Into My Heart

by Rosalie Ferdinand

  *****

  Shifting in the Endothermic Direction

  Rafe invited me to his house after school. I said yes because I thought that his brain was in need of an oil change. We had spent the remainder of our lunch hour going over his math notes and we didn't get very far. Rafe was behind like a camel's hump. While I personally had found the session to be a great warm-up for my Pre. Calculus class that afternoon, (and a great escape from fretting over the upcoming horrors of going to McGregor's party) Rafe shared my enthusiasm. Like when he tried to get Lou the janitor to incinerate his notes on the Standard Vertex Form. Rafe thought analyzing parabolas was stupid.

  I had to wonder how he'd spent his grade eight afternoons.

  When class was done for the day, Rafe met me at my locker. He now knew where it was as I had decoded the Pig Pen message for him. I'd hoped that once he saw how easy it was, he'd embrace the bacon so that we might be able to communicate in a more secure, Katrina-free manner. He said he didn't find it easy at all and just graffitied up the wall. I thought it was lucky that he was so good-looking because he didn't really know how to have a lot of fun.

  Rafe leaned against the row of lockers opposite mine, his arms crossed over his chest, while I loaded up my bag. I found him so cute and attractive at that moment that my maternal urges took over and I tried to get in a quick cheek pinch. He caught my hand before I met epidermis and told me that if I ever did than again, he'd punch me in the heart.

  I brightened and hardly felt any fright at all. "Yeah, why don't you? Then we can skip all the mushy-kissy stuff. If Katrina sees you battering up my aorta then she'll dump you like they originally dumped on Arrhenius' theory of Ionization."

  "Like hell I'm doing that." Rafe looked highly affronted. "It was an empty threat you idiot. I'd never actually hit a girl – my Mom would slaughter me first."

  Well that worked out quadratically-neat because I didn't really want Rafe to hit me, I just figured if he did, he might be a bit gentler than Katrina.

  Rafe held the double doors open for me to prove that he wasn't a thumper of women, just a thumper of homophobes. I sailed past him feeling too cool for school. Thinking about how widely accepted Arrhenius' theory was nowadays made me giddy. I was part of the ongoing evolution of science, I knew I was.

  The corridors were packed. We struggled against the rowdy, jostling crowd and could just make out the parking lot through the doors at the end of the hallway when someone grabbed onto my sleeve and didn't let go. I latched onto Rafe so he wouldn't leave without me.

  It was the tall, pretty brunette. She glanced at Rafe, glanced at my hand holding his wrist and then glanced back at me. "Let's go to the bathroom."

  "I don't wizz in public lady." I quickly let go of Rafe, disturbed by this new development. I wasn't the kind of girl who liked to tinkle in pairs. "And anyway I don't need to go, that soup is still farting around my guts."

  "I think she wants to talk to you Janie." Smirking, Rafe patted the top of my head like I was a local mongrel-stray.

  Pretty brunette glared at Rafe. She was probably remembering him kissing around on Katrina.

  I followed pretty brunette into a nearby bathroom. Three small blond girls were clustered around the sinks, swapping Lip Smackers and griping about how unfair a ten o'clock curfew was. Pretty brunette kicked a stall door hard with some cool boots and said, "Scram."

  The three blonds scrammed.

  I was amazed out of my Medulla Oblongata. Whenever I said 'scram', Grandma said 'jam' and threw a spoonful over her shoulder to ward off genital warts. "Tyrannosaurs means tyrant lizard, did you know?"

  Pretty brunette leaned against the radiator and checked out her flawless reflection in the speckled mirror. "You tell anyone about this, including Moretti, and I'll tell Katrina you were kissing her man."

  "NO NO NO, don't tell, not ever, I'll be flattened into a parallelogram, oh ye Gods, I have so much Astrophysics left to learn," I babbled, wringing my hands and doing a 'I-have-to-pee' foot to foot dance. "I didn't even kiss Rafe back 'cause I dunno how and it was my first kiss ever and no one likes me because I'm ugly and have no social skills and please don't tell Katrina."

  "You're not that ugly," pretty brunette muttered flatly. "Lemme see your bra."

  I blinked at her. "X squared?"

  She took out a cigarette from her trendy little handbag and lit up, even though smoking inside school was against the rules. She didn't seem like the kind of girl who gave a neutron about school rules.

  My clever little math joke was obviously lost on her. "Again you mean?"

  She blew smoke out the open window and scowled.

  This was certainly unusual; she'd already seen my bra once today. Was it something of a memory loss situation? Or did she just suffer from self-esteem problems? I mean sure she was a real looker but maybe her parents were cruel duds and called her fat and stupid and made her mow the lawn in hailstorms. Or maybe she had no talents. I had mathematics and the world of science but what did she have...smoking diesel fuel and buying overpriced handbags that resembled hotdogs?

  I shrugged in what-the-Fibonacci manner and showed her my bra. Again. She was lucky that I'd decided to wear an exciting La Senza bra today; it was a sunshine yellow cleavage-inducer with clear, detachable straps in case you wanted to wear something strapless. Not that I had anything fancy like that but who could say no to something yellow, especially when it was only $5.99 and especially when I had no cleavage to speak of?

  Pretty brunette stared at my over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder while inhaling lung cancer.

  "This double decimal's from La Senza," I explained, hitching my tan cords up over the waistband of my blue flamingo undies. Undies weren't in the bargain so I wasn't about to let pretty brunette see mine. "Grandma got it for me to cheer me up when I caught the flu on Spring Equinox. It was a shitcakes experience. I was so stuffed up on buyable meds that I wouldn't have even been able to explain the difference between the Quotient Rule and the Chain Rule. That's some wacky, eh?"

  "Get lost."

  I yanked my t-shirt down. Pretty brunette was like a chimney, I reflected as I pulled on my small, brown zip-up hoodie. Smoking and tall and nice to look at but kinda rude and didn't say a whole lot. "Vitamin E is essential for reproduction and foetal development." I pushed up my imaginary glasses to make me appear extra creditable and did the 'I-have-to-pee' dance out of there.

  Rafe was standing around and chatting with a few chunks of beef near the water fountain. I was glad when he left them because I was a vegetarian and didn't wish to partake of any beefy, meaty nonsense. They were probably even dumber then Rafe and Rafe didn't even know what a Vertical Transformation meant.

  "What did Daphne want?" Rafe asked me as we headed towards the exit.

  I chewed on some hair. Yeah as to that, why had she wanted to see my bra a second time? The first time wasn't her fault; I'd blurted out the invite without thinking too much about what I was saying. The fact that she might've blabbed to Katrina about me and Rafe kissing had made H2SO4 stew out of my cranial innards. Sure my bra was a real party but if she'd wanted to know where I'd gotten it from she could've just asked. She wasn't much for talking, true, but I understood hand gestures as much as the next donkey. Also, she had boobs too and they were way bigger than mine, if what she'd been advertising in that tight little red top was unstuffed. She could've just checked herself out and not bothered with me. "We were discussing Ohm's Law. VIR, if you recollect."

  "Uh huh." Rafe gave me a suspicious look as we stepped outside. "Why would she wanna discuss Ohm's Law with you?"

  "Because I'm a brilliant young scholar." There were a lot of things I wasn't – pretty, popular, cool, normal – but the one thing I knew I was, was smart. When I was forty and my peers were busy spending thousands of dollars to maintain a youthful face and body, all I had to do was check out the library scene in order to maintain my brain. I didn't care what the cellophane looked like, I wanted the transistor orb inside.

&
nbsp; "Yeah, that much is true." Rafe waved to a big bunch of people hanging around and smoking. "I've never even heard of Ohm's Law. Hard to believe Daphne has."

  "The current flow through a conductor is directionally proportional to the potential difference and inversely proportional to the resistance." I picked up an interesting sedimentary rock that was the exact shape of a rhombus. I would have to investigate it further. "It's all the latest to-do in Cosmopolitician. Girls like to recite Ohm's Law to fortify their oral cavities, if you know what I mean."

  "No, I really fucking don't."

  "That's because you're from Jupiter and I'm an unknown asteroid belt. Everyone knows that, dudsicle."

  Rafe led me to his shitmobile. It was a rusty, peeling, dented heap that looked as though it had taken part in the Serbo-Croatian war. There was a spidery, circular crack defacing the back windshield glass that was the size of Quebec City. The back bumper was hanging on by a rusted thread and the driver's door seemed to have been rammed by a Boeing 747. Someone had sprayed something in yellow Italian on the hood and it didn't look too friendly.

  I pointed. "What's that say?"

  Rafe scowled. "It's a comment on my sexuality. My shithead cousin Claudio wrote it, that fucker."

  So that's what a comment on someone's sexuality written in Italian looked like. Elliptical. "If you're ever feeling bi-curious Suril'd be more than willing to lend a hand." I chortled uproariously at my own joke. "He thinks you're as fine as the Ideal Gas Law!"

  Rafe just stared at me, revolted, so I quickly got into his car before he could get mad at me. Rafe's car wasn't locked. That was probably because it had nothing in it that anyone would ever want to steal. It didn't even have a tapedeck. There was a lot of duct tape holding shit together. My window had no glass in it and Rafe had to sit on his seatbelt because apparently if you buckled it up, you were stuck.

  "Okay so Angelina needs some work," Rafe said over the whines and shrieks of the engine starting. "What woman doesn't?"

  "My Grandma and Suril's Mom don't, they're perfect," I replied, holding onto the rusted door handle as Rafe laid a rubber strip out the lot. "And neither does Marie Curie. She's an inspiration to us all. She's my favourite hero tied with Bill Ny the Science Guy. It's my dream to one day discover a new element like she did. I'll call it Surilium after the only friend I got."

  Rafe gave me a sidelong glance. "Shah's really lucky to have you for a friend, you know that?"

  "Yes I do know that. I made him a fake ID so he can get into those gay clubs downtown." I scratched my nose with the rhombus rock. "I'm a very decent friend. I can talk to him about Multivariate Analysis and rimming over hummas. I hear it's not easy that you can find someone to do that with."

  "Uh...right." He was looking revolted again. He must not have been a big fan of hummas.

  Rafe's car huffed and puffed and fumed and loomed and released enough stinking emissions to kill off a couple hundred kilometres of wildlife. Angelina turned corners like a beluga whale, barely made it past fifty-five kph and smelled like King of Donairs. She was pretty cooltastic.

  We pulled up to Rafe's house in a cloud of puttering diesel a while later. His house was fairly big, with a gigantic porch and a neatly cultivated lawn. A silver Lexus LS-430 sat gleaming in the driveway.

  "That's quite the freebooting 'ride'," I remarked, tossing in some cool vernacular so that I seemed 'with it'.

  Rafe's mouth twitched. It was hard to believe that he had put in on mine. "It's my Mom's. She'd die before ever letting me drive it. It's practically her fourth child."

  "That's a good fourth child to have. For example it'll never put fish sticks down its pants so that it can go swimming underwater."

  "...tell me you aren't speaking from personal experience."

  "It made some sense at the time," I said as Rafe unlocked the front door. "I thought the fish could show me all the cool underwater hangouts. How why I to know it was dead?"

  Rafe's house smelled like baking cookies and was the neatest house I'd ever been in. It looked like the kinda house you saw in cleaning product commercials. Everything was shiny and perfectly aligned and free of dust. I could practically see my reflection in the silver Maple hardwood floor.

  "Ma I'm home!" Rafe bellowed as we took off our shoes. He hung up my hoodie and his puffy vest in the closet, which was a miracle in organization. I didn't even know closets could be clean. "She's probably over at my Aunt and Uncle's," Rafe told me. "They only live across the street."

  Sensitive to the fact that it was still S day, Rafe hunted out some sugar cookies and a couple cans of Sprite. The kitchen was so bright and sparkly that I felt I needed prescription sunglasses. Even the cookies glinted in the streaming sunlight.

  We took our loot to the TV room. It was a cosy space filled with wide leather sofas, a couple of lazy boys, neatly lined bookshelves and an expensive, silver entertainment system. The walls were covered with all things Italy – maps, gorgeous tourism posters, replicas of famous paintings, the Italian soccer team. We got settled on the sofa and laid out our textbooks and binders on the glass coffee table before us.

  Rafe drank some pop and elbowed me, smirking. "Wanna practice making out now?"

  I pondered the persistence of the average teenaged boy's hormones over a really good sugar cookie. I had pinched Rafe's cheek. I had eaten disgusting soupslop in front of him. I had accidentally spit some chewed-up strudel on him. And still he was willing to kiss my mouth. Well, even an object that's at rest will remain at rest, provided that it's not subjected to an unbalanced force. I was not, if anything, an unbalanced force.

  I took out a pencil and a receipt from a graduated cylinder I'd purchased over the weekend and wrote on it f(x) equals -(x plus 3)2 - 1. I handed it to Rafe. "I'll practice with you if you can graph this and tell me where the y-intercept is and what the vertex is."

  Rafe goggled at the receipt incredulously. "Are you shitting me?"

  "All angles are congruent my friend." I leaned back against the sofa, feeling extremely superior. I'd been able to analyze parabolas by the age of thirteen. Graphing had masked the horrifying pain of realizing that I was going to have to bleed once a month until I was fifty. When you were thirteen and already felt like a bumpy buffoon for growing lumps out of your chest, monthly bleed-a-thons truly were horrifying.

  "Fine." Rafe also leaned back and rested his arm along the back of the sofa. "But I'm not graphing it now, I'll do it before you leave. Or have you got a time limit on this thing?"

  "You can graph it on the next Bongo Bongo Day," I said, shoving another cookie in my mouth. "I just don't wanna have to kiss your mouth."

  "Why the hell not?" Rafe demanded, indignant. "All girls wanna kiss me!"

  "Then I am a glockenspiel." I picked up Rafe's Chemistry textbook with excitable, shaky hands. "Holy domain and range did I ever have some good nights with this old scalar. Me and Suril pulled an all-nighter and read this sugared up on Smarties and Root Beer and rainbow gumballs. I'll never forget our drawings of electrolytic cells. Har har, I miss grade eight a lot."

  Rafe blinked a couple of times, momentarily distracted from the crushing weight of his slumping ego. "You and Shah had a sleepover and read a grade twelve textbook? Jesus, no wonder either of you weirdos have any friends."

  "Well why should we be friends with people like Katrina Edwards?" I clutched the textbook to my chest, stung. "She used spend all her time calling Suril a Paki and spreading rumours about how I stole other girls' underwear because I was too poor to afford my own. Suril doesn't think I'm a weirdo, he likes me how I am. So there, that's proved a la mechanisms but I'll bet you don't even know what mechanisms are."

  "No, I don't." He scooted close to me so that all I could see were his adorable freckles and wide bromothymol blue eyes. "Jane I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that. Anyone can see that you're ten times better than Katrina. She may be totally hot but she's always been a little on the mean side."

  My eyes widened. Whoever heard of a t
eenaged boy saying that I was better than Katrina? It was wacky junction most extreme. "That's like saying polygons less than 180 degrees actually do exist. "

  "Uh huh." Rafe skimmed his fingers across my knuckles. It made me feel like I'd just eaten a mouthful of S soup. "At first I thought you were creepy and really weird and, well I still think you're really weird, but you're also loyal and smart and you don't give a shit about what anyone thinks of you. That's decent."

  I was amazed. "No one who's not my Grandma or Suril or Max Planck ever told me anything like that before."

  "Planck? That shitty stoner who works at the Petro-Canada down on Cedar?"

  "No, the German physicist who proved mathematically that the amount of radiant energy absorbed or emitted by a body is proportional to the frequency of the radiation." I took a gulp of pop and rubbed my nose to get rid of the bubbles fizzing up there. "I dream a lot about Max Planck. We eat mashed potatoes sandwiches and study Thermodynamics together. He has his own constant you know. Planck's constant; 6.6262 x 10 -34 joules. It's widely known."

  "Sounds kinda like that Avocado's number we learned about at the beginning of this year."

  I laughed so hard that I got 6.6262 x 10 -23 stomach cramps. "Avogadro's number," I gasped out, wiping my watering face on my pop can. Rafe sure knew how to crack me up.

  We spent the next couple of hours working on Chemistry. It was a real noble gas. Sometimes I got too enthusiastic and couldn't really speak properly, between all the bouncing in my seat and excitable gesturing and dribbling of Sprite, so Rafe made me take walks around the room to calm down. He didn't laugh at me but I could tell that he wanted to. I didn't mind because I was feeling proud of him. Once he put his mind to learning, he wasn't half dumb at all. By the end of it, Rafe was able to redo an old Solutions assignment that he'd originally gotten a three on and this time he got an eight. I was so thrilled that I shed one tear and Rafe said I was a spazzy dumbass and kissed my cheek. He was a very strange lad, I thought.

  We decided to take a break after that joyous event; I needed the bathroom and Rafe wanted to check his e-mail and some basketball scores. The bathroom Rafe showed me to was another gleaming tribute to Mr. Clean, not that I'd expected anything less. Everything was cream and lilac and smelled like a garden. There were a few hundred integers of fancy hand creams and oils and delicately-shaped soaps lining the marble-topped sink counter. Six fluffy vanilla towels of varying sizes were meticulously arranged on the towel rack. I did my business as fast as I could because it felt like a crime to desecrate such a spotless, fragrant bathroom. I was too scared to mess with the towels...and I had no clue which one to use anyway...so I just wiped my dripping lavender-scented hands on my cords. I was glad to leave that bathroom because it was a bit petrifying.

  Back in the TV room I found Rafe lounging around with two new guys.

  "This is Jane," Rafe said. "Jane, these are my brothers Guido and Lucan."

  The only things Rafe had in common with his brothers were dark hair and blue eyes. Guido and Lucan looked like brothers and were obviously Italian while Rafe looked like a pick-pocket and was obviously Irish.

  Guido was slouching in one of the leather lazy boys and he was the biggest guy I've ever seen up close in my life. He completely filled up the far side of the room, radiating macho all over the place. He made Conner McGregor look linear. Guido was swarthy, with a shaved head, a nose that looked like it had been broken a few times and a fading black eye. He was wearing a grey uniform with short-sleeves that showcased his watermelon-sized, rippling biceps. He looked like a hardcore thug. I thought it was too bad I hadn't met Guido before Rafe; Guido would've massacred Conner and ate his car for dessert.

  Lucan was sprawled out on the couch with Rafe. He was also swarthy, with messy hair and a thin, neat line of facial hair that went from sideburn to sideburn. He was lean and rangy and had an easy-going, languid air about him. His stomach was concave beneath his white wifebeater and he was covered in tattoos...from both wrists to shoulders, his knuckles, beneath his left ear, what I could see of his chest. I could tell that he was one of those 'bad boys' that girls seemed to get all idiotic over.

  "Halo-gens," I quipped, shuffling in and sniggering at my own joke. Sometimes I was a too funny bunny.

  "What'd you do to your pants?" Rafe demanded, staring at my wet cords.

  "I got scared by all those fluffy towels." I dumped down onto the other lazy boy since Rafe and Lucan had taken up all the sofa space. "I didn't know which towel I was supposed to use...at home I just wipe off on my Grandma's nightdress. She says it's good for her eczema."

  "Yeah, that's how it should be," Lucan said, looking vaguely impressed. "None of this Martha Stewart fancyass shit."

  I asked Rafe, "How come you look Irish and they don't?"

  "Yeah, we've been wondering that too," Guido drawled out, smirking. He had a quiet, deep voice.

  "I'm not fucking Irish, I'm Italian," Rafe snapped, jerking away as Lucan elbowed him in the ribs, guffawing. "What's that supposed to mean anyway – I look Irish?"

  "Why do you think I always wanna pinch your freckly cheeks?" I scooped up Rafe's Chemistry book so that I had a covalent bond in the midst of all these two new faces. "You're such an Irish lad. You're a chimney sweep. You shine Wellies for a shilling. You steal fruits from the marketplace and get in pickles with the Bobbies. You sell newspapers-"

  "No I goddamn don't," Rafe growled, his freckles suffusing with boiling, red heat. "Shut up Jane."

  Guido was chuckling in a low, gruff kind of way. "You're such a little fucking chimney sweep. You keep stealing those potatoes and one day you'll have enough to make passage back to Belfast."

  "Piss off!" Rafe glowered in my direction. "Quit it with this Irish cockshit!"

  "That's no way to talk to such an enterprising young lady, fuckface," Lucan told Rafe, still snickering. He punched Rafe in the shoulder and nodded to my t-shirt. "I gotta say Jane, that shirt owns."

  Yes, it really did own, though I hadn't expected someone like Lucan to ever appreciate it. Suril had designed it for my last birthday. It was little and black and proclaimed in bold red letters, 'Math and alcohol don't mix...PLEASE DO NOT DRINK AND DERIVE!' "You're the only person who's ever liked this shirt besides my math teacher and Max Planck."

  "That greasy fucker who works down on Cedar?" Guido looked disgusted. "What's he know about anything that's not crack and porn?"

  "I think she's referring to the Max Planck who first showed that the emission spectra of atoms could be explained by assuming that electromagnetic radiation is quantized," Lucan explained. He winked at me. "Am I right? Weird science dreams from too much cramming?"

  I could feel my eyes enlarging up and out of my skull. I had been winked at. Winked at by a super-cool dude who got my hilarious t-shirt and who knew what Max Planck was famous for. A wave of dizziness cosined over me. Lucan seemed to be shining in white, twinkling light, almost as though Krypton had been energized around him. "You've heard of Planck?"

  Lucan smiled at me. "Sure who hasn't?"

  "Oh Jesus," Rafe grumbled irritably. My alluding to his Irish ancestry seemed to have made him most cranky. "I never heard of Max fucking Planck."

  I was beaming so hard my premature wisdom tooth twanged. I thought Lucan was as beautiful as a balanced Redox equation. "It's true, Rafe thought Planck's constant sounded like Avogadro's number."

  Lucan had a good hoot and thumped Rafe upside the head. Guido joined in by punching Rafe in the ribs. Rafe didn't look so thrilled and there was a lot of swearing in Italian involved. I snatched up my rhombus rock so it wouldn't get roughed up. Rafe, Lucan and Guido were a real family of real guys just like on TV. I'd never seen anything like this in my life. I wanted to go over and whack Rafe like everyone else was doing but then he might've punched me in the heart and I would've cried a saline solution.

  "Assholes," Rafe spat, rubbing his side. He kicked Guido, which had all the appearance of a spaghetti noodle striking the CN Tower. "T
hat fucking hurt."

  "I'm trying to toughen you up, you ungrateful little shit," Guido snapped, knocking Rafe's jaw. "You wouldn't last a day in Juvie."

  "You're gonna have your hands full trying to teach this numbnuts," Lucan informed me. "He couldn't even find the molar mass of water."

  "I fucking can so, dickwad," Rafe contradicted, incensed. His cheeks were a livid shade of methyl red.

  Lucan calmly thumped him again.

  "He really can, I taught him how," I told Lucan, nodding earnestly. "He learned loads today. Hey, do you wanna hear a hilarious chemistry joke?"

  "Fuck, on that note I'm outta here," Guido said. He stood up and cleared about 6'4. He was a mountain. "You sticking around for supper Jane?"

  "Yeah she's staying, let Mom know," Rafe spoke up before I could reply. "We still have graphing to go over, don't we Janie?" He gave me a pointed look that I could tell had more to do with making out rather then studying parabolas. He was such a corrupt little Irish chap.

  "Asymptotes ahoy," I agreed, mostly because I found Rafe's brothers fascinating. Both Suril and I had no siblings and this might be my only chance to observe three fully-developed males pursue a meal in their natural habitat. Plus I wanted to hang around Lucan for forever.

  Lucan smirked at me. "How about you tutor me too Jane?"

  "Ease off dipshit, she's underage," Guido said, punching Lucan on his way out of the room.

  "How old are you?"

  "Too young for you, asshole," Rafe retorted, kicking Lucan.

  "I'm seventeen and that's old enough to tutor," I declared, feeling indignant. "I have a ninety-nine point nine average. I can show Guido my midterm if he doesn't think I'm qualified."

  Rafe and Lucan exchanged glances. My astronomical average must've rendered them dazed. It was known to happen.

  "So let's hear that joke now."

  I coughed for a while to achieve perfect pitch and resonance and then solemnly intoned, "Once there was a small piece of Sodium who lived in a test tube and fell in love with a Bunsen burner. 'Oh Bunsen Burner, my flame, I melt whenever I see you,' the Sodium said. The Bunsen burner replied, 'It's just a phase you're going through.'"

  "Yeah fucking hilarious," Rafe muttered while Lucan and I laughed our protons off.

  "Just a phase," I chortled and slapped my thigh with the rhombus rock. It hurt a bit because the rock was sedimentary like that but I was guffawing too hard to care. I sucked in air, trying to breathe but it wasn't easy with jokes like that around.

  "That's a good one Jane." Lucan shoved Rafe over and patted the spot next to him. "Come over here, I'll show you something cool."

  "Keq," I said, eagerly flopping down beside him.

  Chuckling, Lucan borrowed some of my paper and my Techniclick mechanical pencil and wrote down ( (12 plus 144 plus 20 plus (3 x 4(1/2) ) ) / 7) (5 x 11) equals 9 squared plus 0. "Would you believe that there's a limerick in this equation?"

  I bounced in my seat, doing the sitting version of the 'I-have-to-pee' dance. I was so excited that I felt like I had a scatter plot inside my undies. "Yeah I would chief, I really, really would to the 22.414 L/mol!"

  "Quit spazzing or you'll strain something," Rafe ordered, rolling his eyes. I understood that he must not've been too chuffed with the way he couldn't get any of the jokes but I was planning on explaining them to him so that he could hoot too. I just hoped his bowels weren't too itchy.

  Ignoring him, Lucan lightly tweaked my nose, making me cross-eyed, before delivering the limerick.

  "A dozen, a gross and a score,

  Add 3 times the square root of 4

  Divided by 7

  Plus 5 times 11

  Equals 9 squared and not a bit more."

  I hooted uproariously and clapped and thought my aortas were going to burst off. Lucan was even more awesome than the Quadratic Formula and any warthog knew how handy the Q formula was. "That was astronomically cooltastically stupenderrific!" I marvelled at the equation. It couldn't have been more perfect if Pythagorean had written it. "Did you devise that?"

  "Nah, some professor somewhere did. I just kept it around 'cause I thought it was awesomeness."

  "I'm gonna frame this!" I hugged the paper to my 'Don't drink and derive' chest. "You're the coolest dude I ever met and not just because you got a Googolplex of tattoos!"

  "Fuck you're some cute," Lucan said, nudging my knee with his.

  I gaped at him, speechless.

  "She's here to tutor me not put up with your perverted bullshit." Rafe punched Lucan in the arm. "Now fuck off, we have more studying to do."

  Lucan knocked Rafe upside the head. "You jealous chimney sweep? Does Katrina know about all this?"

  My lack of speech went the way of the Alchemist. "Don't mention her name, she'll hear us and kick me in the boob." I shuddered and clutched onto my rhombus rock protectively. "I'm a big sufferer of Katrinaphobia. Currently, there is no cure but to graduate and move away."

  "I always thought Katrina was an idiot," Lucan told me. "Her rack is fine but you still blow her out the water Jane."

  I decided that once I got home, I was going to mark today down on my Einstein calendar as being the most surreal, irrational, mystical, non-Jane day that ever had occurred. Grandma and Suril weren't even going to believe all the new things that had happed to me today. I'd eaten lunch with a boy who wasn't Suril. Said boy had kissed me and wanted to kiss me some more. I'd shown my bra to a girl...twice. I was going to have supper at boy's house. I saw three brothers hit each other a lot. Two boys thought I was better than Katrina, in spite of her being hot and having great tits. I met a cool badass and he also liked Math and Chemistry. He called me cute.

  I jammed my Techniclick into my arm but I didn't wake up. There was a small hole in my arm now. I prodded at it but it didn't go away, only the pencil parts rubbed off. I bit it some and then the hole got disguised by teeth marks. I could tell Grandma that it was an Algebraic bite and see if she believed me, seeing as how I knew two boys who liked me now.

  Rafe had let Lucan know that he was planning on breaking up with Katrina, amidst much swearing and wallopings.

  "About damn time you ditch her – you knew she was gonna be more trouble then she's worth."

  "Thanks for the fucking tip Dr. Phil."

  Cue more scuffling. I'd definitely made the right choice in hiring Rafe, he was well experienced in the art of violent thumpings.

  "And don't forget Ma never liked Katrina."

  "Would you get lost already, I have math shit to learn!"

  Lucan smirked and put Rafe in a headlock. "What happened to Chem. Irish boy?"

  Sniggering, I leaned over Lucan and got a pinch in while Rafe was out of commission. I couldn't help myself anymore than acids could help reacting with most metals to form Hydrogen gas. "Shine yer shoe for a shilling Guvn'r," I trilled in my best 'Please Sir I want some more' Oliver Twist voice.

  Rafe glared liquid Nitrogen at me as Lucan doubled over laughing.

  "You give me all these strange urges that I've never felt before," I explained, hastily scooting out of Rafe's line of smacking. "I want to feed you cookies and milk and tuck you in at night and kiss your freckly little forehead."

  "You say one more word Jane and I'll sic Katrina on you," Rafe snarled murderously.

  I snapped my mouth shut and nudged Lucan to stop laughing but he was practically crying. "Katrinaphobia," I finally hissed out of the corner of my mouth, hoping Rafe wouldn't hear.

  Lucan caught his breath after a few moments and told me, "You're a riot, you know that Jane?"

  "A Keq less than 1.0 favours the reactants," I replied sagely.

  "Yeah, but a Keq equivalent to 1.0 favours neither the products nor the reactants." He chucked me under the chin and told me to make a Rafe stop drooling all over his textbooks. He gave Rafe a parting thump along with a touch more verbal abuse and left us alone.

  There was a freezing silence, much like what you'd find on Saturn. Rafe was still furious with me, if the
expression on his adorable face was any indicator. I'd always hated when people were mad at me and I really hated Rafe being mad at me, especially as he thought I was ten times better than Katrina. Probably I shouldn't've said that he was a chimney-sweeping, shoe-shining, fruit-stealing, newspaper-selling Irish bloke. Probably I shouldn't've pinched his cheeks again. Probably I had no sense of self-control.

  Before he had bought the nuts, my Dad used to lecture me for not thinking before I did anything. I'd never really mastered that concept, mostly because Grandma hadn't carried on with that line of lecturing. She did whatever she felt like and to hell with what everyone else, including herself, thought. She said life was too short to fart around thinking all day. I figured that was as good a way of going about as any.

  I cautiously did a phase change over to Rafe's side. "Don't be mad at me Rafe." I pressed my rhombus rock to his leg and made unit circles out of my eyes. "I'm sorry that I pinched your cheek again and said all those things about you being Irish. I shouldn't've done it but I did it anyway because I haven't got too much common sense. But I promise I'll never do it again and you can tell everyone at school that my breath smells like a plasma transplant and that I'm so dumb that I didn't know that a cube has nine mirror planes, thirteen axes of rotational symmetry and seventeen planes of rotational symmetry."

  Rafe shifted, his dark blue eyes melding with my shitty dung ones. "Uh, what're doing to my leg?"

  "I'm bestowing upon you my rhombus rock. It's a symbol of the Treaty of our Camaraderie." I stuffed the rhombus rock into his palm so that he would understand the enormity of my destitution. "I remember when I first found my rhombus rock. It feels like only last week."

  Rafe's lips quirked and I knew that he wasn't mad anymore. I was essential to his Katrina-dumping plot afterall. "You found it today."

  "Well Reimann sums are an excellent way to find the area under a curve, Rafe." I snuffled and chewed some hair. "I can explain that joke I told Lucan if you'd like. I didn't want to explain it then because I didn't want you to feel stupid in front of your brother."

  Smiling, Rafe poked my side and made me squirm. "You like Lucan a lot don't you?"

  "I do, he thinks my t-shirt is funny and he knows who Max Planck is and he showed me a super cool to the dekillion math limerick." I smiled down at the equation, giddy bubbles of peptic acid effervescing inside my stomach. "At first I just thought he was some ruffian with a lot of tattoos but now I know he's neato-mosquito too. How come you didn't get him to tutor you?"

  "Lucan's works at that tattoo parlour on the waterfront and he's also a Calculus TA at UFH this semester," Rafe told me. "So he doesn't really have a lot of time to tutor me."

  "Wow cow, I never met a real live Calculus TA before," I breathed, awed. I couldn't wait to tell Grandma that Lucan was a tattoo artist, she'd hoof it downtown straight away. "Maybe he can give me some university assignments to do, I find the high school stuff tedious."

  "Just remember Lucan's seven years older then you." Rafe took the math limerick from me and set it on the coffee table. "But for now, I think we should get back to work don't you think?"

  "Yes I do think!" I squirmed eagerly against the sofa, scanning over Rafe's textbooks and binders. "Do you wanna hit up Math or Physics? I say we do Physics because we haven't even touched that yet."

  "Let's do Chemistry."

  I beamed, pleasantly surprised. "You're up for more Chem? That's diprotic with me pal!"

  Rafe caught hold of my chin in this spiffy-quick move and kissed me. His other hand came up to cup my cheek. His mouth was really soft and it was slanting all over mine a la y mx b. This kiss lasted much longer than the first one had and it made my heart race in a way that only advanced textbooks ever did.

  "This is how I do Chem. Janie," Rafe whispered, skimming his cool fingers over cheek. I would've thought that line was pure Havarti but I felt too dizzy to think much about cheese. "You didn't forget my terms did you?"

  "Katrina's going to make goulash out of my innards," I whispered back, gripping the sofa with one hand and his knee with the other. "I should ditch you and hire Guido."

  "I don't think so." He kissed me again, deeper this time, until there was no air left inside my lungs. His tongue traced my lip like it had last time. "I think you're sorta cute too."

  It got abyss dark. A rushing, swishing heartbeat passed before I realized that I'd closed my eyes again. "You do?"

  "Mmm. Open your mouth Janie."

  His tongue touched mine and it was slick and hot and stroking. Blood flooded my brain like a burette and my last coherent thought was that the Kinetic Theory was true on many, many levels; particles in all forms of matter really were in a constant state of motion.