Which Aubrey didn’t mind, though the prospect of finding conversational common ground with someone half her age daunted her. What were high schoolers into these days, anyway? Parties? Boy bands? At that age, she’d been consumed by mathematics and her boyfriend. NYU and Nick. Nothing else had existed.
Fortunately, that turned out not to matter, because Paige did most of the talking. Bright-eyed and squeaky-voiced, and with the perkiest strawberry-blond ponytail Aubrey had ever seen, the girl was like a rainbow transmuted into a person. When Megan introduced them, billing Aubrey as “a native Hendersonite back for a visit,” Paige pumped Aubrey’s hand, then dove straight into a discussion about wire framing.
Aubrey half listened, half glanced around the airy barn at the many volunteers. When Nick proved absent, a knot between her shoulder blades loosened.
“...we’ll have to divide up the chicken wire,” Paige was saying. “But first, we’ll need to figure out the dimensions of the welded skeletons. Those’re made of steel rods, which’ll have to be cut to size.”
“Okay,” Aubrey said.
“You and I are in charge of two floats. A turkey, and one shaped like Indiana. Last year, the planning guys just made drawings and went for it, but a lot of steel got wasted and the floats didn’t end up being all that big.” She gestured to a pile of rebar poles. “I thought it’d make more sense to approach it like an optimization problem, so—”
“Wait.” Aubrey’s ears perked. “Did you just say ‘optimization problem’?”
“Oh, gosh, I know.” Paige rolled exceptionally blue eyes, their color nearly on par with the autumn sky. “It’s math, everyone gets all frowny-faced when I start talking about it, but hey, I love it anyway, and I’m not afraid to tell everyone that I think”—she made an impromptu megaphone with her hands and pointed it at the broader crowd—“NUMBERS. ARE. AWESOME.”
A few people looked up, then returned to their tasks. Aubrey raised her brows.
Paige dropped her hands, sheepish. “Sorry, I get carried away, sometimes. Everyone says. But math is actually way more useful than people realize, and right now it’s gonna help us build some really big floats without wasting any rebar. You know, save the planet, and all that. Doesn’t hurt to impress everybody while we’re at it.”
Aubrey wrestled with a smile. My god, Megan had chosen wisely. This girl was a delight. “I don’t disagree with a single thing you just said, actually. So how would you put together this optimization problem?”
“Well, for the turkey, we basically need a big sphere, which we can build from four circles, right? And for Indiana, a rectangle twice as tall as it is wide.”
Aubrey nodded along. “So we’re maximizing the enclosed areas of the circles and rectangle?”
“Yeah, exactly.” Paige’s perky brows winged upward. “Wait, are you a math person?”
Aubrey grinned. “You could say that.”
“Oh, no wonder Megan put us together.” Paige made asqueesound, then pulled a tiny spiral-bound notebook and pencil from her back pocket. “Okay, so it’s easy enough. We just write an equation that combines the areas of all the shapes, right? We’ll call the radius of the circle X, and the width of the rectangle Y.”
“Sounds good.”
Paige jotted in the notebook. “This is the equation we’ll maximize, but we can write another relating X to Y, since we know the perimeters of the circles and rectangle will add up to a hundred and twenty feet of rebar. Solve that function for Y, plug it back into the first—”
“—then take the derivative and solve for zero,” Aubrey finished.
Paige’s pencil stilled. “Yes. Wait, yes! You’re like, arealmath person, aren’t you?”
“If having a PhD in mathematics counts.”
“No way!” Paigesqueedagain. “A woman after my own heart. But wait, didn’t you say your name is Aubrey? Not... Aubrey MacLean? The woman with all those trophies in the math club cabinet?”
Aubrey pressed a hand to her chest. “Oh, wow. They still have those up?”
“Of course!” Paige hopped up and down. “Oh my gosh. Okay, so don’t get mad, but I’ve been trying to break your trophy record forforever. This might even be the year. I’ve got sixteen trophies, you’ve got twenty-two. Twenty-two! I mean, you’re a legend.”
Aubrey’s startled laugh filled the barn. “I don’t know about that.” None of her classmates had even acknowledged her trophies, back when she’d earned them.
“Oh, but you are. All the math clubbers know your name. Mostly because you and I are locked in a heated battle.” Paige giggled. “Ooh, you know what you should do? Come speak to my club. They’d die of surprise. My archnemesis, coming to tell us what it’s like to be a math goddess in the real world. Wait, whatisit like to be a math goddess in the real world? Do you—”
As Paige rattled off questions, tension tightened Aubrey’s lungs. Speaking to the math club sounded wonderful on the surface, but it would mean showing her face at the same high school Nick’s son or daughter attended. Paige probably even knew the kid.
Maybe he was in math club.
A vivid, daydream flash lit her mind. She saw herself walking into the musty old math room, only to confront a lanky sixteen-year-old with a dark glower and tangled curls.
What would she even say to the living, breathing proof of the heartbreak she’d barely survived?
