But there was also something else inside me when I pictured the Harrison’s home, Sammy sitting on the ginormous couch with her little feet out on the worn leather ottoman, the fire in front of her crackling beneath her family’s laughter. Nostalgia, maybe? Or envy? As embarrassing as that is to admit.
None of it lasted for long. All of the emotions were swallowed whole before I had a good chance to look too closely.
“Four minutes, my people!”
“That’s a lifetime!” Savannah says looking up at me. I wink. Usually I turn off timers for her because she has anxiety. But we’ve been working on her saying something positive every time her brain starts to become overwhelmed by the clock. She stillsounds sarcastic every time she blurts out the positive thought, but at least it gets her through the panic.
My phone vibrates in my hand. Another text from Meredith. I swipe the alert up and off the screen. If it’s not Meredith, it’s Tara—not Tara, it’s Kev and so on and so forth. The lot of them have been up my ass like they’re teaming up to give me a colonoscopy. Tara with her well-intentioned reminders that she’ll see me over spring break and Meredith with her absurd attempts to get me out of the house.Your mother called. They are professionally cleaning the house so you can’t go home. The chickens got into the fridge and there’s bird shit everywhere. Airborne Salmonella and E.coli.This one saysMy photographer friend from South Street is doing a naked educator shoot. He wants you at his apartment by noon on Saturday. It’ll be tasteful, I promise.She’s relentless and ridiculous. But appreciated.
“This is the final countdown. Duna-na-na-na. Duna-na-na-na!” I sing.
The kids take over, continuing the duna-na-na’s while the clock ticks away the last minute. How I wish I could be in their desks, occupying my mind with six linear equations, discovering the answers to the unknown instead of knowing.
“Ok. Pencils up or down or whatever,” I say as I turn off the awful beeping alarm. “Who wants to start?”
They look at each other. Some nudge a person in their group. Some are still staring at the X-men poster.
“I will.” Danielle strums her badass nails on the desk. “Can I hang up these graphs?”
“My board es tu board,” I tell her. “Magnets are in the bin over there by Jimmy.”
Jimmy looks away from the poster wall.
“What?” he asks.
Kid’s either stoned or stayed up all night playing video games. I point to the magnets behind him and he hands them to Danielle. She tells him thanks then whips her dark ponytail back around so she can focus on hanging up the graphs.
“Alright, so my group chose to graph these linear equations to try to get a picture of what we were dealing with.”
I squint at their work. I’ve had these graphs blown up with my own money because there’s never enough room in the budget, but I still need to get pretty close. The y-intercept is off on one of the lines, but it won’t matter. They’ll still be able to get to the right conclusion.
Danielle uses an expo marker and whacks the first graph so that all the heads in the classroom turn toward her. She’s a goddamned natural.
“This graph shows that the two lines intersect. Which is what we’ve been seeing with all of the systems we’ve solved so far. So, they have one point in common. One x and y value that works in both of the equations. One solution.” She smiles at her friend from her group then slides to the next graph. “Butttttt, this one was weird. Because when you graph the lines, they are exactly the same.” She runs her expo marker over the single line on the graph. “So, they share every point—every x and y value. This must be infinite solutions.”
A few ahhs and ohhs sound from the crowd. I won’t even have to teach anything if Danielle keeps going at this rate.
“And what about that last one, Danielle? What did your group find?” I ask, sliding beside Jimmy to block his view of the recycling bin that he’s zoning out on.
“Oh, this graph is sad,” Danielle starts, pushing her bottom lip out. “These lines never meet. They are like two soulmates who will never end up together. They share nothing. There is no solution.”
Two soulmates who will never end up together.
Danielle has struck a nerve. No. All the nerves. And I’m vibrating from the blow.
“Ms. G?”
She steps toward me and I try to swallow, but my throat is so thick.
This is silly. Pull yourself together.I give myself a mental bitch slap, but it barely tingles. My mind keeps returning to that graph.
It doesn’t matter how long those lines go on for. They could stretch off the graph in both directions, up and down over that wall where they hang, out and away into the sky—into the universe and deep into the Earth’s crust. Nothing could change their course. Nothing.
Even a thirteen-year-old can see there is no solution.
“Are you ok?”
I shake my head, then recover with a slow clap that the other students immediately jump upon. Young adults cannot resist a slow clap.
