc teacher come in and proctor our test for us, and that was that.

At least, I thought it had been. Until the next week, when the team had been narrowed down to ten for the regional tests next month – eight official team members and two alternates. Sofia sauntered up to the front teacher’s desk where Brendan sat, with her Calculus textbook in tow, to ask him question after question about theory and strategy and God knew what else.

This was getting ridiculous—she could so easily find the answers to all of them on her own.

I was supposed to wait for Brendan to drive me home, so I couldn’t leave. But I couldn’t take it anymore. How close Brendan and Sofia sat all the time, how much they talked. They hadn’t been out on a date, I knew that much. They hadn’t kissed yet, according to Julia when I grilled her at lunch, and, being his sister, Julia would know.

Besides, Brendan would have told me. He told me everything, a truth I kept repeating to myself even though I felt it slipping away, day by day, through my fingers. He was just too preoccupied with school, and college applications, I told myself. He’d been out to Stanford, and up to Boston, too.

I stared at the two of them sitting way too close. And every day they got closer until I wondered when she’d start sitting on his lap. Not to mention the secret smiles they shared.

The thought made the air in the room go stuffy. I could barely breathe.

I pushed my books aside and jumped to my feet. “I’ll find you in a few minutes, okay?” I called to Brendan.

“Sure,” he said, bending his head back over Sofia’s textbook, so close to hers that they almost touched.

A couple of weeks ago, he would have asked me if I was okay. Now, though, he barely looked at me. The edges of my vision started to get a little fuzzy. I rolled my eyes, mostly to tamp down the nausea that churned my stomach. Thank God I had my camera with me. It would give me an excuse to get out of there.

Not that Brendan was asking for one. I mostly needed one for myself, since I felt so lame, letting him upset me this much.

The stairs to the roof were at the back of a narrow alcove that also led to the janitor’s closet—not the same stairwell we used to get to classes, which was probably why so few students had ever found that passage. Only a single flickering fluorescent light illuminated it, and the dull bluish glow was comforting, somehow. Maybe because it reflected my mood.

I made it up to the top of the roof and breathed in the cold. I was so on edge, I felt every whisper of the breeze like a tiny electric shock on my face, and when I breathed it in, down my throat and into my lungs, which were suddenly having some trouble getting enough air.

I sat down at the edge of the roof on the gravelly surface, grateful for the feeling of the stones digging into my bottom. If there were a thousand pebbles per square meter, and this rooftop was thirty by twenty meters, there were six hundred thousand pebbles up here. Approximately three hundred of which were currently digging into my butt. Lots of tiny pieces to make up the whole surface, reminding me that there were lots of little problems in the world, and mine weren’t the only ones. I let my feet dangle over the edge, trying to force my breaths to their lazy swinging rhythm, trying to focus on the arcs they made in the sunset light. But all I could see was the memory of Sofia, hanging on Brendan’s arm. Nudging her way into Brendan’s life and onto the Mathletes at the same time—the only two things in the world that I really wanted.

My heart started pounding, and my lungs felt impossibly empty. I couldn’t get enough air into them if I tried. Panic attack. Fuck.

This hadn’t happened since I first moved here. Since the last time I felt completely alone.

A sharp whistle pierced the still air of the night. A tall figure in a baseball cap covering a mop of curls stood in the middle of the parking lot below. Vincent.

“Hey, Ashley! What’re you doing up there?”

“Uh…photography project.” I struggled for my original excuse, focused on getting normal-sounding words out. “Grabbing some sunset shots.”

“Could you use some company?”

Before I had a chance to think about what I was doing, I nodded. I didn’t know whether he could see it from that far below, or whether he assumed my answer was yes, but he smiled. I could see it from all the way up there on the roof—holy hell, that grin was beautiful.

“What’s the easiest way up?” he asked. I returned his grin, thinking of all the harder ways up. Would he have climbed the wall like Peter Parker?

“Second door on the left,” I shouted. I had to find more air to raise my voice, and I felt a little better then.

“The janitor’s closet?” he asked.

I nodded, exaggerating my movement so he could see in the waning light. “Go through the door in the back of it, it leads to a stairwell. It’ll take you up here.”

He swung the door of the Porsche open, traded his huge lacrosse bag for a smaller one, and headed toward the school.

Waiting for him, my head spun at the easy way he said my name. How affectionate he sounded. I thought of all the other girls he could be hanging out with right now, or how he could have gone for burgers with the team.

I noticed that the stars had started to poke through the deep blue canopy of sky, and my heartbeat slowed. I pulled my DSLR out of my bag, along with a mini-tripod Brendan had bought me for my birthday. The sunset had brightened to an insane show of watermelon, tangerine, and orchid streaks, a last image of a quickly fading summer. I tilted my head back and took a deep breath in, glad for the sharp cold of the air, but regretting that there would be no fireflies.

The familiar creak of the roof door told me he was coming. Moments later, he plunked down next to me, like we’d done this every night for weeks.

“How was practice?” I asked.

“Oh, you know. Just another hour of jocks on a field.”

I raised my eyebrows. To every other kid who played lacrosse here, the sport was what they ate, breathed, and slept.

“What?” He laughed. “There’s more to life than lacrosse. Like this sunset. Probably why you’re up here.”

I wasn’t about to tell him why I was up on that roof. Probably sucked enough having a sister in high school with you, without everyone talking about her. Plus, he didn’t need to know any more about my crush on Brendan than he already did.

And I decided I didn’t want to tell him, considering the way he was looking at me right now. Like I was pretty. Like I was worth looking at.

“Uh,” I stammered, blushing at the thought, “What’s in the bag?”

“A Snickers bar, if you want it.” He smiled.

Could this guy read my mind? Those were my total weakness.

“Split it?”

“Absolutely,” he said, tearing the wrapping, handing me half, and taking a bite. “Damn, that’s good. My favorite since I was a kid.”

I don’t know why that made my heart jump a little bit, but it sure did.

“Okay. What else?”

“Ah. Most important. You’re not the only one interested in capturing this beauty.” He pulled out a sketch pad and drawing pencils.

“You draw? Seriously?”

“No, I just keep these around to make it look like I do. Seriously, Ashley. Yes, I draw.”

I normally hated being scolded in any way, even jokingly. But something about the way he looked at me made me smile when he said it.

We sat there for a few minutes, Vincent scratching at his paper and me fiddling with settings and taking test shots. The only thing nicer than the camera Brendan had given me was the lens his parents had found to go with it. As easily as they spent their money on stuff they didn’t need, they still did their research, that was for sure. This lens easily cost as much as the camera it fit on, and the vibrancy of color and its sharpness showed it.