“Are you going to the Halloween Festival?” she asked suddenly.
“I think so,” I said, glancing away. “I might ask Harper.”
“Oh. Oh!” Emery exclaimed, sitting up. “Yes, good! I was…um, I was going to suggest that, actually.”
“You were?”
“Yeah. She’s becoming a good friend. And you’re a good friend. So…perfect, right?”
Emery smiled the smile I’d come to recognize as the one she wore when she was trying to take whatever was in front of her and turn it into something good.
I rolled the pencil over my knuckles. “I guess you’re going with Tucker?”
“Yep,” she said and toyed with the edge of her textbook.
“How long have you two been together?” In all our talks, we’d never spoken about him. I’d never wanted to; it felt like willingly chugging gasoline.
“About six months,” she said. “His dad is a senator, and my dad is counting on him to be reelected in a few days. Senator Hill will pass some laws that allow Wallace Industries to keep making their textiles however they want without worrying about the environment. Pretty terrible, right?”
It was certainly terrible that her father was using her to further his own ends. I suddenly doubted that dating Tucker had been her idea. “What happens if Hill loses the election?”
Emery shrugged. “Not sure. But maybe…”
“Maybe…?”
Maybe she breaks up with Tucker and then what? She chooses you with your broken house and your broken father and your broken heart that’s too afraid of getting broken some more?
“Tucker’s not a bad guy,” she said. “And anyway, he and I makesense.”
“What does that mean, you make sense?”
“Well, we do,” she said uncertainly. “The Prom King and the Queen Bee—”
“That’s not all you are, Emery.” I gestured to her room. “Look around. You’re so talented. A real artist. And more than that you’re…”
“What?” she asked, leaning in ever so slightly.
My jaw worked but nothing came out, my mind warring with my heart, which wanted to tell her she was a luminous star shining in the vast darkness that wanted to swallow her up. A diamond clenched in the hand of her ruthless father, who didn’t realize how bright she could shine if he just let her go.
Emery mistook my hesitation. “Sorry, I don’t mean to put you on the spot. My parents don’t ask Jack or me how we are, or what we’re thinking or feeling…”
“I think you’re extraordinary,” I blurted.
Emery froze, her eyes wide. “What? No…”
“You are, and you should never reduce yourself to any one thing when you are multitudes.”
She let out a shaky little breath. “You’re too nice to me. I can’t compare to you and your genius. You’re the extraordinary one, Xander.” She smiled shyly. “I’m simple. I like pretty things. You can calculate black hole singularities, while I can’t even get through high school math and—where are you going?”
I jumped up and went to her wall of collages, searching until I found the perfect one for my purpose.
“Can I?”
Before she could answer, I carefully unpinned it from the wall and brought it to the desk. The collage was all her own artistry in different mediums—sketches, watercolor, oil—and evoked a scene in winter: a cabin by a snowy lake; an icy waterfall—frozen—its water trapped in crystalline icicles; a grandfather clock with no numbers on its face, but a cold moon instead. The entire collage spoke of a world instantlyfrozen in time. What had once been green and vibrant, now icy and still.
I grabbed my pencil and a sheet of paper and wrote:y(x,t)=Asin(kx−ωt+Φ)
“Do you know what that is?”
