9

On Friday, Gage watched me slide into my desk. I’d purposely arrived in Calc just before the tardy bell.

“Hey, sexy,” he said. “Playing hard to get?”

Rolling eyes = my emotions’ inverse.

“Open your books to page 530,” Kenowitz said.

I faced front. On my back, Gage drew a heart with his finger. He’d done the same thing the day before, making my skin tingle both times.

“Aren’t we skipping a chapter?” said Shelley Millhouse, future valedictorian. Home-schooled till middle school, Shelley used to play with me at the cabin while her mom skied, then later at the Condo. Her house was this cool ski chalet turned bed-and-breakfast, right on Crystal Creek. How strange her life must have been, with strangers sleeping down the hall and eating breakfast in her dining room, but the Millhouses welcomed everyone. Till sixth grade, when Shelley and I ended up in class together, and she witnessed how reading labeled me officially dumb.

“I find it works better,” Kenowitz said, “if we learn parametric, vector, and polar functions before infinite series. Infinite series can get confusing.”

“Great,” George Polinsky said. George had been confused by life in general since kindergarten. It used to bug me, but over the last year, I could relate.

“I’m always available after school. You know that, people. Okay. What’s a parametric curve? Imagine the motion of a projectile.” Kenowitz penned a curve on the SMART Board’s graph screen. I’d looked at the chapter last fall, wondering at the equation for my own life’s descent. When I collided with that Shangri-La tree, my descent had paused. That vision of Mom and me two days ago had seemed like the descent starting again, yet tonight Dad and I would move our stuff up to the cabin, and that was definitely ascending.

Gage traced another heart on my back. Two crescents meeting top and bottom. I considered its parametric equation.

“So what we end up with are some interesting and cool-looking graphs,” Kenowitz concluded. “Look at Section 10.1 on page 531.”

I glanced at page 531 and then doodled a line for my future. A wobbly, Mom-less one that made me swallow guilt as I forced it to curve slightly up. I considered its equation, but my mind drifted to imagining Dad, me, and our ski-patrol family at the cabin eating dinner, coyote howls for music. I imagined standing on its deck in my pajamas, gazing at night’s infinity, the invisible sea of peaks rolling below.

I pictured the recreation-path vision. This time, I focused on myself as I’d stood, hand pressed to that tree, summer all around. My body remembered that cello-string vibration, and I realized it was the same resonance as when I’d collided with that Shangri-La tree. I straightened in my desk, remembering the porcupines in both trees. Both trees had been spruce.

I gaped at my palm. If I tilted my hand horizontal, the line along the meat of my thumb matched the one I’d just doodled. I suddenly needed to press that palm’s line against yesterday’s spruce.

Kenowitz’s demonstration of parametric equations and how to graph them was drawing to a close. The bell rang.

I shot from my desk, gathered my pencil and graphing calculator, and bolted. At my locker, I shoved my homework into my backpack, knowing it was wrong to ditch again, but no way could I concentrate, let alone sit in a desk. I texted Dad: TIRED. HEADING HOME.

I slung my backpack over my shoulder and made for the door next to the cafeteria, where it was easiest to slip away without being seen. Just before I reached those doors, Gage called, “Sovern?”

I turned.

“Need some company?”

The unsure set of his shoulders stopped me. I gripped my backpack’s one strap over my shoulder with both hands.

He shrugged. “I miss you. I miss you bad.”

I wanted to rush to him. Instead, I forced out, “That girl you knew—she wasn’t really me.”

The Sovern from the vision rose in my memory, and I blinked her back.

“Maybe that wasn’t me, either,” Gage said.

My mouth sagged open.

“Maybe we were both just pissed at the world. Maybe we were the best thing that could have happened to each other,” he said.

“Best thing? You broke up with me on the anniversary of my mom’s death!”

“I know. I was desperate, see? You were destroying yourself, and I couldn’t handle it.” He rubbed the back of his head the way he did when I knew he was thinking for real. “I’m sorry.”

I’d never heard Gage talk this way. Never heard him apologize. To anyone.

He shoved his hands in his front pockets. “Later.”

I watched him round the hall’s corner and felt like he’d stuffed my heart in one of those pockets. I bolted out the door.

I tugged up my hood. They’d plowed the path, so walking was easy, and the storm had vacated, leaving crystalline sky. On a deep inhalation, my nostrils stuck together. The spruce came into view, and I stopped, shielded my eyes from the afternoon sun, and searched for a brown-gray lump but found none.

The storm had erased my tracks. I stepped to the spruce and studied its bark. I reached out, pulse in my fingertips. Good, I thought. Gage hadn’t taken my heart after all. I laid my palm against the trunk.

Nothing.

From up the path, two jogging women approached, so I stepped aside. Their voices hung in the frigid air. They smiled at me, but I was a delinquent to them, no doubt. One cocked her head and looked up. The other woman looked up too, saying, “Oh!” She pointed at a different spruce than the one I’d just touched as they drifted to the path’s far side.

From where I stood, I couldn’t see anything, so I walked to where the woman had pointed from, shielded my eyes against the sun, and peered up. A porcupine huddled in that spruce’s branches. I considered its base, rooted on Crystal Creek’s frozen bank. I’d been at the wrong tree.

The women disappeared around the path’s bend as I strode to the correct tree and, innards fluttering, pressed my palm against it. That cello sound shimmered through me and out of each quill hole in my cheek.

Sun shafts. Green’s scent.
A rushing river’s shout.

Mom and I strolled along the path, farther down now, their backs to me. I circled around the trunk, right to the river’s edge, so I could see them. Their heads were tilted close. That warm breeze flowed from vision-me to Mom’s dress and set the late spring wildflowers swaying. Vision-me wore a dress too. A dress?

“MIT ! See what believing ‘I can’ will do? Don’t ever let anyone tell you something’s impossible,” Mom said, and her arm wrapping my shoulder squeezed me closer. She kissed vision-me’s forehead. My hand almost came to my own forehead, but I forced it still against that trunk.

Dad appeared around the path’s corner on my other side, catching up to them. He was smiling, proud, content. His gait was swift but relaxed. The breeze ruffled his hair. “Hey, you two!”

Mom and vision-me turned. Mom held out her hand to him, and he took it. They kissed.

“Mom?” I called.

She saw me then and studied me, head to toe. She paled and shivered.

“Tay?” Dad said.

Her brow furrowed, and her free hand came to it. “Do you—?”

“Mom?” vision-me said.

Mom’s gaze tore from me to her.

“I’m here!” I called.

They all looked. Mom’s hand fell to her stomach. Vision-me squinted, assessing. Dad stepped toward me, his mouth set.

“Briggs!” Mom grabbed his arm.

Moments ago, they’d been so happy. What had I done? I pulled my palm from the spruce.

Knife cold. Winter light.
Crystal Creek muted by ice.

Woozy, I hunched over, hands on my knees. I stared at my palm in wonder. I looked up at that porcupine and shouted, “How?”

I hugged myself to feel my solidness. I’d seen two different visions now. Two different Moms. Two different Soverns. Was I insane? My mind ricocheted through options. Maybe I was hallucinating from nicotine withdrawal. Maybe I was hallucinating from grief. Or maybe … there had to be a logical explanation. Patterns surrounded me every minute of every day. In a thousand different aspects of life. Patterns explained by math. Math applied to how the world worked was physics.

Suddenly, I knew who might have an answer.