Rush, I wrote, sitting cross-legged on my bed, wearing my rattiest pajamas and stripped of the makeup and jewelry that Mom had insisted were compulsory for the final round of parties, is like courting. First round is like speed dating. You rotate at the ding of a silent bell, learning more about someone from their dress and manner than from any rote list of banal questions. (What’s your major, for example.)
The second round is the movie date. Can you agree on explosions vs. romance? Maybe a thriller for compromise. How will you spend your future time together?
Third round: dinner date. Your beau puts on the Ritz, shows off a little, and you learn if he makes an annoying smacking sound when he chews.
And finally, Preference Night: meet the parents. Not a proposal just yet, but a test run. A peek into the fold.
I downed the last swig of my latte. It was stone cold, picked up on my way home from Greek Row, since I knew Cole would be waiting to slip my column into place, just in time to get Friday’s edition of the Report to the printer. The school paper had a narrow window on the press—in between the Sentinel and the direct mail going out to advertise the weekend’s sales.
Like my psychic education, my dating experience mostly came from the movies, too. But it wasn’t hard to extrapolate. The two preference parties I’d gone to that night—the Zetas and the SAXis—had been intimate, one-on-one conversations. At each sorority a girl met me at the door and showed me around the house, including her own room. At the Zeta house, they’d found my mother’s picture on the wall, and I laughed to see her hair teased up like a brunette Madonna, circa “Material Girl.”
Kirby had met me at the SAXi house. I’d been hoping it would be Devon. Maybe I should have been flattered that the president escorted me room to room, but there was a probing intensity to her that put me on edge, and made me think about raising my deflector shields. She was full of questions. What were my ambitions, my goals? I wasn’t sad when she pawned me off on a pre-med student named Alexa, and went to circulate among the tiny number of girls that were there.
It wasn’t too late to back out, to renege on my word to Holly. She didn’t need me, and I wasn’t going to change the world with my little commentary. The elite had always ruled and always would.
If I did bow out, my last article could be about taking the high ground, turning my back on the shallow inanity of sororities. But tonight, I was finishing this article for Tricia.
And Rush can break your heart, just like dating. You can pin your hopes on a guy, change yourself for him, pretend to be something you’re not, and if he doesn’t love you back, you think it’s the end of the world.
How much better would it be if women stopped judging their self-worth by somebody else’s arbitrary standards. My mother always said, if he’s worthy of you, he’ll take you as is. This campus is full of organizations where the power of membership lies with the joiner.
And the world is full of guys who don’t read Greek.
I saved what I’d written and checked my watch. Just enough time to print it out and try to catch the most egregious typos. Unfolding myself from the bed, I carried the laptop to my desk and plugged it into the printer. Then I proofread, fiddled with the hook at the end, sent it to Cole via our supersecret system, and finally fell into bed.
“Maggie!”
Dad’s voice dragged me from the well of slumber. The dregs of a dream had come up with me, twisting my thoughts into dizzying patterns. I had to climb the shreds of reason and try to make sense of my room, which seemed fractured and reassembled in parts, like a cubist painting.
“Maggie! I know you have class this morning.”
Downstairs. Dad was shouting up at me. I oriented on the familiar sound—it was far from the first time I’d been shouted awake—and the room came into familiar focus.
Unfortunately, the first thing I saw with any clarity was the clock on my bedside table.
“Crap.” I rolled out of bed and went to the stairs to yell, “I’m up! I’m up!” Immediately I regretted it, and squeezed my pounding head between my hands.
Okay. Not a normal nightmare, then. I get these sometimes. Psychic hangovers, the aftermath of one of my real dreams, as opposed to the random firing of neurons that happens to nonfreaky people in their sleep.
Fortunately, I’d showered the night before, so I just had to find clean clothes and grab my homework and my laptop. When I woke up the screen with a tap on a key, I saw that I’d left a browser window open when I went to sleep. In it was the pop-up ad from the other night, the one with the strange, hypnotic pattern.
Without moving the cursor, I hit Control-P to print the screen. The window closed—and the browser crashed—as soon as I moved the cursor, but this time, I’d captured a hard copy. A spark of recognition gave me an idea. Wherever else I had seen that pattern, its most recent appearance had been on the back of my eyelids. And that, if anything, rated investigation.
Dad handed me my travel mug of coffee when I reached the bottom of the stairs. “This isn’t going to be a pattern, is it?”
“What?” I was still thinking about the pattern in my dream, which had somehow transferred into the waking world. Or vice versa.
He was in no mood for a sidebar. “If this sorority thing is going to interfere with your grades …”
Mom answered for me. “It won’t.” She was dressed for work, but she still looked green beneath her carefully applied makeup. The doctor had assured her that as she was out of her first trimester, the puking would stop any day now. He’d been saying that for two months.
“You won’t let it get the best of you, will you, Magpie?” She kissed my cheek, her breath smelling of mint toothpaste and ginger ale. “I’m so proud of you. And if you want to continue in a sorority …”
“Really, Mom,” I assured them both, “I’m not setting out to become a Stepford Greek. I have my reasons.”
This earned me two sighs—one of dismay, and one of relief. “Oh, Maggie,” said my mother. “Can’t you, just once, do things like a normal girl?”
“Of course not, Laura.” Dad grinned, his humor restored. “She’s a Quinn.”
I headed for the door, mug in hand. “Sorry, Mom. We can’t all choose a destiny in accounting.”
“You could choose a destiny outside of The Twilight Zone,” I heard her grumble as I hurried on my way.
Since I have biology lab only on Tuesdays, I used the open space in my schedule to visit Dr. Smyth in the chemistry department.
The earth science building was bustling, and redolent of an experiment gone wrong. Or so I assumed. Chemistry could be stinky, even when it goes right.
I tapped on the door to the professor’s office, which was just off the lab. Because of the ventilation fans, the smell of burning tires was less pungent than in the hall. I loved the anachronism of the computers and modern equipment in the hundred-year-old space. It reminded me of A Wrinkle in Time, and how Dr. Murry had her electron microscope set up in the stillroom of their farmhouse.
“Dr. Smyth?” She looked up from her work, a frown of displacement on her face as she reoriented herself. “I’m Maggie Quinn. You helped me out with a chemistry question last spring.”
“Oh yes!” Recognition swept away her confusion, and she waved me to a chair by her desk. “You were working on some kind of fantasy story the last time we talked. How did that turn out?”
I perched on the seat and set my satchel beside me. “Better than I thought it would.” In that I was still alive.
“Why aren’t you taking chemistry with me?” she chided.
“All the sections were closed. I’m in biology instead.”
With an impatient wave, she dismissed the principles of our biological existence. “You should have called me. I would have opened one of the sections for you.”
“I still have another science credit to earn. I’ll be sure and take it with you.” I wouldn’t dare do anything different. Dr. Smyth was a force of nature, with flaming red hair and a vibrant personality to match. “I have another question for you.”
“Excellent.” She leaned her elbows on the desk. “What can I do for you?”
I pulled out the printout of the browser window. “This seems familiar to me. Maybe some kind of crystalline structure?”
She took the picture and immediately identified it. “This is a fractal design.”
“A fractal! I couldn’t place it.” My moment of clarity was short. “But that’s math, not chemistry.”
“Well, it’s both,” she said. “You can create fractals by putting a solution of copper sulfate between two glass plates and applying voltage …”
I know my eyes must have glazed over. “And in non-geek?”
She started again. “Basically—and I’m really oversimplifying here—a fractal is a system of illustrating things that cannot be described with normal geometry. Tree branches and snowflakes and the stock market. Things that seem random, but if looked at in a mathematical way, aren’t really.”
“Like chaos theory.”
“Right.”
All I knew about chaos theory came from watching Jurassic Park, but I didn’t mention that.
Dr. Smyth laid her hand on the printout. “Most people see fractals in computer graphics. Pretty pictures made out of irrational numbers.”
“Irrational numbers,” I echoed. “Like pi.”
“And phi.” She was into it now, like a kid showing off a favorite toy. “Phi—1.618—called the Golden Mean or sometimes the Divine Proportion. Grossly oversimplified, it means that the sum of a plus b is to a as a is to b.”
“Um. I left my math brain in calculus. Can you translate?”
“All that’s important is the proportion.” She drew two equal squares touching, and then on top of it drew one rectangle that was equal in size to the two squares. Then she drew another rectangle that was equal in size to the first three put together. Then another, et cetera, until she had a diagram that looked like a stack of blocks.
“These rectangles are all in the ‘divine’ proportion,” she said. “The Parthenon and the Great Pyramid at Giza were both built incorporating this ratio. It’s been shown to be universally pleasing to the eye.”
“Okay.” I took her word for it, not least because it resonated in my memory.
“But watch this.” She drew a curved line connecting all the corners of the progressively larger rectangles, until she had a spiral that looked familiar.
“That’s a nautilus shell.”
“And a cochlea.” She tapped her ear, and I remembered that little shell thingy responsible for hearing from high school biology. “And even …” She drew a parallel spiral and connected the two with hastily drawn lines, like a ladder.
“DNA?”
“Subtly, but yes.” She turned the paper back over and tapped the design from the computer. “Fractals. A pattern that repeats with self-symmetry to an infinitely small, or infinitely large scale.”
I stared at her, a little helplessly. “You realize I have no idea what this means.”
Dr. Smyth sat back in her chair. “It means that if you look at things from a certain perspective—in this case mathematically—there is nothing truly random in the universe.”
“You couldn’t have just said that?”
She grinned and handed me the paper. “What kind of educator would I be?”
I thanked her, promised she’d see me, eventually, for a class, and left. I wasn’t sure I had any answers, but I definitely had more questions.
The first was why had this design popped up, twice, on my Internet browser.
And theoretically, if seemingly random events were mathematically not really random, then didn’t it follow that if you changed the math of things, you could change the outcome?
I suddenly had a new appreciation for arithmetic. I guess I was going to have to start paying attention in calculus.