“No reason,” he said in the same casual tone.
Because we weren’t anything to each other. Not really. We knew personal stuff about each other but also didn’t know each other at all. We were stuck somewhere betweenstrangerandfriend.
I didn’t like it, but the clock was ticking. If I failed that quiz, I’d be screwed right out of the gate.
Xander pulled out a notebook and pencil from his worn-out backpack. He wore a plain black T-shirt, and I found my gaze wandering over his arms, watching them move. His hands were squarish and strong, one striated with a vein that snaked around his perfect forearm…
“Emery?”
“Right. Power functions. Let the fun begin.”
Xander was a patient tutor, and I tried my best, but it was all gibberish. My heart just wasn’t in it. My attention kept wandering away from the incomprehensible math—that Xander understood as if it were his native language—to Xander himself. His eyes were filled with thoughts and figures. A genius mind working in overdrive behind his glasses.
He’s kind of extraordinary.
Xander tapped the paper with his pencil. “You change the form of the graph by changing the values ofkandn. See?”
“If you say so.” I rested my cheek in my palm. “What would you be doing if you were at MIT already?”
“Oh, um…where do I start?”
“How about, what made you get into science in the first place? Because of your dad?”
Xander stiffened slightly. “In a manner of speaking. I grew up with my dad talking about physics, and I became fascinated by those concepts that changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.”
“So you wanted to follow in his footsteps…?”
“Yes and no. I’m just as interested as he is in finding a unified Theory of Everything. He worked at it through particle physics at the NIST and is still working on it at home as we speak. But I want to come at it through the study of black holes.”
“What exactly is a black hole, anyway?” I shrugged at Xander’s quizzical glance. “I honestly want to know.”
“Okay, well, they’re what happens when a large star dies and collapses under its own gravity, compressing its mass into a dense region where nothing—not even light—can escape. They remain one of the greatest mysteries in physics. It was only a few years ago that scientists captured an image of one.”
“What makes them so mysterious?”
Xander gave me another perplexed smile. “Shouldn’t we get back to the math?”
“Later. Right now, I’m learning about black holes.”
He chuckled and pushed his glasses higher up on his nose, which looked both sexy and adorable at the same time.
“Okay, so everything we thought we knew about physics, from Newton’s First Law to Einstein’s relativity, breaks down at the singularity—the place inside a black hole where the mass is concentrated, and where space-time curvature becomes theoretically infinite.”
“How do you know all that if you guys saw a black hole for the first time only a few years ago?”
“Math,” Xander said. “Theories are explored via mathematical equations to see if they pan out.”
“Ohhh. Is that what you mean when you say your dad is working on a unified theory? He’s actually just doing math? I imagined you had some sort of lab at your house.”
“No, just pencil and paper.”
“I feel stupid.”
“Please don’t,” Xander said. “The equations needed to understand things like black hole singularities are beyond most people.”
“But you understand it,” I said. “And your dad understands it.”
“He understands it fornow.”
