Page 126 of Wayfarers

“Sylvie, I need you to stop guessing.”

“Okay,” I say, stung, and turn on the radio. Turn it up too loud, daring him to say something about it.

He doesn’t. He doesn’t say much of anything for the rest of the night, not even when we set up camp.

Sylvie

It’s morning and we’re on the road before Knox tries some small talk. “Is there anybody you want to see while you’re home?”

I shrug, still hurt over him shutting down my questions last night. “Not really. Maybe Dr. O.”

“Your doctor? Like . . . your pediatrician?”

“A doctor, not my doctor. A doctor of math.”

“A math doctor.”

“He was my teacher. Dr. Ogasawara. I was in AP Calc BC my senior year, it’s basically like extreme math for nerds, and there were only six of us who were taking it. And I’m like . . . I’m not good at math.”

“So says the girl in extreme math for extreme nerds.”

“Touché. I mean like, it doesn’t come naturally to me. I get to a certain point in a problem and my brain starts to sputter out, like there’s only so many little math plates I can keep spinning at the same time, and then crash they come down, and I have to start over.”

“Everyone feels that way about something, I think.”

“I don’t want to, though.” I can feel myself putting on an apologetic smile to soften what I’m about to say. “I like hard things. I can do a lot of hard things. I can get up before dawn and run a 5K and go straight to a zero-hour class and I can be on for all of that. I thought I just needed time to get used to Calc BC. Things are only hard until you get used to them.”

Knox is thinking next to me.

“Don’t do the thing,” I tell him.

“What thing?”

“The thing where I make a blanket statement like that and you immediately start poking it for holes. I am positive that there are holes in that statement. I’m positive that there’s all kinds of things I haven’t experienced yet that are just out there, waiting to humble me with big superior smiles on their faces. But between the stuff with my mom and with Cal and all the rest of it, the hard stuff I can’t control, it’s nice to have a handle on the hard things I can. Like, I can force my brain to run through the equation again. And again. And again, until I get it. I took like six practice convergence tests before the AP exam, and I failed the first three. Then I stopped failing them. So it’s true. At least for me.”

“Sylvie.”

“What?”

“I wasn’t going to do the thing,” Knox says quietly.

We’re all alone on the road. On either side of the car, corn is gently waving to us.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I feel like you’re reacting to things I don’t say, or do. Like you go blind to the fact that it’s me sitting next to you, and not somebody else.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Have you had somebody in your life who pushed back at you like that? Who does ‘the thing’?”

“He called it playing devil’s advocate,” I mutter.

“Did it work?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did it help you think through all the sides of your opinion? His questioning you?”

“No. I don’t tend to, like, state an opinion without having thought it through. I think a lot. Probably too much. All that did—all he did—was make it clear that he thought I was stupid. And then I was forced to make an argument for why I wasn’t.”