Her head bobbed. “But my father wasn’t all that pissed. I think, maybe, it’ll be okay. Everything will be okay.”
Her eyes were blue-green pools of love and hope and fear. Fear of confronting her father and still hoping to keep some semblance of a family. To hold everyone together. Despite my hatred for Grayson Wallace, I understood why Emery couldn’t let go. When my mother walked out the door that long-ago morning, I hadn’t moved. Hadn’t said a word. Maybe in some alternate universe, there’s a little boy who called out to her and she stopped. A world in which she realized what she was doing and tried to make it work. One in which she stayed.
But it wasn’t mine because I hadn’t tried. Emery, at least, was trying.
“I have to go,” Emery said. “My punishment is a stuffy dinner with the new senator and his family. I’ll call you when it’s over, and you can tell me everything that went down at the party. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and kissed her softly.
She gave me her pinky wave and headed to her car as twilight deepened. I drove home feeling as if I were clinging to her hope with both hands, only I knew there was nothing there to keep us from falling.
Our little house was dark; the new medication they’d given my dad made him sleep for upwards of fourteen hours a day. Which was helpful, in a terrible way, since he’d taken to wandering outside lately. Twice, I’d caught him down the road as I drove back from school. The days of my Experiment were numbered, and soon I wouldn’t be able to take care of him at all.
I stood in our tidy living room—we had kept Emery’s rearrangement of the furniture—and glanced with apprehension at my dad’s desk. The cyclone of papers with his equations on them, all reaching into infinity for the ultimate solution.
“The answer to life, the universe, and everything,” I muttered.
I tried to harness some of Emery’s optimism. Maybe Dad was close. Maybe he’d solve it before disease stole his mind, and he’d be famous. Rich. The most celebrated physicist on the planet. Then I could steal Emery away from her father and pay for RISD. We could be together…
On leaden feet, I crossed the room and turned on the desk light over my father’s work, where equations—chains of factors—were scribbled across every page. For the first time, I picked one up and examined it. Immediately, tears blurred my vision. I blinked them back and took up another page. And another.
“Of course,” I murmured. “The simplest solution is usually correct.”
The pages were covered in gibberish. Algebraic nonsense. Streams of consciousness. Rambling theories that devolved into nothing, or strings of words, or my mother’s name, over and over…
I let the papers fall. I hadn’t known, but I’d always known. My father’s work was another superposition that collapsed under my observation. I was losing him, and so I had to lose Emery. At the very best, I was facing a long separation from her—years even—until my father perished from his disease, because Iwould notdo what my mother did and leave him.
But the only thing I had to do tonight was get good and drunk.
***
Orion had taken over the enormous courtyard in the castle-like “dorm” of Atlas Hall. He was a Mercer, one of the Big Five families that funded the Academy, and I could see his family’s money everywhere I turned.
The fountain in the center was lit up with changing-color lights. Rec rooms led into the courtyard, where tables of food and drink lined one side, and a DJ and dance floor took up the rest.
Both the indoor and outdoor spaces were crowded with people by the time I got there, the music loud and thumping, with a hundred laughing conversations thrumming beneath it. Students sat and talked on the couches or made out in dark corners. I spotted my rowing crew standing around a keg, Tucker passing around a flask while Orion kept the punch bowls filled with vodka.
I strode up to my team, plucked the flask from Tucker’s hand, and drained it. Whiskey burned a path to my gut, then headed straight to my head, instantly making the world a more palatable place to be.
I handed it back. “Thanks. I needed that.”
The guys all stared a moment and then broke out in shocked cheers and bellows. Only Rhett stayed apart, his gaze as cool as ever. Did I give a shit? No, I did not.
Thank you, whiskey.
“Ford, you’re a goddamn legend!” Tucker roared, laughing, as if we hadn’t spent the year trading punches. “This is the best fucking crew in CHA history!”
He lifted his now-empty flask in a toast. Another cheer went up amid sprays of beer and punch, and I was engulfed in heavy hugs or pounding on the back. The whiskey was already doing its job, making the night murky, banishing all the pain somewhere I didn’t have to look at it for a while.
Someone put a red plastic cup in my hand. I downed the entire vodka-punch drink in one go and took another. Then another. Then I grabbed a fourth and wandered the party, blissfully free ofthinkingso goddamn much. My mind, always analyzing, observing, calculating…the alcohol made that impossible.
Time became slippery as I slid into random conversations with random people, the night taking on a strange, carnival-like atmosphere, with each part of the party like a different sideshow. I even thought I saw Harper and Orion having a heated conversation before she stormed away, angrily wiping tears.
I frowned and started after her, but someone grabbed my arm.
“Hey, you’re that genius, right?” a guy asked, standing with a group of friends.
“Yep,” I said. “I’m a fucking genius. Which is why I’m so obviously winning at life.”
