Chapter 35

“I won’t pressure you, Ari, but I’m not opposed to subtle acts of persuasion.”
—Siobhan Davis, Beyond Reach

I TEXTED EM as soon as I woke up Friday morning since she wasn’t home yet. “Boy or Girl?”

“Not yet.”

That was it. Apparently, Francie was still in labor. I wanted to rush over to the hospital and hold her hand but I didn’t even know which hospital she was at. Sometimes I cursed the fifteen-year-old I was living inside of for his negligence about details and total lack of follow-through.

Didn’t matter that he was dead.

What did matter was that I had to catch the school bus this morning since Em wasn’t home to drive. And that made me nervous. I figured I could put up with the kids on the bus. They wouldn’t be any different than the kids in school and I was doing fine with them. I guess I was considered a little aloof or maybe even just rude for ignoring most people, but I was on constant guard about my opinions and attitude around my classmates—even my girlfriends.

No, what was making me nervous was the fact of ‘bus’. I don’t know how dense V2 was, exactly, but I had no immediate recollection of the accident. I didn’t know if I’d stepped in front of a school bus or a city bus or fucking Greyhound.

When I got to the bus stop there were several kids around. Our little subdivision only had one stop and everyone was expected to be there. I stood well back away from the street clutching my backpack straps and waiting for the lumbering behemoth that would devour us and disgorge its meal at the high school. I suppose I would have had a better choice of seats if I’d gotten on first instead of last, but I just slid into the first open seat I came to.

“Did you get number seventeen?” the kid next to me asked. Seventeen? Was that the bus number? I turned to look at him. “The Geometry problems. Number seventeen.” It was Martin, the kid Mrs. Stierwalt suggested we include in our study group. We hadn’t made any overtures yet. I guess we forgot.

“Oh. Yeah. You need help? It’s congruence transformations. If you just take each point and map the transformations one at a time, you’ll have the image on the graph,” I said.

“I know.”

“I thought you wanted help.”

“I just wanted to know if you actually got it. It’s so damned boring.”

“Yeah. It can be. I’m learning some stuff, though, so I guess I don’t mind a class that’s easier. Honors English and AP Human Geography are taking most of my time,” I said.

“She gave me a bunch of extra problems to solve—like that would make up for being bored,” he sighed. “It’s just math. I wish we had something more theoretical. I’ve been working on the problem of trisecting an angle.”

“Didn’t we prove that was impossible last semester?”

“I’m not trying to prove it’s possible. I’m trying to see what I can learn from the attempts. Like how can a real number be irrational? If a line has the value of pi, how long is it? With the origin at 0,0 where is the endpoint. You can only get close.”

“But if it can be expressed as a ratio or a fraction, then it has to be real, doesn’t it?” I shot back. As far as I was concerned, I’d been a mechanical engineer. I was interested in things that worked and ten decimal places was as accurate as I’d ever needed to be in creating a gear.

“That’s the problem with trying to trisect an angle, see? One-third has no real value as it has an infinite decimal. You can’t plot it.”

“That’s when you change base. One-third has a finite value in base nine.”

It was all pretty much nonsense as the kid was simply exploring mental exercises, but it passed the time and we were at school pretty soon. Both of us knew the base you worked in didn’t have anything to do with constructing angles using Euclidean tools. I invited him to join our study group Sunday afternoon at my house just to have company while he was studying since I doubted we’d really spend that much time on Geometry. He agreed.

Having arrived at school on the bus, I didn’t have time before school to get warmed up before gym. Jock shot a look at me and I just shrugged and said, “Bus.” He got it and motioned me to start walking. After I was warmed up, I started jogging. I focused on keeping my form and stepping firmly on my weak leg. I was at the point where I could consistently jog three laps around the gym and then walk one. By the end of the forty-five minutes, though, I was beginning to question my choice of activities for my date with Joan that night.

She was in her fifth sailor suit and it was hot pink. I mean hot. This was the first of her little outfits that had a cropped sailor top that left a good part of her tummy exposed. The jewels in her navel were back and I guess the teachers counted that as not having her navel exposed. I wondered how the heck she got them to stay there and if she had a navel piercing.

“So, I need to know so I can wear the right outfit,” she said as I took her hand and led her over to our table instead of sitting at the table across from our usual.

“Okay. Well, it’s too cold to go sailing or sky diving,” I started.

“Sky diving? You’d take her sky diving?” Desi asked. “No way!”

“Yeah. Excuse me for nixing that one. I don’t see any reason to jump out of a perfectly good airplane,” Joan said. “I hope you thought of something more sensible than that or this will be the world’s shortest date.”

“Skating.”

“Rollerblades?”

“Nope. Old fashioned quads.”

“You roller skate?” Rachel asked.

“I hope so. I’m kind of depending on Joan to keep a really good grip on me so I don’t fall down,” I laughed. Joan breathed deep, which did wonderful things for the amount of skin that showed under her top.

“Come on, Joan!” Beca said. “You wanted to get him horizontal!”

“Yeah. But I didn’t want to bruise my butt doing it,” she glared at our little girlfriend. “Okay. This might still be a short date.”

I had to catch the bus home again after school and Martin had saved a seat for me. I sat next to him.

“So, are you some kind of alien?” he asked abruptly.

“What?” He couldn’t have meant anything by that, right?

“Math genius. I heard you can stop a bus with your bare hands.” I winced. “And you have like a dozen girlfriends. Superboy.”

“Only four,” I groused.

“Dude! Really?”

“Um ... I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention that when you come over on Sunday. If they thought I needed a dozen girlfriends, they’d probably try to get them. I don’t need that,” I said.

“My lips are sealed. It works, you know,” he said out of the blue.

“What works?”

“Graphing irrationals in different bases. I’m going to apply all the trisecting theories to base nine.”

“You’re kidding. I was just joking.”

“Yeah, but the thing it got me thinking of is that the problem isn’t where everyone approaches it. It’s more fundamental than whether you can trisect an angle; it’s whether you have the right tools. The problem isn’t in the math, but with the tools we’re given as restraints. I need to invent another tool.”

“I’d appreciate if you don’t reference me about that idea, either.”

“Yeah, like I’m going to thank alien Superboy in my Nobel Prize speech,” he laughed. We parted at the bus stop and I got home just half an hour before Pey.

I fretted around the house a while before getting ready for my date. I picked up my phone a couple of times to text Em but she’d sent me a text right near the end of school that said, “Turning off phone. This is it.”

Mom and Dad were home and getting dinner ready for Pey and them when my phone rang and I had it to my ear halfway through my “Sister, Sister” theme song ringtone.

“How is she?” I demanded.

“Whoa! Take it easy. You’d think you were the father. Francine is fine, but exhausted. Twenty-five hours of labor will do that to you. Baby is fine. William Jay Redmond, a whopping eight pounds four ounces and twenty-two inches long.”

“Willliam J.? What’s the J stand for?”

“Nothing. J-A-Y. Lighten up, brother. It was the best she could do.”

“Just, um ... tell her we’re all thinking of her and can’t wait to meet William, I guess.”

“I will, J. Let me talk to Mom a sec.” I handed the phone to my Mom and she was all oohs and aahs. She hung up and handed me my phone just as the doorbell rang and I went to meet my date.

“Want to grab a burger before we hit the rink?”

“Yeah. Sort of a last supper? Very religious.”

“If you really don’t want to skate, we can just hit the movies, I guess,” I said. Damn. I didn’t remember dating to be so hard the first time through.

“Don’t be silly. It sounds really fun and I’m so pleased you picked out something unique. It’s kind of romantic in a Happy Days sort of way. But if my butt is bruised on Monday, it better be because you were pounding it into the floor, not dropping it on the floor.”

“Um ... We’re not really going to do that tonight, are we?”

“You are all flustered. That’s not like you! No. I never screw on a first date. Except that once and I learned my lesson from that.”

“It is our first date, isn’t it? I mean just the two of us. What took us so long?”

“Something about having to share you. And ... um ... don’t worry about that. This is just the kind of relationship I need right now. I’m kind of exploring different facets of my ... um ... sexuality. You know? For as little as she is, Beca can pretty much grab an ear and lead me around wherever she wants. But I know I’m not gay. A little bi, maybe. Or a lot. But I still like guys—you—too.”

She kept her jacket on all through our burger at the diner. We split a shake but didn’t try to drink out of the same glass. If we were going to share spit it was going to be first-hand, not second. When we got to the rink there was a short wait to get skates rented and then I offered to take her coat and put it in a locker with mine and our shoes.

Holy shit! I was reconsidering the whole first date thing.

She’d gone back to the simple blue Sailor Moon outfit but I didn’t remember it being quite so ... brief on Monday. Instead of the long boots, she had over the knee white socks. The skirt was almost up to her butt ledge and was held up by a pair of suspenders. And this top was cropped shorter than the one she wore to school. A little flip and I’d see her bra. She had the long pigtail hair extensions in with a little topknot on each side of her head.

Like a gentleman, I knelt in front of her to help her into her skates and get them laced up. She kept rocking her knees out and back showing me a pair of classic blue cotton panties. At least she wouldn’t be exposing anything too significant if she did fall spraddled.