Equating EquatingAfter swimming, showering and dining, Stu and I are finally studying in the Coffee House, or CoHo in Stanford speak. I should say, Stu is studying math, and, technically, I’m studying him. For a while, there’s nothing but the sounds of people talking, plates clinking, pencils scratching and my heart thumping because Stu is sitting just a touch away.
Stu’s pencil darts all over the equation we’re supposed to be solving together. My XX chromosomes are getting all hot and bothered just watching Stu’s XY action. Jasmine is so right. Brains + brawn = lots of yummy.
I steal a glance at Stu. He’s blowing a strand of hair out of his face, all concentration.
All I can concentrate on is whether Stu really thinks I’m cute. If so, his pencil moves a lot faster than he does, because he’s acting like we’re just problem set buddies.
Instead of dating, we’re equating.
Still, equating is threatening to one-fifteenth of the female population at SUMaC. Jasmine let it drop over dinner to Katie that Stu and I were studying tonight, and all Malibu Barbie was able to muster was a weak verbal swipe at me: “What a perfect ho-hum first date.” I just laughed and told her that I had heard worse from third graders, ho ho ho. Anyway, if Katie thinks she can fluster me, she obviously doesn’t know that I’m an honors student in Mama’s Insidious Insulting Academy.
A couple of scraggly guys start setting up in the corner of the CoHo, pulling out guitars and microphones.
“This isn’t working out,” Stu says, tapping his eraser on an errant X.
Before I think about what I’m doing, I take my pencil, reach over to his notebook and jot down the answer. He woos me with a compliment; I with a math answer? Even as I lift my pencil, I wish I could scribble out the past few seconds.
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 at mo sphere. 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.
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 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.