Love and Other Unknown Variables

by Shannon Alexander

  2:09:52 a.m. When Charlotte smiles you can see a small chip on the bottom corner of her central incisor. I wonder how it got chipped. It makes her smile even more appealing. She has a smile with a story.

  I’m getting stupid with sleep deprivation.

  3:14:15 a.m. Pi. It’s pi time. Is there pie leftover? What kind of pie does Charlotte like, I wonder? It’d be some unique flavor, like fig. Fig pie would taste like butt.

  4:57:04 a.m. OhmyGodIamsotired.

  6:00:00 a.m. I rouse myself from half-sleep to a zombie-like state that passes for awake.

  6:20:15 a.m. I must have fallen asleep in the shower. Moving too slowly. I stare at my shaggy, sand-colored hair and decide it would take too much energy to comb it.

  6:29:53 a.m. I’m leaning on the counter with Mom waiting for the coffee to finish brewing. She’s eyeing me, but not questioning me. When Mr. Coffee stops, she pours herself a cup and one for me. She drinks hers black. I give it a try and gag.

  “That’s terrible.”

  Mom laughs. “You’ll get used to it,” she says, adding lots of cream to mine.

  I try another sip and grimace. “Seriously, how do you drink this?”

  Mom shrugs and finishes her mug. “Sometimes, we do what we have to do to get by.” She fills her mug again and holds the carafe out to me for a refill. I shake my head and take one last sip. Blarg.

  6:32:22 a.m. I’ll just have to kick James in the sac if he whines about being tardy today.

  6:41:01 a.m. “You look like crap,” Greta says as I pull out of her driveway.

  James snorts from the backseat.

  I’m too tired to care.

  Greta fiddles with the radio and tunes into a familiar song. My vision is flooded with a replay of Charlotte’s hips moving, pulling me into a chaotic world I have no chance of controlling—the world of hormones. I exhale like a gorilla just punched me in the stomach and reach for the dial to turn the station.

  “Hands off, Chuck. I like that one.” Greta swats at me, defending her tune. I try darting around her, but she’s lead to my gamma rays.

  I’m obviously not paying attention to the road. Which is how I end up driving into a garden.

  In my defense, the road curves right in front of old Mrs. Dunwitty’s house. The road curved, and I did not.

  “Chuck,” Greta screams, half in my lap trying to grab the wheel. My car has bumped up the small curb and laid tracks through the green grass, through a small decorative fence, and over some orange flowers.

  I crush the brakes and fishtail in the mulch, spraying it all over the yard and ripping up a few more bushes of flowers. Once I manage to stop the car, it’s in the middle of Mrs. Dunwitty’s garden. There’s part of a rose bush on the hood.

  “Everyone okay?” I ask turning to Greta and then James.

  James’s eyes are wide, but his lips are set in a grim way. Greta’s hands are a little shaky, but she manages a sympathetic smile, until she notices the carnage. “Oh, Chuck,” she says on an exhale. “Look what you’ve done.”

  I look at the yard. My stomach sinks to the threadbare floorboards. I’ve totally screwed up Mrs. Dunwitty’s garden—the same garden that has won her the coveted Yard of the Year award seven years in a row. It’s the only thing on this earth Dimwit loves. She loves her garden more than I love MIT.

  Greta shoves at my shoulder, saying, “Go! Go tell Mrs. Dunwitty you’re sorry.”

  “But we’ll be late,” I say, jabbing my finger at the digital clock on the dash. 6:42 a.m. The lines in the middle of the six and four don’t show up anymore so it looks like hieroglyphics. “I’ll stop by after school.”

  “She’ll have called the cops. You’ll be in way more trouble. Do it now.”

  I look at James for backup.

  His muscles are clenched so that his square jaw looks like it’s made of rock, not flesh. Instead of agreeing with me, he nods at Greta who doubles her effort to shove me out of my own car.

  “Fine. But when this old lady turns me into compost, I’m coming back to haunt both of your asses.” I can hear the final strains of Charlotte’s song still playing on the radio as I slam the car door.

  Mrs. Dunwitty’s front door is painted a sickly shade of pink. The only reason she gets away with exterior pink paint (total neighborhood no-no) is she’s been here longer than anyone else. And she’s way meaner.

  Dad grew up with her son. He’s witnessed her wrath. Once, her son neglected raking the leaves to go to a movie with Dad and some girls. She made her son pick up every leaf. One by one. By hand. Dad says she sat on the porch overseeing her sentence, calling out whenever he missed a leaf.

  My hand hesitates by the doorbell. I peek over my shoulder and see James glaring at me. One false move and he’ll be out of the car and ringing the bell himself. I take a deep breath and press the button.

  I hear the lock click. Before I can blink, Mrs. Dunwitty whips open the door, and stares out at me with hawkish eyes and a too-wide mouth that seems to stretch from ear to ear. She’s rail thin and about a foot shorter than me, so I try to stand in front of her so she can’t see the wreckage behind me. No use. She sees past me to her war zone-esque garden and starts shrieking.

  “What happened? Did you see what happened?” She’s breathing fast and clutching her chest, her brown weathered skin turning ashen.

  Oh, crap. She’s not going to kill me. I’ve killed her. I hadn’t seen that one coming.

  “Charlie?” Her voice shakes.

  “Um…” I stumble. My brain is telling me to lie. Lie real good. Tell the woman you were on your way to school and you noticed some vandals had torn up her garden. Charles Mortimer Hanson = Good Samaritan. “See, what happened was—”

  “You,” she says, jabbing a bony finger at me. “You did this, didn’t you, you little shit?”

  Too late. I blink away my surprise. My parents work with young kids so their vocabularies are pretty PG. I’ve never had an adult speak to me like Dimwit.

  Mrs. Dunwitty pushes past me. “My beautiful garden. My roses.” The sagging skin on her arm flaps as she gesticulates and hollers. “My statuary. Dammit, Charlie, what kind of a jackass drives over an angel?”

  I look over the garden and notice a small stone angel tipped over by my front bumper. One of her wings is lying in the dirt beside her. Bet God doesn’t like you to rip the wings off his angels. Now I’m dead and damned. “Yeah, see, I’m real sorry. I was driving and got, um, distracted and lost control.” My voice fizzles out.

  Mrs. Dunwitty’s whole face is pinched in deep thought, like she’s seeing something I can’t. She mutters to herself. What I catch sounds like, “… won’t like this at all. Just the excuse he’s looking for.” I think she’s talking about her son. I know he checks in on her every so often, although why he’d care about her garden, I can’t figure. I’m sure she’ll fix it. The woman lives to garden.

  When she looks back, I fight the urge to dodge the daggers in her glare. “I can’t do this alone.” I flinch away from the sharp edge of her tone. “You’ll fix this. Starting this afternoon. You’ll make this right.” She nods once before shutting the door in my face.

  ---

  James is still grumbling at me as we pull into Brighton’s student parking lot. The bulk of his bitching is out of his system though. For the last half mile, he’s been having an angry conversation all by himself.

  “Don’t know why we put up with his shit,” he says.

  “Cuz he’s got a car,” alter ego James replies.

  “We don’t know anyone else with a car?” James v1.0 asks in a desperate whisper.

  Back and forth he goes. Greta laughs, which snaps James out of his psychotic rambling. He flushes and runs a hand across the stubble on his cheek. “What? You know it’s a valid question.”

  “True,” she says, her eyebrows pulling down low as she studies me.

  “I said I was sorry,” I say, pulling into the first open spot in the lot.

  Greta laughs again, but i
t doesn’t sound so nice anymore, like she’s laughing to cover her urge to punch me in the face. “No, you didn’t,” she says.

  “He reckons he doesn’t need to,” James says. “God of numbers shouldn’t have to apologize to anyone.” He does a little mock bow with his head.

  The god of numbers wouldn’t have crashed in the first place because the god of numbers wouldn’t have been trying to block out visions of a certain long-legged girl’s hips and how the skin there might feel under his fingertips. I scrub at my burning eyes, wiping away my exhaustion.

  Screw James and his whiny bullshit. It was an accident. No one intends to drive over a foul-mouthed octogenarian’s prize-winning rose garden. No one wants to spend time sweating his balls off under the glaring eye of a demented grandmother, no matter what those Hallmark Channel movies say. Frustrated, I snarl, “Shut up, James. You think you’re Mr. Perfect? You can’t even piss off an English teacher.”

  “My stuff is working.” James leans forward between the seats. “You couldn’t do any better.”

  “Can too.”

  “Can not.”

  “Can—”

  The car shakes with the force of the door slamming. “I’m the god of numbers, and I demand an apology!” Red hair dull against the morning light, Greta storms through the parking lot saluting us with both middle fingers.

  James swears under his breath, grabbing his bag and following.

  “James,” I call out after him, but he doesn’t turn around.

  2.1

  “Mr. Hanson?” The sound is muffled, like I’m swimming. “Mr. Hanson, can you rank these acids from strongest to weakest?”

  I blink and shake my head vigorously to wake myself. “Uh, twelve?”

  “Mr. Hanson, what class do you think you’re in?”

  I squint at the teacher. “Um…yours?” The class chuckles, and I smile at them like I know what they’re laughing about.

  “I’ll see you for lunch detention, young man,” the teacher says.

  “But, sir,” I give my head another shake to clear it, “uh, Mr. Browning, I already have lunch detention for Mrs. Keele.”

  “Hanson, what is wrong with you today?”

  Sleep deprivation brought on by the hypnotic dancing of the English teacher’s sister. I shrug instead of answering.

  “Tomorrow. Lunch. Here.” He points at my desk before moving back to his.

  Two lunch detentions? Who the hell am I today? This is all Charlotte’s fault. My brain is fried, and I blame the girl who’s taken up residence there. Serotonin is such a pain in the ass. Maybe if I help James, Ms. Finch will quit and move herself and her sister far, far away. But as soon as I have that thought, my traitorous brain riots.

  I’m exhausted.

  Before lunch, Greta catches up to me in the hall on my way to Mrs. Keele’s.

  “Hey, derelict.”

  “Huh?” I look at her, rubbing my eyes to clear them, balancing my Styrofoam lunch tray in one hand.

  “Heard you got detention.”

  I nod. “Look, Gret. About this morning, I didn’t sleep well last night and—”

  “Wait,” Greta says, reaching in her pocket for her phone. “I want to record this.”

  “What?”

  “Well, aren’t you about to apologize? They’re such a rare species, your apologies. I’d like to have it on record.”

  My ears instantly burn and my jaw locks. I’ve got no way to unlock it and let the words come out.

  Greta notices. “Maybe next time,” she says, putting her phone away.

  “I have apologized for stuff before. Remember the squid?” In freshman biology, I accidentally pierced the ink sack of the squid we were dissecting and sprayed Greta in the face. I’m trying not to laugh at the memory. “I said I was sorry then, didn’t I?”

  Greta raises a brow.

  “Didn’t I?” I thought I had. At least, I thought I had after I’d laughed my ass off. Greta’s lips are pressed into a firm line. “Look, I’m just not usually wrong about things,” I say with a grin, hoping she’ll smile back.

  With a huff, she rolls her eyes and finally allows for a small smile. “Anyway,” she drawls, “I know it was an accident, and I felt a little bad about being kind of bitchy, so I brought you something.” She reaches into her Mary Poppins bag and pulls out two cans of Mountain Dew. “These are to show you that I’m sorry for overreacting,” she says, carefully depositing them on the tray in my hands.

  Mountain Dew: defibrillator in a can. “Thanks, Gret.”

  She nods. “See, how easy that was?”

  I look blankly at her.

  “I apologized and yet the universe didn’t implode.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  She pretends to catch her balance. “Whoa, did you feel that? No? Me neither,” she says, looking unimpressed. “Now, you’d better get going. You don’t want to be ‘tardy.’” She makes her usual air quotes around James’s favorite word.

  On my way to detention, I pound back both sodas and feel revived…and twitchy. I make it through advanced physics with Greta and molecular biology, but by the time I get to English class, I’m feeling a Dew crash of epic proportions.

  I’m nauseated and sweaty, can’t stop bouncing my knee, and Greta has smacked me twice now to stop my fingers from drumming the table.

  As soon as Ms. Finch walks in, everything goes into hyper-drive. It’s like I’m seeing into the future. Given a decade, this is what Charlotte may look like.

  My brain starts screaming at itself to shut up. I don’t care what Charlotte will look like in ten years. I don’t care what Charlotte looks like now. Charlotte’s appearance will not get me into MIT. Her full lips will not get me a spot as one of Dr. Bell’s research interns. Her long, lean legs will not win me a Nobel Prize.

  A wave of nausea crashes over me. I lean forward and put my head on the cool desktop. Closing my eyes, I let the waves roll over me, waves the color of Charlotte’s eyes.

  “You okay, Chuck?” Greta whispers.

  “Is there something wrong with Mr. Hanson?” Ms. Finch asks from the front of the room.

  I sit up. “No. I’m fine,” I manage to say, but the room is spinning, which doubles the vomit-y feeling. I make fists and worm my knuckles into the muscles of my thighs, hoping to distract myself.

  “In that case, shut your traps—”

  Oh, how I wish I could. Just then, I feel the horrible burning sensation of Mountain Dew going the wrong way in my esophagus. There’s not much I can do. It’s coming up. It knows it, and I know it.

  I spring from my seat and sprint up the aisle with one hand clamped over my mouth. Please don’t let me barf in front of everyone. I’m almost to the hallway. Jenna, sitting in the front row, pales as she watches me. Something about the terror in her eyes, like a mirror of my own, distracts me, and I trip over her bag in the aisle. Flailing through the air, I take my hands away from my mouth to brace for a fall, and all hell breaks loose. Mountain Dew and cafeteria corn dog go flying in every direction as I tumble to the ground.

  The class erupts into a chorus of disgust. I roll myself up and notice I’ve landed right next to a pair of black pointy-toed heels. Well, they were black. My eyes run up the long legs attached and stop at Ms. Finch’s face, contorted with revulsion.

  “Well,” she says, “that’s one way to get out of a pop quiz.” She bends over and offers me a hand. My braced arm slips in some puke and I crumple at her feet.

  “Mr. Thomas. Please come help Mr. Hanson to the bathroom.” Ms. Finch steps away from me as James tries to figure out the best way to help me up without getting covered in nastiness.

  “We’re finally doing this,” James whispers as he drags me out the door, “together.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” I say, but my voice is too loud in my head, so I shut up.

  “There’s no recovering from that. It’ll take the custodian the rest of class to clean up your mess. Everyone is all shaken up. And Ms. Finch is covere
d in your gastrointestinal fluids. I knew you’d come through for me.” James finishes with a fist pump. The motion shakes me. I feel my stomach twist again and for a second, consider letting loose right on James. The thought exhausts me, though. I hang my head and allow myself to be led away.

  2.2

  That afternoon, Dimwit takes one look at me and swears, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Charles. How are you supposed to work if you can’t even stand up straight?”

  I shrug, regaining my balance by clinging to the porch railing.

  “Go the hell home.”

  So I do.

  I climb into bed fully clothed. Everything about me feels thick like wool. I want to slip away and sleep, but the strange sense that I’m not alone is holding me back.

  I prop myself up on one elbow, blinking in the dim light, and see someone silhouetted in the doorway. It’s Charlotte.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Congratulating you,” Charlotte says, maneuvering around piles of clothes, papers, and miscellaneous crap. She moves a stack of science journals and pulls my desk chair closer.

  “Oh.” I’m confused by her presence, the smell of her skin, and whatever it is she just said. “For what?”

  She laughs, and I relax into the sound of it. “You annihilated my sister.” She shows me a text with a picture of Ms. Finch’s boots. “Those were her favorite shoes. Can you make yourself puke on command, or did you just decide to take advantage of a great situation?”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “But it did happen.” Charlotte digs the toe of her shoe into the carpet between us.

  “Is there a universe in which anything you say makes sense?” I ask, rubbing the back of my hand across my mouth to get rid of any drool.

  “She knew what she was getting into when she took the job. Everyone warned her, said Brighton kids are a pain in the ass. Said y’all wouldn’t listen to her.” Charlotte is leaning forward on her knees, a gleeful look in her eyes. “I had the best summer in, like, six years because she was so intent on creating lesson plans that would intrigue you guys and make her some freaking local hero. The English teacher that tamed the dorks or something.”