Math Camp was supposed to be different. I certainly was not going to repeat last summer's disastrous month at Judo Camp. The brochure promised that I would learn self-defense and build self-confidence. Instead, my daily beatings continued, but with the added consent and encouragement of the camp's staff. At least I got plenty of practice in curling into a fetal position. Math Camp was supposed to be different; there, I would be respected and revered for my ability to solve first-order differential equations at age 15. People would push and shove to watch me integrate expressions. Math Camp was supposed to be different, but not half an hour after my mother kissed me goodbye, I was standing with my back to a wall, silently watching kids aged 10-17 run back and forth, greeting their friends and introducing themselves to each other. I sighed.

After we received our cabin assignments and unpacked our stuff, a counselor cheerfully told us that there would be no classes on the first day, and instead we would play some games outside. We assembled on the field where we broke into teams for, as if anyone needed to guess, dodgeball. Kids, of course, are the craftiest of Earth's creatures, and thus had no difficulty spotting me in the crowd; soon enough, in a roar of Darwinistic bloodlust, a red rubber ball screamed toward me and into my cheek, sending my glasses skyward and me to the ground. In my daze, I faintly heard someone exclaim, "Awesome shot, Derek!" I groggily grasped for my glasses and crawled to the "out" area, where I lied face-down on the grass for the rest of the afternoon.

That evening, the entire camp was gathered in the log-cabin auditorium for a "Meet the Staff" assembly. The campers were calm, drained by the afternoon's activities and sedated by stomachfuls of "Welcome to Camp" spaghetti and meatballs. My stomach had been not-quite filled with "Welcome to Camp" bread sticks and water, in an effort to avoid the painful allergic reaction that would have inevitably followed the slightest consumption of tomato sauce. I was sitting in the front row, about six feet from the stage, carefully scrutinizing the industrial grade carpet at my feet when the head counselor stepped up to the podium and began his welcome speech. I didn't listen to a word, of course; a similar speech last summer turned out to be terribly misleading, and failed to mention the sadistic seventh-graders obsessed with destroying me.

Instead, I examined the counselor-instructors that were seated in a row behind the podium. As I scanned their faces from left to right, I only found two that were interesting enough to make me pause. The first was a guy who looked sort of like a cross between a howler monkey and a mackerel. He had really big ears, puffy cheeks, and bulging eyes that didn't seem to blink quite as often as they should. Alouatta scombrus insularis, I joked to myself. I also noticed a girl seated toward the right, between two Ivy-League types. Indeed, I more than noticed her-I became transfixed by her. She dressed as though she were the result of high-speed particles of personality from each of the last five decades colliding and fusing into one: burgundy saddle shoes, a light green knee-length skirt with a weird Indian design, a worn-out 3/4 sleeve tee shirt with a faded Atari logo, and a pair of silver-blue cat eye glasses. She sat with her knees together and feet a bit apart with her toes pointing at each other, carefully listening to the speaker-I assumed so, anyway; it was impossible to tell for sure, since her eyes were hidden by the reflection in her lenses. I imagined that if I could see them, they would have been big and attentive, which in my mind matched her shoulder-length dark hair and fair skin, colored by an inexplicable blush. I watched her absent-mindedly rub the hem of her skirt, remove badly-behaved strands of hair from her mouth and scrunch up her nose when her glasses slid down, and would never have stopped if she hadn't stood up with the other counselors. They took turns stepping to the podium to introduce themselves and announce which class they were teaching. I glared resentfully at them.

"Hi," she said as she stepped toward the microphone, waving to no one in particular, "I'm Lissa and I'll be teaching Calculus II." Calculus II. I gulped. Good thing I hadn't planned on learning anything new, I thought to myself.

The following morning, I woke up late. Actually, I woke up right on time, but had to spend some extra minutes getting up, since my cabin mates thought it might be a good idea to duct-tape me to the bed. So after spending forty-five minutes or so freeing myself, I quickly got dressed, cleaned up and ran toward the cafeteria. Halfway there, I had to stop to catch my breath. I took a moment to glance across the field next to the path and saw Lissa leading a small group of teenagers into the wooded area. I took a final gasp for air and ran across the field toward them.

I arrived at "Classroom 'E'" (which was not a room at all; it was a clearing with several rows of log benches and a portable chalkboard) just as she was beginning to introduce herself. I collapsed on the far left of the first log-bench, panting like a dying beagle. Stopping in mid-sentence, she turned toward me and smiled.

"Hi Jason, glad you made it okay." I barely heard her. In fact, I barely heard anything at all, and I was seeing red. Suddenly, Classroom 'E' went dark and I felt my head hit the top of someone's shoe.

I awoke with a dull headache, aggravated by the florescent lamp that I found myself staring directly at. I blinked a couple of times and tried to sit up, but felt dizzy and changed my mind. "Welcome back," said a voice near my feet. Lissa was seated cross-legged on a bench next to the table I was lying on, reading a thick textbook. She got up and handed me a glass of orange juice. "Drink this, you'll feel better." I took a few gulps and sighed.

"Why am I in the cafeteria?"

"The nurse's office was locked. I think she took the day off for her girlfriend's birthday or something." She wrinkled her nose. "Are you okay? What happened?"

I thought a few moments. "I guess I haven't eaten in a while." She pouted her lips slightly, but didn't respond. Instead, she pushed her book up the table toward my shoulder and sat down in front of it.

"You ought to rest some more," she said and returned to her book. For the next forty minutes or so, the only sound was of her turning pages. Finally I broke the silence.

"How did you know my name earlier?"

"You were famous around here even before you arrived," she said, looking up from her book and giving me a smile. "Everyone knows about the fifteen-year-old in Calculus II." She paused. "Oh, and we also received a series of very memorable phone calls from your mother, complaining that we didn't offer classes in discrete mathematics or linear algebra." I grimaced. "It's okay, my parents were like that too."

"How did you make them stop?"

"They seemed satisfied when I was granted early admission to Carnegie Mellon once I graduate from high school." She blushed a bit and looked down at her knees.

"Wow, how'd you manage that?"

"I've been a research apprentice at MU for a while-in number theory," she added cautiously. I jolted myself into a sitting position. She looked a bit concerned, but didn't say anything when it became clear that I wouldn't faint. "Want to see what I'm working on?" I didn't need to answer. She rummaged around in her bag and produced a sheet of paper, on which she started to write in purple ink; her handwriting was big and neat, and she dotted her letters with little circles. After she finished, I looked at the page: it was a short program written in Lisp. "Basically, it repeatedly sets n to 3n+1 if it's odd, or n/2 if it's even," she explained. I nodded in agreement, even though my agreement made no difference whatsoever. This was math, after all. "Well," she continued, "there's a conjecture that this function will eventually return '1' no matter what positive integer we start with... we're trying to prove this is true." My headache vanished. I started asking questions and she happily answered them.

We continued our conversation for the next couple of hours. I had some difficulty concentrating on anything, though. I got distracted from the Collatz Problem by the smell of her shimmering hair. When I was admiring her greenish-grey eyes through the side of her glasses, my attention was captured by our discussion of efficient algorithms for factoring large integers, and my mind wandered to the pale skin on her neck while we discussed Fermat's Last Theorem. Mersenne primes chased away the inevitable thoughts of her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. My head was absolutely spinning.