He grinned. “What are friends for?”
***
At home that afternoon, I was practically humming as I walked in the door. Dad was at his desk, scribbling his endless numbers. The remnants of the lunch I’d left for him were on a plate beside his work, mostly eaten.
“How’s it going, Dad?” I asked, dropping my backpack onto the couch in our living room, which I’d labored to tidy up before school began.
“Oh, you know how it is,” Dad said, squinting at pages and pages of his equations, trying to reconcile a Theory of Everything. It was an impossible task, but miracles do happen: I’d made a friend today.
I helped myself to some orange juice from the fridge. “Any breakthroughs?”
“Alas, only infinities and contradictions.” Dad sighed. “Dead ends, all. But I shall not give up hope! For hopelessness is the ultimate dead end.”
I leaned against the entry separating the kitchen and living room, juice in hand. “Can I take a look?”
He hugged his papers to his chest. “No, no. It’s not ready. Still percolating.” He tapped a finger to his forehead. “Still baking in the old noggin.”
“Okay, Dad,” I said. “I’m going to my room for a bit, and then I’ll see about dinner. Sound good?”
But he was already back to work. I took the stairs up, passed his room, and then climbed again—this time on a rickety staircase that was more like a glorified ladder—to my loft over the garage. It had been my dad’s room when he was a kid and was more like a small apartment with its own bathroom. I’d set up my desk beneath thetriangular window that faced the bay, with the dark green of the trees below. One wall was crammed with books, while another held a shelf for my 1990s-era record player and vinyl collection of alternative music. A Radiohead poster adorned one wall.
Like my dad, I preferred this house to the one I’d grown up in Gaithersburg. That house was an electrostatic field, charged with the tension of my mother’s unhappiness.
She mapped escape routes for every room.
Now that I was older, the distance my mother kept from Dad and me was easier to see. His genius was a lot to take: eccentric and scattered. When I began hurdling over milestones, I think my mother worried I’d turn out just like him.
“Maybe I will,” I muttered, lying down on my bed and staring at the ceiling. Not for the first time, I wondered if I’d inherited more from my dad than his brilliance. Maybe my fate was to break down at fifty, too. To have a jar crammed with marbles, so to speak, but slowly lose them, one by one.
I brushed the unsettling thoughts away. My second day of what I was now calling the Experiment hadn’t been a total disaster. I might even make some friends in Dean’s club, row for the crew, and fill in some holes in my childhood experience that my abnormal intellect had stolen from me.
Maybe even go on a date? With an actual girl?
Images of Emery Wallace floated across my vision, and those I couldn’t brush away. She might’ve been my dream, but now she was just a mirage—someone who became less real the closer I got to her.
I put my hand over my aching heart just as my phone chimed a text from an unknown number.
Hi. I saw you’re offering tutoring at CHA? I need help in calculus.
A job offer. This was turning out to be a pretty good day after all.
Happy to help, I typed.What did you have in mind, timewise?
At least three times a week, starting ASAP. My name is Emery btw.
My heart nearly stopped. I stared at my phone.
Another text rolled in.RU still there?
I’m here.
Is this real? You’re not some creep, are you? There’s no name on your ad.
I gritted my teeth.Xander.
Another pause, and then my phone lit up with Emery’s incoming call. My stupid heart flooded with everything I’d been tryingnotto feel. I dammed it all up and answered with a cool, “Hello?”
“Xander.” Her voice was the same sweet tone but now tinged with distrust. “Xander Ford?”
