I've blown it. Kiss "girlfriend" goodbye. No matter what Jasmine says, geekiness is the wedge that drives a space between "girl" and "friend."
But Stu doesn't gawk at me like I belong to a different atmosphere. He blows out a whistle, long and loud with admiration, and looks at me like there's nothing sexier than a smart girl.
I have to remind myself, I'm not at Lincoln High. I'm hundreds of miles away, in a world where brains may not necessarily trump beauty, but at least having a brain is a variable in the dating equation.
"Girl, you know your math," Stu says loudly, and holds his hand up in the air, waiting for me to high-five him.
As soon as my hand slaps his, I know deep in my gut, where I've always felt the truth, that I am really and truly in the throes of my first bona fide case of Yellow Fever.
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The way his hand lingers on mine tells me that Stu hasn't been inoculated either. "Favorite book," he says.
My synapses are so focused on feeling his hand on top of mine that I watch his lips move and listen to his voice, but his words don't make it up to my stewing brain: What's going on here? He squeezes my hand and repeats, "Favorite book."
"Possession," I tell him even though it feels like I'm giving him a piece of my soul when I do.
"Romance."
"God, it's so much more than a romance. It won the Booker Prize." I spring to my book's defense like I'm a potluck parent, parading its accomplishments, and then stop. "Wait, you read it?"
Stu laughs at my surprise. "Well, yeah, my mom lugs it on every vacation." He has to lean toward me now that the jazz band is warming up in the corner, a lone trumpet crooning. "She said it's the travel guide to every smart woman's heart."
She's right, I think to myself. Only I've never needed a guidebook to my own heart, until possibly now. Can my heart trust Stu? I wonder. After all, I trusted Mark and he just about spit on my heart.
"How about you?" I ask. "Favorite book?"
I can't help it. I hold my breath, and lecture every censor in my brain, trained from years of potluck comparisons, to be open to whatever he says. Even if it's a lame manga comic book.
"The Phantom Tollbooth."
I can't keep the squeal out of my voice: "I love that book."
"Tock is the best," Stu says. "He marches to his own beat." And with that, the band starts jamming, and my heart is
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thumping Tock, Tock, Tock in time to a song that continues to play in my head long after we walk back to our own Digitopolis in Synergy.
None of the boys watching an action flick in the common room notices us come in together, once again demonstrating that the most difficult proofs aren't in math, but human chemistry. The girls, on the other hand, are all aquiver, noses sensing the pheromones in the air. Stu and I aren't talking, much less touching each other, when we sit down next to Jasmine. But sprawled out on a couch like Synergy is her private mansion, Katie of the Big Hair is steaming so that I swear her hair puffs up another couple of inches. Jasmine contemplates me with something approaching envy. She's no closer to bagging Brian than she was at the airport.
"Your mom called," Jasmine tells me.
I shrug; I'll call her tomorrow.
Here at SUMaC, surrounded by math geniuses and number jocks in the common room, with Jasmine on one side and Stu on my other, I get a sense of what it's like to be a Queen Bee. And there's no way I'm leaving now when I'm buzzing with something that feels like happiness.
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19 * Buildering
When I was little , I used to dream in two languages: English and Taiwanese. That ended after my fourth-grade teacher ordered Mama to stop speaking anything but English at home. In the Ho household, whatever a teacher wants, a teacher gets. So when Mr. Enoch worried about my unorthodox use of language, that was tsai-chen to Taiwanese. (Never mind that a year later, a little French girl who mixed up prepositions completely charmed him with her first "monsieur.")
Playing in my own private theater tonight is the same nightmare I always have, a Patty Ho cult classic. I wake up, drenched in sweat. My dad was chasing me with a cleaver again. Laura, Ms. Pragmatic, wonders if maybe I've watched too many Leave It to Beaver episodes and my subconscious wants that perfect American family; hence, the cleaver. Me, I just want to know why I can dream in color, but my nightmares are always in black-and-white. Janie says that it's because I'm more highly evolved than the average teenager, it being so film noir and everything. I think it's because I'm a visitor from Planet Demento.
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"You screamed," says Jasmine, calmly.
My eyes focus on the multicolor nightmare that is my roommate. She's throwing stuff into her backpack. Every single light is on in our room, and she's even tilted my desk lamp to shine directly into my face, a spotlight of horror.
"I couldn't wake you up," she says, as if she's annoyed that I'm in bed where all good math jocks should be... at three in the morning.
I recheck my alarm clock on my desk to see if I've read it right. I have. But the last thing I want to do is fall back asleep, not with a knife-wielding dad on the loose. I'm glad that the end credits in my black-and-white nightmare are rolling, the details growing grayer by the second. A second feature film runs in front of my face: Jasmine and Her Technicolor Backpack.
"What are you doing?" I ask as she shoves some shoes into her backpack.
"We are going buildering."
"Builder- what ?"
"Come on, get your hapa butt out of bed!" Jasmine laughs, pulling me out from under my blanket. "We don't have all night."
And to my surprise, my hapa butt jumps out of bed, gets into some sweats and follows her softly down the stairs.
For all the palm trees waving around like it's the balmy South Pacific, summer nights in California are cool. I shiver as I try to keep up with Jasmine, which is odd since she's usually trotting in double time to keep up with me.
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Patty Ho Truth Theorem Three
Given: Jasmine is a woman on a mission.
Prove: I am a crazy fool to be following her at three in the morning.
Statement
Reason
1. Jasmine is hup-two-threeing like a drill sergeant.
1. Given. (Pant, pant, pant.)
2. I am usually asleep at 3:13 a.m.
2. Yawn.
3. Only a crazy person would willingly get out of a comfortable bed to go skulking around a cold, creepy, deserted campus.
3. Given. What was that crunch behind us?
Therefore, I am a complete idiot whose brain has been melted by math, so now I think its perfectly acceptable to gallivant around in the dead of night.
Omigod, really, what was that crunch???
So what is Jasmines mission, and why is she inviting me along after week of wondering?
A skinny, feral cat darts out of the darkness in front of us and stares at us with its glittering eyes. My heart slows down. It's not a sex offender on the loose. How could it be? There isn't a soul moving in the late-night campus of hulking shadows, aside from us. Even White Plaza, the pulse of the community when the sun is up, is empty, the bookstore dark and
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the student union closed. Without the bikers clogging the paths and terrorizing the pedestrians, Stanford this late at night feels like a stage set.
"We can take a shortcut here," says Jasmine. We pass the Clock Tower kitty corner to the School of Education and then slip under a stone archway, no longer golden but gray-blue in the moonlight. Our footsteps echo in the long arcades of the Main Quad, where a bunch of kids in other summer programs for the gifted get to study English literature, lucky them. All the courtyards are filled with flowers bedded down for the night, their heads closed in tight buds.
"How do you know your way around so well?" I ask softly even though there's no one who could be eavesdropping.
Jasmine is silent, and then says, "An ex went here."
The way she's folded into herself, arms cro
ssed over her chest, I wonder how recently the ex was booted out of her personal equation. Given how she's been chasing Brian like he's the last math geek in the world, I didn't think any old boy baggage had been encumbering Jasmine.
"I was fifteen, he was a senior here," she offers, as if she knows I'm grilling her in my mind.
"You're kidding." I'm fifteen and I've never so much as been on a date, much less with a college student.
Just two years older than me but infinitely boy-wiser, Jasmine laughs and shakes her long hair. "Always date up, kiddo. The guys get better."
I don't have to ask what they get better at. First, Anne and her romance novel research, and now Jasmine with her older men. I wonder if I'm the last living virgin in high school.
"How about you?" asks Jasmine.
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"Oh, me?" I'm too embarrassed to admit that I'm still technically not allowed to date. That Stu is the only guy I've ever played dating tag with. That it's been three nights since our problem-solving session in the CoHo, and I have a new problem to solve: what's the next step?
"Your mom doesn't let you date, does she?" Jasmine laughs. "My parents don't either."
"But..."
"Don't act so surprised. You know, you don't have to do what everybody wants you to do. Good girls are way overrated."
I'm still processing this when I notice that we're standing at the side of MemChu. A couple of lights shine on the church's stone wall, casting strange shadows. I tune in just in time to hear Jasmine telling me that buildering is to buildings what rock climbing is to rocks.
"You're climbing this?" I lean back, but even arched, I can't see all the way up to the roof.
"Yeah."
I groan.
"It's perfectly safe. The route's at least forty years old," says Jasmine.
Perfectly safe is staying in bed, even if I'm haunted by recurring black-and-white nightmares. Perfectly safe is reading one of Abe's Spiderman comics, not pretending to be one. Perfectly safe isn't leaving Synergy at night when we've been explicitly warned to stay put after ten.
"Are you allowed to climb this?" I ask.
"Allowed?" Jasmine snorts. "The entire Quad is off-limits."
I can't breathe with the fur ball of fear lodged in my throat.
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"Look, I can feel you stressing. Don't," says Jasmine, dropping her backpack onto the ground. "You won't be buildering tonight."
That seemed to imply that I would be climbing on another night. Given my fear of falling, I'd say this has about as much chance as Mama telling me that I'm the daughter she's always dreamed of having. So about nil.
Jasmine slides an old pamphlet, held together by staples, out of the front pocket of her backpack. A hand-drawn ice axe and piton are crossed, forming an "X" under the title, Mountaineering: Freedom of the Quad. She flips open to a page with a sticky note on it. Trained in reading over shoulders, I have no problem figuring out that this is a guidebook to climbing Stanford's buildings.
"Where did you get this thing?" I ask.
"eBay. Definitely worth fifty bucks." Jasmine wraps the guidebook back in a sheet of butcher paper and gently places the package in her backpack, precious cargo. "Just stand watch for me."
"Stand watch for what?"
But Spiderwoman doesn't respond. She stretches her arms overhead and places her hands on the sandstone like she's done this hundreds of times before. She probably has --- every night that we've been here, and I'm guessing, with her ex, the former Stanford senior. In a few seconds, Jasmine's over my head, a shadowy ballerina dancing up the wall. Left behind on the ground, I remember that I'm cold. I hug my arms around myself, wondering what it would be like to climb farther than my eye can see.
Tentatively, I place my hands on the sandstone, feeling the rough ridges of the slabby rock under my fingertips. I hear
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Jasmine's whoop and rear back guiltily from the wall. It's a hard world I don't belong to. Yet. "You should see this!" she calls.
And I promise myself that next time, and there will be a next time, I'll be up there with her.
That is, until for the second time tonight, a bright light shines directly into my eyes.
"What are you doing?" asks a greasy-haired man in a security uniform.
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20 * Blundering
I am about to become the only fifteen-year-old in history to have a heart attack. My pulse is racing so fast it's beating speed records set by hummingbirds. Only I'm not flying anywhere. I can't hear anything above the pounding of my heart. Even so, I strain for the slightest sound of Jasmine scrabbling down the church's forbidden walls. Nothing. Thankfully, the security guard lowers the flashlight so that I'm not a blinded heart attack victim.
My eyes dart over to where Jasmine is supposed to be descending, and the man follows my gaze with his flashlight. Yes, I would be the world's worst spy. But still nothing.
He stares suspiciously at me and then drops his flashlight to Jasmine's backpack by my feet. "You thinking about defacing the church or something?"
"No!" I blurt out the first thing I can think of: "Buddha preaches peace."
That, amazingly, seems to work.
"OK, who are you? What are you doing trespassing at...,"
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Security Man checks his watch, "three forty-four in the morning?"
I wonder if "meditating" would be pushing it, but then every Oprah show on safety that Mama taped and forced me to watch comes bounding into my brain. Never trust men in security guard uniforms; that's rule number one. Rapists and who-knows-what kind of evil men moonlight as guards when they're really scoping out victims. Trust your instincts, that's rule number two. I size the guy up, which isn't hard to do. He looks like he's had a couple dozen Krispy Kreme donuts too many.
So I do what I always do: I run away.
The return trip to the dorm is a lot longer and lonelier by myself. I stay close to the Art Building, hugging its thick shadows as I shoot anxious glances over my shoulder. After the security guy's first warning shout, I haven't heard him since, but I still expect him to spring out of nowhere like we're in a spy movie, with me, double-oh-Ho. One big difference, James Bond wouldn't be so worried about getting caught that he nearly face-plants himself on the library steps. But I am stressed about getting caught, about Jasmine wherever she is. I wonder, does the Farm have a holding pen for students?
I skulk by Green Library, dark and desolate without any lights on. Another look around, but no overweight security guy, so I dodge in front of Meyer Library, the playground of Anne Wong and her new brain twister, Harry, since it stays open until nine at night. Anne! I groan, and add one more
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item on my mental list of things to do to erase this evening from Patty Ho's history of flubs. Anne cannot find out that Jasmine went buildering and I went blundering. Gossip is efficient in our potluck circle. One word from Anne to her mother and I might as well be homeward bound, both sent home and under permanent house arrest. If The Gossip Lady caught wind of this, well, let's just say that every night will be prom night for the China Dolls, who will be celebrating until they are dead.
Thanking my runs around the campus, I easily navigate past the concrete bunkers of Stern Hall and cut up along Campus Drive. Just one more sprint up a butt-burning hill, and I'm home free, not house bound. Never before has a closed door looked more welcoming than it does now. My hand is on the handle, key in the lock. I'm inside Synergy, and scaling the stairs to safety when a door on the first floor opens.
"Not so fast," says a guy.
I whirl around so quickly that I flirt with whiplash.
It's not the beefy security guard; it's beefcake Brian. He may be blond, blue-eyed and a babe, but he looks like he's channeling Mama. His eyes are narrowed and I can tell he's the guest speaker in the Mama Lecture Series.
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21 * Great Wall
Chalk it up to me verging on a nervous breakdown, but I start laughing. True,
Brian's hair is half sticking up, and the other half flattened down like a porcupine who doesn't know whether he should be on the offensive or defensive. But I'm laughing so hard that I lose my grip on both the rail and reality, and slip down the last two stairs. Brian catches me, and I notice that he's looking at me like my brain has busted into a billion pieces.
He shoots a nervous glance up the stairs before steering me to his room, which makes me laugh harder because he looks like my bumbling partner in spying, double-oh-caught-in-limbo. As Janie and Laura know back home, once I get started on a good fit of laughing, I can hardly stop. Only Brian doesn't know that I'm just cracking up, the crazy kind of laughing until you pee, not the totally-whacked-out-hysterical kind.
Quietly, Brian closes his door and puts both hands on my shoulders. For half a second, I think he's going to kiss me when he leans toward my mouth, and I don't know what to
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do. Should I kiss him back? No, wait, what about Stu? Should I kick him? But no, the guy is sniffing my breath. Like a dog. Honestly, I'm a little weirded out until it dawns on slow-witted me that he thinks that I, Patty Ho, the girl whose craziest party antic was singing karaoke with the potluck group, am wasted. More like I've wasted my youth. Until now.
"I'm not drunk," I say although I feel it. At least, I think I feel it. But I am drunk with the thought that Brian, the man that Jasmine's wanted to builder since she spotted him at the airport, is standing in front of me with nothing on except his boxer shorts.
Nothing but the truth: (and a few white lies) Page 10