Tuesday dawns cold and cloudy. Regardless of the weather, there is a bounce in my step as I approach the math building. The guy in front of me gives me a strange look as I thank him enthusiastically for holding the door.
It’s a good thing, for Noah, that I’ve had to wait four days to tell him about my math epiphany. My initial enthusiasm might have been overwhelming.
On the other hand, it’s been a very bad thing for me. In the process of expounding my sudden appreciation for dimensional analysis, I have endured a disturbingly high occurrence of the look. You know, the one you always get as a young single person, even if you’re describing a completely platonic situation?
That look.
I got it from Dad and Mom—which was predictable—but now that I’m back at school, I’m getting it from Ivy. She even went so far as to suggest I ask Noah out.
As if my excitement has anything to do with him!
First of all, he’s my tutor. He is being paid to spend time with me. I’m sure I only enjoy the time so much because he excels at his job. Finally tackling my fear of this class has made me appreciate him, sure, but it’s just because he’s helping me clear such a giant hurdle.
I’m grateful, that’s all.
It has nothing to do with attraction.
Second, I’m not attracted to him! Just because a person smells nice or you happen to notice the curious way he cocks his head when he’s thinking or your thoughts scatter when he leans in to see your work, that doesn’t mean you’re attracted.
Right?
Third, even if I were attracted to him—which I’m not—he’s made it quite clear that he isn’t interested in getting to know me. Ivy insists this must be because he’s shy or because, like Ethan, he deems the distance a necessity. I disagree.
My point is, because of the delay, I have way overthought today’s tutoring session, and now it’s making me nervous. But why shouldn’t I be excited about math? Attempting to put all the knowing looks from my people behind me, I determine that I will not act like anything. True self and all that.
I take a cleansing breath, smile at a stranger passing me in the wide hallway, and open the door to the math lab.
Noah is at our table, scowling at his phone. As soon as I set Trusty down, he swaps his phone for a pencil and greets me with a lift of his chin and a marginal softening of his dour expression, though his eyes remain dark.
“Guess what!” I say, pulling my things out and setting them on the table.
He sits back in his chair but doesn’t say anything.
I take this as an enthusiastic invitation to share. “I can do math!”
He folds his arms.
I laugh. “I’m serious!” I say, tempted to swat his arm like I would Kaden’s if he were baiting me like this.
Noah is wearing a T-shirt with shorter sleeves than he normally wears even though it’s freezing today. I can’t help but notice that his arms are more toned than I’d expected.
“I gathered that from your laughter,” he deadpans.
Don’t think about his arms. “I can do math!” I insist.
“And . . . ?” He sounds anything but impressed.
“Like, real math. On my own!”
“I know,” he says, picking up his pencil and tapping it against the tabletop.
“What do you mean you know? I haven’t even told you my story yet!”
He blinks in slow-motion, and I wonder if it’s more a suppression of eye-rolling than a blink. “I mean I know you can do math. I’ve known that from our first session.”
This stumps me for a minute. He knew? How could he know? I was still struggling then. I set his statement aside for later analysis and press on with my story. “So I was home for Thanksgiving, and Dad and I were stargazing and talking about some comet and Mars exploration, and I thought, How fast could a spacecraft get a human to Mars with current technology? And the equation to figure it out just popped into my head!”
“Popped.”
“Popped! I realize it’s nothing like calculus or whatever, but I figured it out, just like that! At closest approach, if it takes five months to get to Mars, you’re going almost 10,000 miles an hour! But if you could go as fast as the fastest probe—it left Earth’s orbit at 36,000 miles an hour; I had to look that up—you could get there in as few as thirty-nine days! Even at that speed it would take nine months at the farthest approach. Nine months on recycled air in a tin can. Can you even imagine the calculations they’d have to do for a landing?”
I pause for air and notice that his eyes have narrowed.
“This came to you while you were stargazing?”
“Yeah, my dad’s kind of star-crazy,” I explain, brushing one hand to the side and wishing he’d focus on the point of my story. “He has a couple of scopes, and we always do that at Thanksgiving since Christmas is usually too cold for the rest of us.”
His eyes dim a shade. “You’re lucky,” he says. “To have a dad like that.”
There’s pain behind the words, though he’s doing his best to cover it. I vacillate for a second, wanting to get back to my epiphany, before remembering my vow to see people, really see them.
I don’t want to overstep, but I ask anyway. “Do you spend much time with your dad?”
He shakes his head, focusing on a little piece of scratch paper he’s picked up off the table. “He’s dead.”
Shock jolts my core. Why did I ask, why did I ask, why did I ask? “I’m so sorry,” I say. So inadequate. But I mean it, and it’s all I have.
“Don’t be,” he says. “It’s probably for the best.”
I have no response to this, not knowing what terrible circumstances would lead him to say such a thing, so I default to silence, hoping he’ll feel safe enough to confide more. Unlike the last time I tried the wait-time strategy with him, today it works.
“Dad started drinking young and couldn’t stop,” he says, his eyes down as he puts a careful fold in the paper, creases it, then makes another. “He battled it for nearly twenty years. Got sober long enough to convince Mom to marry him, but the pressure of trying to take care of all of us sent him back to the bottle. I remember a few good times, from when I was little, but mostly I remember him as drunk or gone.”
“That’s so hard, Noah,” I say, stunned, willing myself to hold it together for his sake.
“It didn’t help that depression runs in the family,” he says, almost meeting my gaze with a sideways glance before returning his focus to folding, creasing, and unfolding the paper in his hands. He sinks a little into the table as he speaks, his shoulders sagging and his elbows splaying wider as he talks and folds. “The drink just made that worse. Then one December, they found his car wrapped around the concrete pile of an overpass. There was ice, and his blood-alcohol was like twice the legal limit. They took him to the hospital, but they couldn’t do anything. Mom picked up the slack and held us together.”
I feel sick. He has no idea how well I can relate, but the last thing I want to do is make this about me. His voice is flat, like he’s reciting dry history, but his hands show me how hard this is for him. I focus on my breathing, making sure my voice is soft but steady when I speak. “How old were you?” I ask.
There’s a pause in the folding. “Twelve,” he says, his voice finally betraying the weight he carries.
My heart sinks. Zach’s age. So young to lose so much. No wonder he’s closed off. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” I say, reaching out with one hand to comfort him. He must see it coming, because he immediately stiffens, pulling his arms in and straightening in his chair. I can see his walls rebuilding, like Iron Man’s armor, and I reel my arm back in, much like I did that first day.
“It’s fine,” he says. “Fourteen years ago this week, and my mom—” He clamps his mouth shut and glances down at his phone. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” He trails off and rubs one hand through his hair.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say. “Not the kind of anniversary you look forward to.”
“Life goes on,” he says, squaring his shoulders and placing the last piece of armor. “We have math to do.”
Our eyes meet, and though he doesn’t say anything outright, I can relate to his unspoken need to drop the subject and move on. So, again, we do the math.
And I don’t say anything about how much I now know we have in common.
* * *
“His dad was an alcoholic?”
I nod at Ivy, still reeling from Noah’s admission.
“I can’t imagine having to deal with that,” she says.
“Yeah.” I think back on our tutoring session, remembering now what I wish I’d seen more clearly when I walked in: darkness under his eyes, slumped shoulders, rumpled T-shirt that was a little too small. He was definitely not in a good place.
“But it’s good he opened up to you.”
“Yeah,” I say again, puzzling on that. Why would he open up to me about something this big when he’s always been so careful to avoid personal talk? I shrug and find Ivy analyzing me. “What?” I ask.
She’s giving me the look again.
“What?” I ask again.
“Don’t you think it means something, that he opened up to you?”
No comment.
“Also that you have something in common?”
I get up from the couch, where we’ve been chatting, to unload the dishwasher.
“Does he know about Benson?”
Pushy roommate. I don’t know why I put up with her. “Of course not. I don’t talk about . . . that . . . with anyone.”
She’s followed me into our tiny kitchen. “I know.” She sets a hand on my shoulder as I’m putting away the glasses. “I have to ask, Grace. Did you think about Benson when Noah was talking about his dad?”
I stop unloading and stand still, facing the cabinets, with Ivy’s hand still on my shoulder. “Maybe.”
Her hand does a little circle, rewarding me for talking at all. “Maybe you’d both benefit from sharing.”
I can’t help but stiffen at this suggestion.
“Or maybe he just needs a friend,” she amends.
My heart pounds as I turn around. “Oh man, you know where to hit me.”
A slightly apologetic smile is her answer. “Sorry.”
“Not sorry,” I argue.
She shrugs. “I’m pretty sure you’d regret it later if you didn’t at least give him an opportunity at friendship.”
I scoff. “He has rebuffed every effort I’ve made at anything resembling friendship.”
“Mm-hmm,” she says. “Until now.”
I hate when she’s right.
Ivy takes a breath, holds it for a second. “What if he has been holding back to maintain a professional distance?”
That what-if keeps me awake most of the night.