Into My Heart

by Rosalie Ferdinand

  *****

  Translational Kinetic Energy

  Sucking water from the ends of my shampoo-fresh, dripping hair, I looked into the foggy bathroom mirror and shouted, "Unhand me now you devilish fiend!" I grappled dramatically with my fluffy Rafe-towel, which was the same dark blue as his eyes, grunting and shoving, until one end of Rafe fell in the toilet.

  "When you cheat on Katrina, you'll end up in water most murky," I said sagely, wringing toilet off of Rafe. I rubbed at my nostrils for further inspiration and adopted more of a high-pitched vocal range. "Disengage yourself from me now, fiendish devil! Disengage yourself from me now, devilish fiend. Hmmm..devilish fiend or fiendish devil? Aluminum or Aluminium? Comfortable or Comforchair?"

  During our practicing yesterday afternoon, Rafe had told me that I should lose all the Science jibber jabber. He said that there'd be a good chance that Katrina wouldn't understand what I was yodelling about and might think that I was encouraging him. I thought that that was quite the reasonable concern since Katrina, as beautiful as she was, wasn't what anyone would deem the 'gifted' freebie one received upon purchasing fifty dollars worth of cosmetics at the Clinique counter.

  The second last thing I wanted in my lifetime (the first being an eighty-nine average...and oh how that very notion made the noxious gases rumble inside my rectum) was for Katrina to think I was trying to steal her boyfriend...again. I hadn't forgotten how she'd written 'MR. DRISCOLL IS A FATSO DIARRHOEA BRAIN' on my Prime Minister election coverage project in black permanent marker so thick that it had leaked through about twelve of my thirty-one pages.

  That had been in grade eight. Now I was in grade twelve and scholarships and university applications and Math Competitions and Chemistry Fairs were dependent upon my equidistant average and fertile mind. I couldn't risk Katrina's anger for all the kidney beans inside the Excretory system. She'd been mean to me for no reason in elementary and junior high and I got menstrual cramps just thinking about what she'd do if I actually gave her a reason to be mean.

  I sat on the edge of the bath tub and put on my lucky red, padded La Senza cleavage-inducer. True I wasn't planning on inducing anyone with my boobular region, artificially-ample or otherwise, but I figured I couldn't go wrong (and hopefully Katrina couldn't go right) with a little extra dose of the old Lu2.

  "They put a brassiere on a camel,

  She wasn't dressed proper, you know.

  They' put a brassiere on a camel,

  So that her humps wouldn't show," I shrieked as I cha-chaed into my cords and felt a lot better inside my kidneys, speaking of.

  Grandma had recited that poem to me on our first bra shopping trip together. The poem, along with Grandma's assertions that bras could be fun as long as you never bought 'wimpy white' or 'barfy beige', had been enough to make me forget about shrink-wrapping my zeroes and get back to graphing a few linear functions in the dressing room of The Bay. Unfortunately no amount of poetry had been able to make me appreciate monthly bloody undies, especially since Grandma was known to brag about the joys of menopause and burn boxes of tampons and maxi pads in our fireplace just to spite me.

  I yanked on my t-shirt and went back to sucking shower out of my hair.

  Before Rafe had left, he'd outlined his Conner-bashing itinerary to me. He was planning on waiting until very late, two or three in the morning when most of the people would be passed out in their own vomit, and then he was going to 'tear McGregor a new fucking shithole' as he so kinetically put it. He'd wanted to know if I wanted to hide and watch the entire thing go downtown.

  "NO3 way," I muttered, shuddering as I gave my hair a rough rubbing with Rafe. It had gotten to the point where I could taste more water than shampoo and what was the good of that, if I could just drink a glass from the shower anytime I wanted?

  I had always had a great dislike of violence. I hated seeing it on TV, I hated hearing about it school, I hated reading about it in the papers. Violence made me feel both sad and ill on a cellular level. My brain would understand that Conner deserved what was coming to him...and for a nasty, spoiled bully like him, violence was the only thing he'd understand...but my innards wouldn't. Still, I had the image of Suril's injured face graphed into my cranial tissue and I thought that I at least owned it to my very best friend in the world to duck in and poke one of Conner's broken legs.

  My stomach lurched.

  I burped to get that queasy feeling out of me and headed back to my room. I found it to be quite the Thermo plaza of central activity; Suril was laying on my bed rereading a favourite old okra called 'Hybrid and Incompatible Finite Element Methods', while Mrs. Shah and Grandma were taking turns using the binoculars to spy on Mrs. Buschi, the obnoxiously chirpy, two-faced Charge Nurse who lived across the street. Her son Quentin was in grade twelve also and he was the kind of insufferable pervert who'd set up cameras in the bathroom to catch his stepsisters in the shower and then sell the tapes to his equally perverted friends. Quentin worked at the Gap in the mall and had to wear some kind of a headset to sell jeans. Suril and I had a bet going on when he'd get fired for peeking at girls in the changing rooms. We'd both lost since we'd both bet a week and he was still going strong at three months.

  "You know, when your jugs get to looking like that, they ain't jugs no more, they're udders," Grandma announced, handing over the binoculars to Mrs. Shah. "Ughs cubed, as the nerds say."

  "Yes, it is very much chee! And why is she not investing in some proper girdle? A gut that rotund needs to be bound, packaged and registered in case of any heart attacking emergency!"

  They both chortled and did some thigh slapping.

  Suril grinned at me over 'Hybrid and Incompatible Finite Element Methods'. "They've been at it ever since you jumped into the shower."

  "What sounds more better, 'devilish fiend' or fiendish devil?" I asked as I opened up my printer and took out a pair of socks.

  "I've always been partial to 'villainous fiend' myself," he replied. "But then again you can't really go wrong with a good, solid 'vile beast' now can you?"

  "So! Let me see now..." Mrs. Shah trailed off as she turned around to examine me. "You are wearing this things to the party?"

  "Not exactly what you'd call a real glam look." Grandma scrutinized me through her binoculars. "Maybe you should try on some of my eyeshadow...I got a lotta colours and they're all real sparkly."

  "Grandma, that would only serve to add an extra CH3COOH to my already balanced equation." I was wearing a poopular pair of brown cords, matching poopular un-zipped sweater and a pissy yellow t-shirt that said in graffiti writing, 'For a good prime call 555-793-7319'. "This is my Ode de Toilet look."

  Suril waggled his eyebrows at me, grinning. "I think Rafe's definitely gonna wanna call you for a good prime."

  "Jane dhikra,you can't wear these...duds," Mrs. Shah protested, appalled. "You are attending a social event with an Italian who has become interested in you! Have you no nice party frocks?"

  I gasped as my eyes grew to the equation r2 equals theta. "I don't wear amphibians Ma!"

  Mrs. Shah blinked at me. "Well at least you must have a skirt, no?"

  Grandma and Suril both groaned.

  I did have a skirt, which I thought was very lucky since it had blown into our backyard after a big wind storm four years ago. I wore it to Math Competitions and Fairs, University Lectures, Christmas Eve mass and a wedding once too. It was black and soft and was longer than floor length on me but I had no problems with rolling it up at the tummy and then flattening out the bunches with a few belts and long sweaters.

  I dug it out of my closet and handed it to Mrs. Shah. "I can wear this because it'll go good with my lucky bra. This can represent the dark shade of the holes you gotta dump in, in India."

  "That's not a dark shade, that's a parachute," Suril wisecracked, watching his Mom hold the skirt up to her neck so that it finally fit her.

  "No, that's what you call birth control," Grandma corrected.

  "Who cares what the Frenc
h designers call it," I said, rubbing the bottom of the skirt against my nose. It was almost as soft as Rafe's clotted cream cheek. "It's long enough that I can still wear jeans under it and that's the important thing because then I don't have to fart around shaving my leg hairs off."

  Mrs. Shah shoved the skirt back at me. "Okay so yeah maybe trousers is our best bet."

  Eventually she and Grandma left to do some Language Arts marking and play Dennis Greeley at NHL 2005 respectively.

  "I'm still kinda shocked that Rafe wants to date you," Suril said, setting aside 'Hybrid and Incompatible Finite Element Methods'. "I mean it's obvious from yesterday that he likes you but I never figured he'd be smart enough to appreciate you seriously."

  I crawled onto my bed and got comfy next to him. "I never heard of two boys liking me before...I never even heard of one boy liking me before. I mean, everyone I talk to thinks I'm a nerdy loser or a gross loser or an obnoxious loser. Katrina must've sautéed Rafe's brain up in a Teflon pan of clarified butter, if he's not conforming a la the general consensus."

  "Except for me, all you talk about to people at school is homework and class," Suril said, idly rubbing at his split bottom lip. "With Rafe, you're interacting on a social as well as on an academic level, so he's able to see how awesome you really are. If you were just tutoring him a couple times a week, he wouldn't be interested in you because you'd just be another dorky nerd to him. He thought you were weird and gross too right? But he also liked how loyal you are and he never would've seen that side of you if you were just his tutor."

  "Yeah, that's not just nonsense," I said, awed. I certainly hadn't thought of things like that...mostly I hadn't thought of things at all. Suril just had a way of making people's otherwise seemingly strange actions seem as obvious as Pappus' Theorem.

  Suril snorted. "Jane, I know you. If it's not related to Math or Science, or me or Grandma, than you just take what's happening at face value. You're so busy analysing equations and textbooks that you don't bother with yourself. You never examine your feelings or think about yourself in a non-academic, non-career oriented way."

  I was a millimetre surprised at this glance into my inner elemental make-up though I really shouldn't have been. Suril had always had a good grasp on people and their feelings and other such Psychological parallelograms. Not to mention that he'd known me since grade seven and it wasn't exactly news that I was similar to a Cyclical Process...after certain interchanges of work and heat, I always returned to my initial state.

  Which I didn't think was a bad thing at all. Perhaps I wasn't what anyone would call 'normal' or 'social' or 'exciting' but I knew exactly what I wanted to do in my life and I knew how to work for it. I didn't see why I should waste time brooding and moaning and angsting...what would that accomplish other than making me miserable and annoying those around me? Why not have fun with equations and fabtastic textbooks that taught me things and helped take me to a high plane of learning? Why not stick with what I knew, which to me was as fun as a person could get?

  "But do you really feel that fretting over the existence of some kind of a...of a dating boyfriend an efficient management of time?" I rested my chin onto my knobbly, bony knees. "It seems counterproductive to me...much in the way that being provided a Periodic Table on tests and exams is counterproductive. You'd think that at an Honours grade twelve Chemistry level, we'd have memorized all the Molar Masses by now."

  "Not everyone can be as fucking brilliant as we are." Suril frowned at me, his expression turning serious. "I don't want to see you fretting Jane, I just want you to think about yourself sometimes. You're a smart, caring person...why shouldn't someone appreciate you and find you attractive? Why shouldn't you expect something more from life than Chemistry and Math?"

  "But I have Grandma and you and your parents," I reminded him. "How much more people does a person need?"

  "What about Rafe?"

  "What about him?" I smushed my lip into my knee. "He's Katrina's boyfriend."

  "Yeah and by this time tomorrow he won't be," Suril pointed out. "And he doesn't want Katrina remember? He wants you."

  "I don't exactly know what to do about that," I admitted, licking at the ridges in my pants. "It's kind of...bizarre actually. Like those Bollywood movies your parents watch. One minute the guy and girl are bickering in India and the next they're dancing all over the Swiss countryside wearing about seven different outfits for a six minute love song. Then they're back in India with no mention of their little theatrical sojourn. I say that pretty much sums up all this hoopla...right now I'm cavorting around a mountain in Europe and I don't know when I'm going back home."

  Suril burst out laughing. "Don't tell me that you're afraid of Switzerland! Seriously, they have working toilets and streets that aren't filled with water buffalo shit."

  "I'm a tofu wiener who's afraid of stairs and dogs and heights...and that includes Swiss mountains. Naturally I'm afraid. Plus I don't much care to think about what will happen to my average once Katrina hears that I've been making merry with her boyfriend."

  "Look, don't waste your time worrying about her," Suril advised. "Everyone knows how hot she is and she'll definitely be drinking loads tonight. Plenty of guys'll be interested in consoling her on her loss and she'll forget about Rafe in no time."

  Suril may have known a lot about people and their feelings but I doubted that it was going to be so easy. I still had memories of Katrina in grade five, throwing a temper tantrum every week she didn't win the Friday Draw. "She wants to name the kids she has with Rafe Severn and Astra. I feel that's indicative of a serious type of cling-a-thon '99, don't you?"

  "Not really; she's probably one of those weirdoes who's been planning her wedding day ever since she was a little shit." He shrugged. "I doubt all that clingy crap's specific to Rafe; she's just a dramatic attention whore. It's not like that's news to us." He tugged on some of my frizz. "Mostly I just want to see you happy with someone who thinks you're hot. Ditto Rafe."

  "Mostly I'd just be happy if you did some Dynamics with me."

  I loved Suril because he never pressed me. That was the difference between him and Grandma...he could tell when I was feeling lost and would ease off for a while. Grandma had never quite mastered that subtle art. Suril grabbed 'Engineering Mechanics - Dynamics' from off my desk and randomly selected a page. "Okay, Chapter 21 : Three-Dimensional Kinetics of a Rigid Body. First one to finish these eight problems wins. Loser has to spend Sunday reading Mill on the Floss and poetry and The Edible Woman and doing English homework all day long."

  "Awww (d/dx) csch x equals -csch x coth x!!!"

  I finished 17.4 seconds after Suril due to a graphite breaking incident.

  "Cheap arse mechanical Bic pencil stupid shitsicles Hamlet!"

  Suril said, "Forsoothe wench, thou hath losteth thy Arithmeticeth libertyes."

  I sulked until dinner while Suril gloated.

  After a dinner of take-out Thai and a dessert of Mrs. Shah's ginger chai and Agnes Wilbraham's ginger molasses cookies, we all drooled around the living room to watch Trailer Park Boys. At nine o'clock sharp the doorbell rang.

  "The hired hooligan has arrived!" Mrs. Shah shrieked, her gold bangles jangling excitedly.

  "The hired hooligan who wants to date my granddaughter," Grandma said as though she was swishing a fine Riesling around all her own teeth. "Can't say I ever thought I'd be saying that. Mostly I always figured Janie'd end up with one of them nerdy Chinese guys."

  Maybe I would've, if I hadn't tripped and then farted in surprise right on Tin Tang's Sandman anthology in grade nine. Not to mention that he'd actually enjoyed when we'd been forced to read 'The Guns of Navarrone' in English class, which any bumblejunk could see was stupider than getting wrong a Hess's Law question.

  Cringing at the thought of that 'literary' Stilton, I tangoed to the front door, jostled it opened and proclaimed in my best Newfie accent, "Hazelton's Summer Home...some are home and some are not."

  Rafe grinned at me in a
lupinesque fashion. The October air was cold but he didn't have a jacket on. He was only wearing a black t-shirt, black cargos and a load of that silver wire around his neck. His arms were lean and freckled, his scorpion tattoo vivid in the porch light. I recognized his tattoo as Lucan's work. "Hey Hazelton," he drawled out, pulling me out of the house by my unzipped sweater. "So everyone that's home, where they at?"

  "Living room," I gasped as my heart began its familiar rapid pumping action. He was strong and hard against me, for such a pale-faced, freckly-armed shiner of the shoes.

  Rafe bent his head and decided to scribble the first sixteen digits of Pi into my mouth with his tongue. "Ready for tonight?" he murmured wetly against my bottom lip as he ran his hands over the arse of my shitty cords. His hands were big and were a tingle-inducer...much in the same fashion that my lucky bra was a cleavage-inducer.

  I made it a point not to wiggle in a silly way, even though he was making my blood pressure pulsate, reaching Systolic proportions without the aid of an Hg Manometer. "Nurses and Doctors could use you in hospitals," I told him breathlessly, pulling out of his arms. I sucked in air and whatever aftershave-cologne hoopla Rafe had decided to wear. He smelled like the last Math Competition I'd entered. "You'd really put the Man in Manometer, if you catch my lemniscate."

  "Yeah, I can see that you're ready," Rafe said, smiling as he stepped into the front hall.

  I shut the door behind me and whispered, "Rafe you didn't forget that Suril's Mom's-"

  "In the dark about him being in the closet? Nope."

  Pleased, I scrunched up my face up at him and led him into the living room.

  Suril waved at Rafe with his cookie. "Hey man."

  "So at last we are meeting this notorious Italian ruffian Jane has hired," Mrs. Shah dramatically declared, seizing Rafe up. "Hmmm okay, no tight clothing, good for the fighting, well done. All black, also okay, good, good. What is that, wire for garrotting? Yes, it seems as though you are an experienced one, excellent very much so."

  Grandma was examining Rafe through her binoculars. "So you're thug who took away my granddaughter's kissing virginity and now wants to go for the whole damn schmoo."

  Menthol Red smeared onto Rafe's face as his eyes became supersaturated. He hastily stepped away from me. "Uh...I don't-"

  "Rafe this is Jane's Grandma and this my Mom," Suril interjected, his eyes crinkled with laughter. "Mom, Grandma, this is Rafe Moretti. He goes to school with us."

  "So tell me, in your career about how many racist baddies have you beaten, hehn?" Mrs. Shah asked. "And with what weaponry? I usually only use my champaal...that is sandal in Gujarati you see...but then I am only an amateur who will take no buffoonery from the local rascal authorities."

  "I told your brother this and I'll tell you the same thing," Grandma jumped in before Rafe could answer, though it was debatable if he could since he was looking Bombay smoggy. "If you're gonna be having sex with my granddaughter than you damn well better use a condom and that goes tentuple for oral sex too pal. I don't know where you and your ho-bag ex-skanks have been."

  Suril choked on his chai.

  "Rafe told me that he gloves his love," I remarked, sniggering into my fingernails. "Remember when you said that? Boy did I have a good laugh and a half at that!"

  "By Ravana's ten heads! Muriel!" Mrs. Shah had finally found her voice. She glowered at Grandma. "Nobody will be wanting to make a devotional garland from the gulghota that has already been plucked!"

  The scandalize outrage in Mrs. Shah's voice seemed to drag Rafe from his stupor. "With due respect, I'd never do anything that Janie wasn't ready for. Especially since we've only just met."

  "Gulghota means marigold," I told Rafe, pushing my gums further off my molars. "But I've always been more of a dan-dlee-uh Botanist myself."

  "See how red-red the Italian's face has become," Mrs. Shah observed. "Just like the tandoori chicken they would serve in that little Kebab shop on Melton Rd. in Leicester. Remember Suril?"

  Suril, who was chortling into the back of the sofa, wasn't able to reply.

  "Her pleasure first," Grandma said, pointing at me. She was giving Rafe a good view of her shimmering jade eyeshadow as she narrowed her eyes at him. "Like what they say about them ribbed condoms you know? If she goes running off to Lucan then it'll be your fault you didn't please her right, got it freckles?"

  Rafe scowled, clearly not to chuffed with being called freckles.

  "You know, I was not knowing that Italian lads had the freckles," Mrs. Shah said, blinking her sloe-eyes at Rafe. "And such gardenia-like skins. I only know what I see on this 'The Sopranos'. And you know, I like the Giorgio Armani."

  "Yeah, you're kinda like a child-proof version of Lucan," Grandma added, peering at him through her binoculars again.

  Rafe muttered something in Italian under his breath and raked a hand through his spiky hair. "I might not look...quite like Lucan but I'm definitely Italian and I'm more than capable of beating the hell outta that racist jerk McGregor. I've taken on guys twice his size before and in groups and they're just lucky that they've lived to lie about it."

  "Just like an Amithab Bachaan film," Mrs. Shah cried.

  "Rafe had a broken leg once and he beat up four guys with a plank of wood," I said, pulling hair from in between my teeth. "And Guido, his older brother, is a Corrections Officer and he's about the size of that Petro-Canada on Cedar."

  "And didn't you run over some Lebanese foolio who insulted your Mom?" Suril asked.

  "I don't take BS from anyone, I don't care who they are." Rafe met Grandma's gaze head on, his CuSO4 eyes cool. "I know Janie's never been to a party before so I'll look after her. I promise you that I won't let anything bad happen to her."

  I thought that was a nice thing to say. I took my fingernails from my mouth and said to him, "I equals Icom plus Mh2 where h is the perpendicular distance between the two axes."

  "Damn straight pal," Grandma said, ignoring me. She'd never been too interested in the Parallel-Axis Theorem, as it were. "'Cause I may not be Italian but I still got no qualms about planting a bag a cocaine in your locker and tipping off the Pigs."

  "Maybe you can do this thing to that Conner bastard-guy after he is beaten into idiot vindaloo," Mrs. Shah told Grandma. "He will no longer be thinking that us ethnics are ignorant sheeps to be kicked around, isn't it!"

  "Yeah that's right," Rafe agreed, his mouth twitching. "McGregor'll have a lot of time to think about his actions while his Doctors are busy removing his ribs from out his lungs."

  "Especially since I have procured for you this thing." Mrs. Shah rummaged around in her black handbag and pulled out a pair of brass knuckles. "Much better than using your trainers, no?"

  "Mom!" Suril seemed torn between disbelief and awe. "Where the hell'd you get that at?"

  "We got our sources," Grandma said smugly. "And we ain't allowed to speak about them neither so don't be nagging."

  "A very good bargain was reached," Mrs. Shah assured us. "And they are real brass, not any type of cheapo steel knockoff, straight from the gutters of Shanghai. Come, take."

  Rafe took them, clearly impressed. "Mrs. Shah, these are wicked."

  I jiggling on my tip-toes so that I could peer over Rafe's shoulder. "Ideally, you'll want to wrap your fingers to make sure that no skin is touching the tops or insides of the knuckles to prevent your fingers from breaking or the knuckles from falling off."

  Rafe glanced back at me and arched an eyebrow. "Do I wanna know how you know that?"

  "She knows loads, it's 'cause her head's always farting around in them boring arse Science books," Grandma said. "If you can get her out of all school bullshit then she'd be a real firecracker I bet."

  "I happen to like Janie just how she is," Rafe told Grandma quietly.

  Grandma was dumbfounded. "Well Father Christmas, I never thought it'd come to this."

  "We must take photos," Mrs. Shah said, taking out her sleek silver digital camera from her handbag. "Our Janie is go
ing to her first grown-up party with the hired Italian who will beat karma into the blackened soul of this Conner bastard-guy! Come, by the fireplace. I will permit you to place your arm about my Jane's shoulder, okay?"

  "Yeah, this here is one for the books." Grandma whipped out her own camera and snapped a few thousand pictures.

  There was a lot of picture-taking, followed by a few years of hugging and hand-shaking and thanking and good-lucking and be-carefulling. Suril hugged me the longest and said he loved me. Grandma slipped Rafe a pack of condoms (male and female) and some vanilla-flavoured lube when Mrs. Shah was busy smoothing down my hair and tucking my bangs behind my ears. They all told Rafe to make sure that I had some fun in a way that didn't related to Science.

  "Holy hell, that was some scaryass shit," Rafe muttered as we walked down the driveway.

  "I'll say, who'd eat tandoori chicken from a Kebab shop?"

  "Not that, your Grandma." Rafe opened Angelina's passenger door for me, which I thought was friendly hybrid. "She gave me fucking condoms Janie!"

  I buckled up my seatbelt and said, once Rafe was inside the car, "As we're no longer in a Chemistry lab, it'll be necessary, as well as extremely prudent, to use rubber stoppers to prevent organic solvents from leaking."

  Rafe gawked at me. "Did you just...is that a...a metaphor...for sex?"

  "What we learn and how we develop inside the Chemistry lab is applicable to the Chemistry lab of life," I told Rafe solemnly. "For are we all not just Buffering Solutions, containing both a weak Acid and its Conjugate Base? Comedy and Tragedy, if you'd prefer a more thespian-related attitude."

  Frowning, Rafe said, "Are you saying that no one's really good or bad? That essentially everyone has a bit of both in them?"

  I settled back against the car seat, my wrist rubbing at my mouth ready for a good chew. "Essentially."

  Rafe looked pleased with himself. Then he said, "Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number thirteen."

  "Kathisophobia is the fear of sitting down."

  "...I'm not gonna ask how or why you know that."

  "Haemorrhoids," I said with a straight face that lasted for about a picosecond before I guffawed into Angelina's dirt-streaked window.

  Rafe shook his head as he made a right turn at a solid ninety degree angle and nearly took out the headlights of an oncoming Jeep Cherokee. "Okay, so here's our game plan...I told Katrina that was studying with you tonight and once we were done, I was gonna bring you to the party with me. She's fine it that so you don't have to worry about her freaking out. She'll probably be sloshed by the time we get there anyway. She's one of those big lovey-dovey, emotional drunks so don't worry if she plasters herself on you and starts going on and on about how much she loves you. While I'm doing my thing with her, Austin's gonna hang out with you. I told him all about our little scheme, remember? He'll look after you."

  "Optimus Prime knows," I intoned dramatically as I licked down my thumb. I went on to showcase my vocal talents for Rafe's aural pleasure. "Transformers...more than meets the eye."

  Rafe's mouth twitched. "Right. So, uh McGregor's got a pretty big house and anyone who's his friend or you know, popular, is allowed to head upstairs to screw around and shit. Austin'll get Katrina to come up and we'll do our thing. She'll flip out, make a scene and feel sorry for you. I'll disappear and leave you guys together...she won't be pissed at you, I promise. I'm planning on acting like a big jerk. Then I'll show up later and take care of McGregor when he's too drunk to recognize me. How does that sound?"

  I chewed on that old seed for a while. The way Rafe detailed it out seemed sound but who knew what things could spiral where when drunk, hormonal teenagers were thrown into the Capacitance worksheet? "I suppose that in this particular experiment we'll be dealing with mostly unknown variables."

  Rafe leaned over and kissed my cheek as we waited at a red light. "Trust me Janie," he said softly and kissed me again, this time on my mouth and with some licking too.

  Conner resided in an affluent neighbourhood called Kensington Crescent, which sounded exactly as pretentious as it was. The lawns were sculpted and immaculate, the houses stately, the cars overpriced and expensive. It was the sort of place where you'd expect children to have illogical, florid names like Jayden and Clavyxta and their nannies would get the boot if they ever dared to feed the spoiled little darlings something as bourgeois as Lucky Charms or frozen chicken nuggets.

  Rafe had to park Angelina a couple of blocks away from Conner's house because his street was lined with cars. From the lights glowing through the massive windows of the surrounding houses that Rafe and I passed, it didn't seem like Conner was the only one throwing a party. Though somehow, I didn't think Conner's would involve classical music and swanky yuppies socializing about the windows, sipping Chardonnay and nibbling on shrimp canapés. We could hear the music faintly from where we'd parked but by the time Conner's brightly-lit, jam-packed house came into view, my ears were tingling. There were groups of people milling about on the front lawn, smoking and drinking, while more, like us, were just arriving. The smell of pot was so thick in the air, that Suril across the city was probably feeling the effects.

  As we walked up the circular driveway, we passed a blond girl barfing into a large rhododendron, while a seemingly 'baked' winner was groping up her skirt and humming 'Farewell to Nova Scotia' under his breath.

  "Creamy Karen's off to an early start," Rafe commented, seizing hold of my arm and dragging me away when I would've stood around and watched.

  "Rafe, I wanted to see that," I protested, glancing back over my shoulder. Creamy Karen had just gotten a splash of upchuck on winner's cool 'kicks'. He didn't seem to notice as he was too busy mining for potash. "I promised Grandma and Suril that I'd observe everything and try new things and have fun and not think about Science and Math too much. Personally, I feel that this party's like a foray into the world of Ethnography, don't you agree?"

  "Hey Moretti, Katrina know you got a new ho?" a bespeckled, underfed 'emo' guy called out. He and his fellow thrift-shop delicacies were all drinking Moosehead Dry and discussing how anti-establishment they were while they smoked the cigarettes they'd stolen from their parents.

  "Fuck off, she's my tutor," Rafe snapped, scowling.

  "The Weiss Constant is used to calculate the susceptibility of Paramagnetic materials," I called back to emo guy, pulling out of Rafe's grip. "See, I'm advertising my wares as I observe. Afterall, is not the study of social groups a Science in and of itself? You can't truly distance yourself from the Sciences, no matter what Grandma thinks."

  Rafe gave me an amused look. "You do realize, don't you, that most people you talk to aren't gonna remember what the hell happened tonight, let alone your 'wares'."

  I shrugged as I did a series of leapings over some alcoholic litter in time to the shrieking Pop music. "Such is the nature of Chirality my friend."

  The inside of Conner's house was loud, unbearably hot and crammed like my brain come exam time. People were dancing and laughing and drinking and groping each other and there was barely room to move. Rafe grabbed my hand and steered me through the crowds. A few hundred people greeted him and whacked him on the back and tried to chat with him, which just resulted in a lot of screaming and gesturing. Alan Lee, a sarcastic loudmouth who was in my Chemistry, Biology and French class, waved to me from where he was dancing on top of a jade French Provincial sofa with two brunette girls who seemed more interested in each other than in Alan.

  That was a side of Alan I'd never seen before.

  Rafe led me through a bunch of gigantic, packed rooms, through the kitchen where he snagged a beer for himself and a Coke for me and out to the backyard. It was an enormous expanse of space, complete with swimming pools, a gazebo, winding stone walkways and waterfall ponds. Since it was early October, the pool was drained and a bunch of pseudo-punks and skaters were skateboarding in the bottom of it. A separate stereo system had been set up here, this one blaring Alexisonfire (whom I recognized fr
om one of Grandma's car CDs) instead of the Hip Hop Pop of inside. There was a kind of a mosh pit occurring in the much smaller, much shallower kidney-shaped swimming pool to our right. Everyone who wasn't skateboarding or moshing was socializing or else doing dirty things in the privacy (sometimes) of the many bushes and trees.

  Rafe flipped the bottle cap of his beer off with his keys and winked at me. He may have been underaged but it was still an impressive trick, or at least it was to the bunch of guys near us who were 'chilling' to the music. A couple of them tipped their bottles in his direction and then continued nodding and watching their drunk, rowdy friends make impressive spills on their skateboards.

  Katrina popped out of the crowds and tottered towards us so suddenly that I shrieked and slopped Coke all down my chin. She was wearing very baggy, very low-slung black cargos with metallic brown pointy-toed heels, what appeared to be a baby blue thong that was showing at her hips, and the tightest, thinnest camouflaged tank top that alerted the world to the fact that she wasn't wearing a bra.

  "Sexy baby!" she shrieked and all but tripped and fell into Rafe's arms. She kissed his neck a few hundred times while rubbing up against him. Then, she roughly shoved Rafe aside and flung herself into me.

  I screeched out something about the Dulong-Petit Law and stumbled against Katrina's clumsy weight and flailing, clinging arms. For someone who possessed the tall, slim bearing of a runway model, Katrina certainly had quite a bit of mass to her.

  "Jane Jane Jane, the girl who's gone insane," she chanted at the top of her lungs, breathing beer all over my face. She patted my head with quite a bit of force and accidentally scratched my forehead with one of her long, baby blue nails. "We go way back a DOG'S AGE, me and insane Jane, don't we Papa don't we! You used to pick your nose all the time and line up your boogers on the windowsill! Remember that? And that weirdo kid from Egypt would to pay you a nickel to see them! Hah hah, bitch you were GRODY!" She kissed the scratch on my forehead with a loud, wet smack and then hurled herself onto Rafe's twitching lips. I saw her tongue jump into his mouth as she grabbed his arse and did more rubbing drama.

  "Keto-Enol Tautomerism is acid catalyzed," I sputtered, dumbfounded...which was a new one for me since I'd been a lot of foundeds before but never of the dumb variety really. Rafe had warned me of Katrina's friendly nature when drunk but this had all the difference between reading about a star exploding and actually seeing it. Not that I had born witness to such an astronomical event...other than in my imagination. "The Crab Nebula resulted from a star whose explosion was seen in 1056," I told myself as I collected Katrina's lip goo off my forehead with the edge of my Coke can.

  Rafe was attempting to extract himself from Katrina but where he moved, she followed. Finally she hooked one of her long legs up by his hip and really went to town with the deriving. I figured that was as good a way as any to keep him anchored. Certainly I had seen similar poses inside Boob and Butt magazine. Maybe Katrina had seen them too...for 'research purposes' she probably would say.

  A lanky, scarecrow of a guy with a long, scraggly brown ponytail decided to stumble up to me then. He was wearing a tattered Cannibal Corpse T-shirt and ripped jeans. "I might not be the best looking dude here but I'm the only one talkin' to you."

  I licked at the pulse in my wrist. "Did you know that the equality in the Clausius Inequality holds for totally or just internally reversible cycles and the inequality for the irreversible ones?"

  He smoothed down his moustache and beard before leaning in close. "You got a mirror in them pants? 'Cause, heh heh, I can see myself in 'em."

  I glanced down at my pants and then back up at the cold sore that was peeking out of the corner of his hairy mouth. "f equals R/2 where R is the radius of curvature of a spherical mirror."

  "Guy I don't know!" Katrina suddenly squealed, straight into Rafe's ear judging by his wincing. She lurched out of Rafe's arms and poured herself onto Cannibal Corpse. "Hey remember when we didn't know each other?"

  "Oh fuck yeah!" Cannibal Corpse cried, wasting no time in feeling Katrina up. The ecstatic expression on his elongated face suggested that this was the farthest he'd ever gotten with a girl who wasn't made of plastic.

  Rafe grabbed Katrina's elbow and yanked her roughly back to his side. "That's my girlfriend asshole," he snarled.

  "Oh fuck no!"

  "Seems we can all see what's happening inside your pants now," I pointed out, leaning down for a closer look. It was too bad I didn't bring along Grandma's camera, she and Suril would've had a good hoot out of this little who-ha.

  "You wearin' Guess jeans baby?" Cannibal Corpse demanded, puffing out his chest like an aroused pigeon. "'Cause guess who wants to get in 'em?"

  "Listen you cheesy dickwad, you touch her with your greasy little paws and I'll bust your face open Cannibal Corpse style," Rafe snapped icily.

  "I love it when you wear Addidas Moves," Katrina moaned, snuffling her face into Rafe's neck. "It totally gets me all hot."

  "Heat Lost equals heat gained," I agreed since Rafe's freckly face had paled into the realm of MgS as he tried not to look at the mirror inside Cannibal Corpse's Guess jeans.

  "Okay dudes rock on," Cannibal Corpse said good-naturedly and slunk off towards a couple of punky-looking girls. He was flexing his fingers and muttering to himself.

  "You made his Piza lean," I said to Katrina, giggling. I felt a lot more relaxed since the Katrina of my phobias would never have willingly touched a grease monkey like Cannibal Corpse. "I bet the closest he ever got to a pretty girl like you was when he took a free tour on one of those XXX web cam sites."

  "Awww Janie, you're such a sweetie cherry pie!" Katrina screeched into my ear. Alexisonfire was like a tinkle in a specimen jar compared to her mighty roarings. "How come I never invited you over to play Barbies and robbers when we were little? We coulda been the bestest buds for forever and a week!"

  I blinked, surprised. This was the closest I'd ever gotten to an invitation to play Barbies. I was highly impressed. "'Cause I had a pet sardine named Long Division and you said I made him smell bad, implying that I was smellier than a sardine."

  "Oh yeah. Man alive, you guys were some stank!" Katrina raised her head off of Rafe's shoulder and said to him, "Ol' Jane here was such a ginormous nerd that she ate, like McNerd burgers with her protractor!" She laughed uproariously before grabbing Rafe's face – he'd been scanning the crowds for that Optimus Prime friend of his – and began another oral check-up Quebec style.

  I drank some more Coke and looked around. There was nothing new to see on the kissing front of things, unless Katrina put her hand down Rafe's pants. I wouldn't've minded seeing what colours of the spectrum Rafe's face turn when she did that. I observed the people moshing in the shallow, empty pool, intrigued and a bit stupefied because I'd never seen one in real life. The mosh pit was a great rumpus of mostly guys screaming and jumping and shoving and hurling themselves against each other. They were surrounded by a ring of people whose main job, as far as I could see, seemed to be pushing enthusiastic stragglers back into the middle of the skirmish.

  I couldn't discern for a chance to win a copy of 'Molecular Thermodynamics of Fluid-Phase Equilibria' what the point of all this...The Edible Woman-esque hoopla was.

  From an Ethnographical perspective, it was clinically fascinating. From a scientific perspective, it was shamefully appalling. We, Earthlings, had spent centauries upon centauries studying our surroundings. We had studied every species of life, every piece of flora and fauna, every meteorological and geological phenomena known to the planet Earth. We had studied inside of the Earth and beyond the Earth and even within ourselves...and the future of this great and mighty planet and its race was a bunch of intoxicated, head-banging winners grappling and jostling each other.

  I wondered if my IQ could lower via osmosis.

  "Baby boy, let's fucking get our rhythm on!" Katrina shrieked, tossing her long, shiny auburn locks. "I'm sick of this metal shit, I wanna hear some 50 Cent and G
wen Stefani!"

  "I'm waiting for Austin, remember?" Rafe was frowning, seemingly irritated as he downed his bear. I could understand his sentiments; Suril and I had caught sight of that 50 Cent blockhead being interviewed on MuchMusic once and a more illiterate, incomprehensible stupidarse 'fucktard' as Grandma like to say, I'd never had the fortune of seeing on my TV. I wouldn't have wanted to frequent any location where his 'music' was playing either.

  "You have cooltastic hair," I said to Katrina, rubbing a piece of it in between my fingers. It was smooth and silky. I had tried to touch one of Katrina's pigtails when we'd been in grade one – it was so bright and glossy and pretty – but she'd squirted her juice pack onto my new Velcro Spider-Man sneakers before I could. "I want to chew on it, it has lots of potential."

  "You're a fucking scream girl! Hah hah, you can't chew hair, that's damaging dumbass!" Katrina whacked me on the back so hard that I stumbled into two people making out. They didn't notice the interruption. "I wanna dance sugar cookie, let's go! Come on, we'll find Austin later!"

  "Here, I'll go find that guy," I said to Rafe, moping Coke off my chin with my bangs. I was anxious to explore and observe more of this madness that they called party. I leaned into Rafe's ear, since Katrina was still whingeing and stumbling around, and shouted, "Go dance and have fun pal! I have to observe and take party in these here going-ons and I think it'll be a real Finite Difference!"

  Rafe glanced at Katrina and then back at me. "I promised your Grandma I'd look after you," he shouted back. His free hand found mine for a brief moment and goosebumps, in spite of the heat, sprouted up all over my body.

  "F(x) equals - dU(x)/dx," I declared, wiping at my ear. I could nearly feel his lips on my skin even though he hadn't touched me. "I'll be turpentine-fine!" Waving in a friendly manner, I started off because Rafe looked ready to argue.

  "Okay bye-bye boob!" Katrina laughed uproariously and hauled Rafe off. He was glaring at me over his shoulder and making a production of being reluctantly dragged away.

  I told him telepathically, to save the anger for Conner...because you just never knew when anger could run out.

  I drifted through the crowds. It was strange to think that I was relatively the same age as all these people and yet they couldn't have been more different than I had they been hatched on Zlygonar 7. For example, why was everyone so excited by the four enormous metal barrels that a bunch of guys wearing Greek letters on their t-shirts had dragged in? A huge mass of people had gathered round them and were cheering and shouting.

  I tapped a blue and black haired Japanese girl on the shoulder. "Are there fireworks in there?" I shouted into her ear.

  She smirked at me with her shiny lavender lips and punched me in the arm hard enough to send me reeling. I had never been punched before and it hurt a googolplex more than when Rafe had yelled at me. "It's a beer keg geek-a-tron!"

  I left the patio/pool area and their moshings and 'beer kegs' to trump for the greener pastures of the extensive garden. The crowds were thinner here and mostly consisted of groups of people chatting and amorous couples. I stopped near a few couples heavily making out and examined my arm. There were no signs of bruises or redness, but I was sure it that was coming. That rough pseudo-girl punk had done a number on me.

  I wondered if this meant that I'd been beaten up.

  I looked down my arm at the bruises Conner had given me. They stood out on my skin like the complexity of a Cocaine molecule in a sea of standard H2O. I pressed down on one and a little bit of hurt came out. I pressed another one and more hurt came out. It was like playing the piano only without any sound. Or a piano.

  "I play the bruise piano," I said and tittered into the shrubbery. A twig poked up my nose and made a scratch inside. I had to blow my nose on a Maple leaf to see if any blood came out. Something came out but I didn't think it was blood. It was hard to tell since it was dark and the leaf was crunchy.

  Conner wasn't going to be giving anyone else bruise pianos for a long, long time, ever since I'd decided to be proactive and assertive and take some initiative. That would've been a good t-shirt to have printed up I thought...I took the initiative and all I got was a jock with broken legs.

  I drifted back towards the house after watching a Tamil girl named Arpana suck down some guy's noodle. She didn't even gag. I couldn't wait to tell Suril, partly because he knew Arpana from temple and thought she was a ho-bag but mostly because the guy was on the side of attractive and was of a very sufficient length too. Certainly Arpana must have thought so, being as she had quite the impressive oral grasp of the situation. Sniggering at my own wit, I went inside, returning pseudo-punk from my English class' wave from where he was skateboarding in the empty pool with his idiot pals.

  The music inside the house was now that electronic dance mix drama and it made me want to dance so I did, smooshed against the fridge and in between a bunch of people who were all watching and catcalling as a Muslim guy named Imran and a Cuban guy named Mariano had a breakdance-off in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  I realized after a short while of hot, sporadic, crazy dancing (I wasn't very good but that hadn't stopped me yet) and cheering at all the wild breakdancing moves why people liked parties so much...they were fun. And I didn't even have a textbook or a sheet of equations with me.

  I had my sleeves rolled up to my shoulders and was fanning my face while doing what I liked to call the 'Transverse Wave' (it was my tribute to Physics) when Rafe's friend Optimus Prime shoved through the crowds and danced up to my side. He was wearing enormous of chocolate brown skater pants that dragged all over the floor, a grey t-shirt that featured He-Man and Teela and a red visor that said 'Fugitive' on it in white letters.

  "You dance like a crazy mother!" he bellowed into my ear and gave me a thumbs up.

  I took that as a compliment and kept on 'groovin'' as they called it. Laughing, Optimus Prime joined in and we had our own version of a dance-off, which was some of the best fun I'd ever had outside of studying Organic Chemistry with Suril. A bunch more people started to dance with us and then it was just a free-for-all Table of Values. Eventually, when we had no more groove left in us and I'd taught everyone around me my latest move, the Orthogonal Family (what was dancing without a tribute to Calculus?), Optimus Prime and I headed back outside to cool off. We sat panting and sweating on the front lawn and shared a smashed chocolate doughnut that we'd found discarded near an ornate iron wrought lattice.

  "Shoulda grabbed us a couple of beers," Optimus Prime said, licking a glop of chocolate off his pants. "Or you more into coolers? I can get a hook up with some of those new Smirnoff Black Cherry Twists."

  "Seventeen is my years on Earth," I told him, even though the idea of something featuring Black Cherry sounded as wonderful as reading 'Vibrational Spectroscopy of Biological and Polymeric Materials' in bed during a thunderstorm. I rubbed my hot face into the cool grass and licked it a bit. I was thirsty but there wasn't a lot of dew around.

  He shrugged. "Yeah, same but I'm not about to let that stop me."

  He was a pretty nice guy, the Optimus Prime called Austin O'Leary, I soon discovered. As we cooled off, I told him about how this was my first ever party and how Grandma and Suril didn't want me to spend all my time thinking about Science and Math; instead I was supposed to observe my peers in a social setting and partake of all legal activities. Optimus Prime thought that that was 'frigging cool' and introduced me to nearly everyone loitering about Conner's front lawn.

  We went back inside after a while and got to more dancing, flitting about from cramped hallways to cramped rooms. A lot of people were heavily inebriated and danced even worse and much more outlandish than I did. One girl even took off her sparkly camisole and gave everyone a free bra show when she could have charged for it. I decided that I'd have to tell her later that there was a business to be made in bra showing. At least I had my high average to fall back upon during rough times but a girl who wore a white bra edged in pink lace, what did she have to f
all back on, highlighting her hairdo?

  I lost sight of Austin when some drippy, gooey slow song started to play. I guessed he went to find some girl to dance with but I didn't see what the point of that was...one didn't always need to use a TI-89 Titanium graphing calculator like Gradient Field to graph a limacon now did they? I certainly didn't have any qualms about dancing alone because afterall, did we not enter and do we not leave this mortal, material world alone?

  That was my far-removed-from-the-Sciences philosophical thought for the evening and I was rather proud of it as I wasn't typically known to have a lot of, if any, philosophical thoughts. Grandma would be proud of me, I reflected as I flailed my arms about in that artsy, vegan, Neo­-Goddess Wiccan hoopla. I was participating in a social event and hardly thinking of Math or Chemistry at all, it was a to say the least. I minced around, dipping and waving my tugged-down sweater sleeves about and eventually pranced right into Rafe.

  He guffawed alcoholic breath right in my face. "Come on Fairy Princess," he shouted, grabbing my flapping arm and tugging me through the couples and into a dim corner. "Have you been drinking?" he demanded as he arranged my arms around his neck. I had to stand on my tiptoes to reach.

  "No but I can tell you have," I shouted back, blowing my sweaty bangs out of my eyes. Rafe slid his hands over my back and pulled me close to him. I was boiling from all my loopy dancing and even though Rafe and I were hardly dancing...it was more hugging and swaying really...my Equilibrium was suddenly about twenty-seven degrees hotter. That Rafe, I just didn't know how he got up to these old 'heat' tricks all the time. He may as well have been a walking mass of flame, considering what he could do to me just by touching. "What happened to Katrina?"

  "Austin's got her down in the basement," he said in my ear. His hands slid under my sweater and rubbed all over my sweaty back like I was some baby that needed the burping. "That's where all the jocks and their girls are. They're playing pool and poker down there."

  I relaxed an improper fraction. "Me and Austin found a Tim's Horton doughnut on the lawn and we split it. It was chocolate. Pseudo-punk from my English class gave me a Mountain Dew. I never danced like this with anyone that wasn't a broom or Grandma."

  Rafe laughed. I could feel it on my neck like a Deinopidae was crawling there. "You're here dancing all by yourself like some kinda gimpy hippy on crack. I can't have that now can I?"

  "Just don't have the goulash because then you might have the heartburn," I quipped and roared with laughter into Rafe's throat. Goosebumps erupted over his skin and he shuddered against me. It was as though he also had a Deinopidae creeping over him.

  And then I was struck with the sudden insight that maybe, somehow, if Rafe could effect me so chemically than perhaps I was able to effect him too. Hadn't he told he yesterday afternoon that his Ra molecules were attracted to my Ja molecules? The girl nearest to me had her head on her partner's shoulder and she was running her hands through his shaggy hair. Sensing an experiment in the air, I cashed in on my newfound sheep tendencies. I tightened my hold around Rafe's neck and mashed up my face into the side of his neck. A chill ran through his body. He stumbled a bit and I ended up banging my hip on the wall. I didn't mind because Rafe was like a chemically-smelling, Atlantic Ocean-eyed, befreckled pillow. He was all soft and slightly spicy, like the dough Mrs. Shah used to make pooris.

  I licked Rafe's throat experimentally to see what he tasted like but he didn't taste like much, except for hot. I wondered how a person went about giving their friend a hooky. Suril had said that it would be a crime if I didn't give Rafe a hooky in return, hadn't he? I licked again and Rafe stepped on my foot.

  "Come on," Rafe growled into my ear, his hot breath tickling me. His breathing was laboured from all the dancing. "It's gonna be time soon."

  "I just wanted to see what flavour you were," I shouted and a few people close to us looked over.

  Rafe tugged me through the living room and into the swarming hallway. It seemed like a lot of people were watching us and trying to talk to Rafe. I showed everyone my incisors and slurped sweat out of my bangs. My Prime t-shirt had moulded itself to my skin. Rafe led me up the jammed, circular staircase and down the left corridor. As we went further along, the groups of people began disappearing. The doors that lined the hallway were all closed and some of the doorknobs were adorned with t-shirts or socks or, in one instant, a striped tie. I could make out the occasional drunken moan over the thumping vibrations of the music below us.

  Rafe randomly yanked open a door near the end of the hall and dragged me inside. A tanned blond guy who had no shirt or pants on was busy on the bed with a leggy black girl wearing a little plaid skirt and her bra. They were kissing each other in a noisy, sloppy manner that was reminiscent of Japanese noodles-slurping. They also seemed to be doing quite a bit of 'dry humping' as Boobs and Butt called it.

  "Get out," Rafe snapped, slamming the door shut behind us. "I want this room."

  "Who in the fuck-" No Shirt's face paled when he caught sight of Rafe. "Shit, it's Moretti! Man, don't punch me, we're leaving!"

  The girl, whose face I could now see, was named Basia Michaels. She'd been in my class from grade three to grade nine. "Hi Basia," I said, poking my gums at her in a friendly manner. The bra she was wearing was turquoise and covered in delicate green lace. "Where'd you get that bra at?"

  She stared at me with fuzzy eyes while No Shirt scrambled around gathering up their clothes. "Wuzzat?"

  "Where'd you get that bra at?"

  "Whodat?"

  "She's out of it," Rafe told me, hiding a smile.

  They beat the scene, Basia glancing over her shoulder at me with apparent confusion. No Shirt's boner was evident in his Canada undies and it waggled as he practically ran from the room. I giggled into my wrists. "His graduated cylinder didn't look like it was even 30 mls did it? Certainly it was nothing like the young fellows in Suril's magazines."

  Rafe stepped towards me, his eyes darkening in the light of the ornate bedside lamp. "Are you gonna make me feel self-conscious when we do it?"

  "D equals 1/2CpAv2?!" I goggled at him and hastily shut my gaping mouth in case he got any fancy ideas. Unfortunately I had to open it again to talk so I just stuffed some hair in there to make things look unappealing. "Rafe, that was just Grandma talking Hamlet. No one actually expects you to copulate with me."

  Rafe decided to take his t-shirt off in a way that made my face flush like Grandma playing poker. "What if I want to?"

  My mouth went FeCl3 dry.

  Smirking, Rafe ducked his head out the door to hang his t-shirt on the doorknob. "Take your sweater off," he ordered, stalking towards me. The lamplight made his pale skin shine pure Au. His shoulders and chest were covered in cinnamon coloured freckles and there was a cluster around his bellybutton that made my stomach oscillate like a simple pendulum for some reason.

  Maybe this was what being attracted to a boy was all about...you liked their abdominal freckles.

  "The scent of skunks is due to Thiols primarily," I blurted out, bumping into the bureau as I tugged at my sleeves. My fingers were vibrating slightly and I knew it wasn't from the music. I supposed I must've been more nervous than I realized, even if inebriated Katrina wasn't five ninths bad. I started to fold my sweater but Rafe yanked it from me and tossed it over his shoulder. I stared at him with enlarging eyes. His bare chest and freckles were very close to me now. My heart rate began to do some breakdancing moves.

  Rafe's hands found my hips and he sat me on top of the bureau so that we were eye to eye. "I got ten bucks in my pocket," he drawled out in a throaty kind of voice that made chills and thrills wash over every millimetre of my epidermis. "I wanna see your bra."

  I began to tremble all over and in my poopular cords too. I was scared. Did Rafe actually intend to follow Grandma's advice and use those condoms and vanilla lube with me? Universities frowned upon sexual relations amongst their students, potential or otherwise I was sure, didn't they? Could this go down upo
n my transcript, should it get out? Was Rafe in some kind of a state of inebriation leading to extreme...randyness right now? I hadn't noticed him walking funny or slurring his words but maybe he was one of those sly drunks. I didn't want to have drunken sexual intercourse with him when Katrina was about to walk in, lovely freckles or not! "Well everyone's doing it, yes...but as it were...hormones and beer...the theoretical limit at which the photon-"

  "Janie." Rafe's fingers were skimming over the bruises Conner had given me. He was the only one who knew about them; I hadn't even told Grandma or Suril and they knew everything there was to know about me. Rafe had said I was brave, even though I was scared of stairs and had to walk really slow down them so that I wouldn't fall on my head again. "This is between you and me. It's got nothing to do with Katrina." Rafe took my hand and pressed it to something hard at his waist...but it wasn't his pipette, though I didn't think I wouldn't have minded if it had been. Just for the sake of Anatomical analysis, naturally. "That's my Mom's pager. I borrowed it for the night. Austin's gonna call it on his cell when he and Katrina are on their way up so we'll have a head's up, okay?"

  Well ten dollars was ten dollars.

  "The further away a galaxy is from us, the faster it is receding away from us," I said and took of my t-shirt. It felt electromagnetical to the twelve because I was sweltering inside this boiling home but it also felt strangely peculiar because I'd never sat around in a bra while a boy with no shirt on stared at me.

  And staring Rafe was. His pretty eyes were like two great spherical planets goggling out of his head...and they certainly weren't in the process of receding.

  "I'm only a B so there's not a whole wheat to see," I said, fanning my overheated chest with my t-shirt. "But at least the bra's got quite the drama to it. It was only $7.50 after Valentine's Day."

  My lucky bra was red and had white hearts on the straps and two sparkly pink hearts intertwined at the top corner of the cup. It opened in the front and the clasp was a red heart. It may have been fruity with a generous helping of tacky but for $7.50 I could forget that Valentine's Day was nothing more than a cheap, stupid marketing ploy designed to suck money from the witless masses. I had an exciting bra that wasn't barfy beige and that was good enough for me.

  "That's fucking sexy," Rafe breathed, his eyes stitched to my front. His tone was fervent.

  "It's more Havarti than sexy," I said, looking down at myself to see what all the hullabaloo was about. I couldn't see much. "But I want to collect every colour in the light spectrum so I had to buy it. Somehow though, it turned into a lucky bra. That's how come I wore it tonight, it's a luck generator."

  "If any other girl was wearing that, it'd look retarded," Rafe muttered, reaching out to run his finger along one of my straps. "But on you it's sweet. Like you wear all these dorky Science t-shirts and sweaters and under them you're all sexy and shit. That's fucking hot."

  That was some hard-hitting journalism to me. "I was going more for shit than the sexy," I admitted, tracing the freckles on Rafe's shoulders with my pupils. "Hence my brown pants and sweater, accented with a urination t-shirt get it?"

  Rafe's fingers were skimming and sliding along the bottom of my bra and he was making me squirm. "You know what you haven't done yet?" he asked my chest. "You haven't kissed me. I always make the first move."

  I thought back to all the times we kissed. There was something in what he said. "Bode's Law isn't Boyle's Law," I agreed, bracing myself on his smooth arms. I tilted my head, leaned in and fit my mouth over Rafe's. It was a molecule exciting, like getting another one hundred on a Pre. Calculus test. You knew that was coming but it was a little different and a lot thrilling every time.

  I was kissing a boy at a party! And I did the slow dancing with him and made his body shudder when I'd licked him a little bit. Once I relayed these events to Grandma, she was going to take out a half-paged ad in the Gazette and I could see the headlines now: Local Girl cured of nerdy dork ways! Talks of Rectilinear Kinematics fade into obscurity as kissing Italian thug takes priority over University applications! Grandmother rejoices and calls in the Man Strippers! Token Gay friend ecstatic at dating possibilities!

  By Buddha's breath, I hoped I never became arse enough to give up Rectilinear Kinematics for any boy, ever.

  Rafe parted his lips and licked at mine until I opened my mouth. I squirmed and had to make funny noises because Rafe was also groping my bra in addition to sucking on my tongue. I wanted to tell him not to get too excited because my bra was of the padded decimals but then he decided to slip his fingers inside. My stomach quite literally exploded. I yelped and accidentally bit Rafe's tongue.

  He jerked away from me, swearing in Italian.

  I was throbbing under my bra and I couldn't tell if I was aching in a good way or in a bad way. It felt like a bit of both and hundreds of compounds more. I shoved myself back into my t-shirt and slid off the bureau. "Rafe?" He had his hand over his mouth and was breathing heavily. My stomach dipped again but this time it was out of fear. "Are you bleeding?"

  "Nah, it was just a little bite. I barely felt anything." He raked a hand through his spiky hair and sighed. "I shouldn't have touched you like that. I guess I got a little carried away."

  "I just got the surprise, I'm sorry," I said guiltily, gnawing on my bottom lip. I could still taste Rafe on me. It made me want things in a purely Anatomical way. "Maybe I can try the kissing hoopla again? I'll make it proper this time, I promise."

  Rafe looked surprised for an instant before smirking. "You like kissing me."

  I shrugged. "It's better than having a yeast infection while reading The Bishop of St. Praxed's Church, true."

  It was funny kissing someone whose face was so revolted.

  Rafe didn't waste any time sliding his hands under my t-shirt and up my back for a good Prime. My hands found his shoulders and he was smooth and warm beneath my fingertips. I was pressed up against his bare chest and it was both terrifying and breath-taking at once. I pulled my mouth away and gasped for air. It wasn't any kind of a sexy sound so I figured that Rafe couldn't be too excited. My hand had somehow moved down his shoulder and was touching the tattoo that adored his muscled bicep.

  "It's not as cool as Lucan's Calculus tattoos but it's no turnip sandwich either."

  Rafe scowled, his mouth thinning. He would've snapped something at me but I licked his tattoo before he could. I couldn't help myself, it looked like lines and curves of black liquorice marking his skin. It didn't taste like liquorice though, it tasted warm and like Rafe and I liked that. I raked my teeth gently down the Hadogens Troglodytes' measoma and licked at a few surrounding freckles too. "It looked like liquorice," I explained, chewing on a strand of my bangs. "I just wanted to taste."

  Rafe's eyes were narrow as he searched my face. "You've got some kind of an oral fixations don't you?"

  "I never did that to a boy before," I gasped, pulling away. "My virtue isn't floppy. You're the only boy I never fooligated around with. I even told you that before remember?"

  Rafe laughed. "I just meant that you're always sticking things into your mouth. Your hair, your fingers, your wrist, your pencils...me."

  We stared at each other. I thought Rafe was beautiful in a This Riemannn Sum is called the nth Trapezoidal Approximation of the definite integral ba f(x) dx kind of way. Or in the kind of way that previously I'd only found Biosynthetic Pathways beautiful.

  Bianca's pager beeped.

  I jumped and banged my hip into the corner of the bureau. I began babbling something about Stereochemistry until Rafe hauled me to him and kissed me hard. I gurgled in nervousness. Somehow, after all the bra displaying and freckle viewing and kissing, I'd managed to forget about Katrina.

  "Janie relax, it'll be okay," Rafe murmured, sliding his hands around my waist like we'd practiced yesterday. "I promise. You're my brilliant Math genius, aren't you? You can totally do this. Trust me."

  With my heart beating inside the back of my throat and some sick churning i
n the bottom of my stomach, I let Rafe kiss me. I did trust him, it was Katrina, drunk or otherwise, that I was scared shitless of. I started to struggle, shoving at Rafe's chest. He really was strong and I couldn't budge him even when I tried my hardest. It was like he was Iron and he'd corroded in an Oxidation-Reduction reaction that cause me to bond to him in the form of Rust.

  "This is wronger than C10H16NO being the molecular formula of Ephedrine," I moaned as he roughly attacked the hooky he'd given me that evening inside his room. His teeth were scraping at my skin and it felt awfully funny. "Rafe you have a girlfriend."

  "Shut up," he snarled so angrily that for an instant I really was scared.

  I was listening as hard as No Shirt had been for Basia so I did hear the soft rasp of the door against the carpet. "I'm not your girlfriend, Katrina is, you devilish fiend," I shrieked loudly, squirming my weight in the moons of Jupiter. "This isn't the kind of Chemistry I was talking about, fiendish devil!"

  "Shit man, that's your fucking tutor!"

  Rafe let go of me abruptly and shoved me aside like I was a Spectator Ion.

  Austin was standing in the doorway, Katrina at his side. Her face was AlBr3 white, her green eyes gigantic and filled with hurt. My heart wavered like a Potential Energy Curve. I didn't think Katrina had ever looked so beautiful.

  "Girl, where the fuck's you been at?" Rafe demanded brashly with just a hint of a slur in his voice. He stalked towards her, his strides suddenly a bit too fast and too long to be considered sober. "You went off and I's stuck with nerdy-ass here and she didn't even open that fucking math mouth...stupid bint. Baby, no one kisses like you." He grabbed Katrina's arms roughly and tried to kiss her.

  "Don't touch me," she whispered, jerking away so forcefully that she stumbled into the bed. Her entire body was trembling, from the top of her shining auburn hair to the soles of her pointy-toed shoes.

  "Christ Rafe, you need to sober up," Austin snapped, grabbing him by the shoulder and yanking him away from Katrina. "You can't treat her like that after you were just sucking face with that geek girl!"

  "She's my girlfriend asshole, I'll treat her like how I want!"

  "Listen, I'll get him sobered up," Austin said kindly to Katrina. "You guys stay here until I get back okay?"

  Rafe shoved Austin hard. "I ain't fucking drunk, bitch!"

  Austin yanked Rafe by the scruff of the neck and literally threw him out of the room. The door slammed shut behind them.

  Katrina didn't move. Her huge eyes filled with tears and they splashed down her tight top. Her shaking hands were bloodless.

  I murmured her name.

  "I-I'm okay," she murmured back. She sat down hard on the bed and covered her face. Her chest began to heave.

  After a few moments of hesitation, I cautiously sat down next to her. I had expected screaming and name-calling and hitting and the throwing of things from her...then tears. I opened my mouth but had no idea of what I was supposed to say; had Grandma been in my position she'd have smacked Katrina upside the head for being such a nasty bitch to me all those years, to hell with her broken heart. Before I could say anything though, Katrina buried her covered face into my shoulder and wept.

  The fear and uncertainty and nausea that saturated my innards slowly uncoiled, leaving behind a huge wash of pity. I slid my hand down Katrina's hair and thought that it looked like fire.

  I still wanted to chew it though.

  *****

  Book Two is available now! If you want to read it, go and download it. https://adf.ly/1RZM7v