Solving for Ex

by LeighAnn Kopans

  “Yeah, well,” I said, drawing my knees to my chin, “It’s the same brain for both things, you know. It’s all ‘brain stuff.’”

  “You amaze me,” he said, still smiling that same stupid smile.

  I looked down at my feet, and rested my chin on my knees. “You think I’ll make the team?”

  “Ashley, are you kidding me? Yes. Yeah, you’ll make Mathletes.”

  He reached behind me and started rubbing my shoulders. “I can’t imagine the team without you.”

  I let myself fall to the side and into him, closing my eyes and letting the warm shocks of his touch run through my muscles. “Aren’t you worried about people starting rumors?”

  “About what? Me playing favorites?”

  I really meant about us being together. At that point, I wouldn’t have minded the rumors at all, actually. Maybe they would have forced Brendan to finally make a freaking move.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said, still staring at my shoes.

  “Nah. Everyone knows you’re my favorite. And everyone knows that you’re good at this stuff, Ash. And fast. What would the team do without you?” His voice lowered as he looked at me. “What would I do without you?”

  That was it. I couldn’t take any more. I had to make a decision about what signal to send to him, and I absolutely couldn’t make it now, even if it meant staying locked out of the house. I was chickening out, just like every other time I hung out with Brendan and I thought I saw something in his eyes that may have meant he felt the same way.

  May have.

  I stood up, too fast probably. “I’ve gotta be back. Kristin wanted to take me to lunch.” Kristin did not, in fact, want to take me to lunch, but it was the only excuse I could think of.

  “Okay,” he said, wearing that stupid smile that confirmed exactly how oblivious he was. Dude was crazy smart when it came to school, but when it came to people? He was dumber than a ton of bricks. “See you in the morning.”

  Riding to school with him was awesome, even though it made my stomach flip. “Bright and early,” I said.

  apt to expect too much

  It was only the second week of Junior Honors English, which was basically the next lowest form of hell before we would descend into Senior AP English the following year. I’d seen the reading list for AP, with such delights as Moby Dick, Notes from the Underground, and Middlemarch. So you’d think that our Junior English professor would let us read some lighter stuff.

  No chance. She plunked down a shiny new copy of Mansfield Park on each of our desks on the first day.

  “I’m not trying to be cute,” she said, her sentences punctuated with the thunk of each book on a desk. “Okay, well, maybe I am. I do love that our school shares a name with my very favorite Austen novel. But that’s not why it’s my favorite. Compared to Pride and Prejudice, which you’ll read in AP next year, Mansfield Park is mature and nuanced, studded with deeper social issues than all the rest of Austen’s works put together. We’ll be having a quiz next Wednesday about the major themes and character arcs, so I’d suggest reading it more closely than you would, for example, the newspaper. Or your fashion magazines.”

  Britt raised her hand. She had been the rare freshman Mathlete, was freakishly good at every other subject, stunningly gorgeous, and incredibly popular. Yes, she was one of those girls. “We don’t get the newspaper.”

  Mrs. Crawford rolled her eyes and, without looking back, said, “My point exactly, Miss Harding.”

  Some of the guys in the back of the class snickered at that last name, just like they did every single other time anyone said it. Including themselves. This was going to be a long year.

  I’d heard enough about Mrs. Crawford to know to take her seriously, so I’d spent Saturday afternoon after breakfast with Brendan marking up my copy with theme, major plot points, and some interesting character stuff.

  On quiz day, most of the kids had buried their noses in their books in the five minutes between arriving to class and the bell ringing, as though the text could be absorbed through their eyeballs in that span of time and then magically translated by their brain into quiz answers when the time came. Britt was one of them, and Vincent leaned across the aisle and rested his elbows on her desk, pretending to look at her notes with her, his gaze flicking down her shirt. I rolled my eyes, and then leaned back in my desk and closed my eyes for a moment of peace and quiet before bell rang.

  Just as I was imagining the next shot of the river walk I’d like to attempt from the fire escape of one of the old restaurants in downtown Pittsburgh, my ponytail flipped up and around in a circle. I sat straight up and turned slowly to see Vincent, who slouched back and smirked just enough to let a dimple show in the expanse of his ridiculously flawless skin.

  I caught my breath against the annoyance of some guy I didn’t know, gorgeous or not, flicking my hair around like we were best friends. I cocked my head and raised my eyebrow.

  He leaned down in his bag and pulled out his copy of Mansfield Park. It was one hundred percent flawless—unmarked and free of dog-ears—like it was pure luck he’d remembered to bring it to class today. “Ready for this quiz?” he asked. “I hear Crawford’s a hard-ass.”

  I quirked an eyebrow. “Are you ready? Looks like you didn’t prep.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.” He tapped the cover of the book. “We read this at my old school. I’ll get a perfect score, mark my words.”

  He’d read Mansfield Park when he was a sophomore? And I thought this school was nuts. I smiled. “We’ll see.”

  Mrs. Crawford handed the papers back and we got to work. Twenty-five minutes later, I’d thrown down three different main thematic threads in the work and bitched for four paragraphs about why Edmund Bertram really had to be such a clueless dickheaded milquetoast when all the rest of the characters were really deep and interesting. I of course had already completed the first page, which had been regular multiple choice.

  “I’ll take your long answers,” Mrs. Crawford said, pacing the front of the room. “You’ll do me a favor by grading one another’s multiple choice right now. Please pass your tests one seat forward and mark off any answers that don’t match what I read here.”

  True to his word, Vincent got a perfect score. We handed the tests forward just before the bell rang. I didn’t know why, but I let myself hang back to walk out into the hallway with him.

  “I’m very impressed,” I said.

  He laughed. “By what? I told you I’d get a perfect score.”

  “So you just really love Mansfield Park, then?”

  “Obviously.” He smiled, but I couldn’t tell what kind of smile it was. It looked completely genuine, yet vague. Like there was no real anchor between his expression and the meaning of smiling. Like it was his default when he didn’t want people to know what he really thought of something.

  At least it was a damn beautiful smile, though. I had to avert my eyes to keep myself from enjoying it too much, or I’d probably crash into the wall or something.

  “So, you and Sofia,” I said as we walked. “Are you, like, Fanny and William close, or more like Henry and Mary close?”

  “Huh?” he said, looking at me with a furrowed brow.

  I knew he had heard me. I got suspicious about that uncracked book all over again. “Mansfield Park?”

  There went that smile again. Totally chill, totally relaxed, totally in control. Totally disconnected.

  He laughed again. “Well, let’s just say we’re close enough. We grew up moving around a lot. Most of the time, we were the only people we knew at a new school. So we’ve hung out more than most siblings, probably. And I know her well enough to know that if I ever called her Franny she’d kill me.”

  “Fanny.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So, this Mathletes thing,” he said.

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

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

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

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

  “Yeah, pretty much.” Except me.

  “What about Brendan? He seems cool.”

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

  “Okay, so show me the ropes?”

  “You want to join Mathletes?”

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

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

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

  all favourable to tenderness and sentiment

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

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

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

  “The number of rectangles,” everyone answered.

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

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

  “Okay,” I said. “Yes. Excellent.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Could you use some company?”

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