Zenn Diagram Read online

  Sadly, that’s about as fuzzy as I get.

  I slip my glasses back on and, since I don’t want to let him off the hook too easily, I avoid any polite eye contact.

  He drops his trig book on the table with a heavy thump. Out of the corner of my eye I see him take off his jacket and hang it on the back of his chair. He wipes his forehead with one hand and I guess I have to appreciate that he rushed enough to break a sweat. He plops down and rubs his hands on his thighs and, since I’m still avoiding eye contact, that’s what I notice first.

  His hands.

  Tan, sturdy wrists, scratched-up knuckles, long and calloused fingers. His fingernails are fairly clean, but I suspect it took some effort to get them that way. His hands look a little like they’ve been tumbled around in the washing machine with gravel and then put out in the sun to bake to a golden brown.

  They make me look up and notice the rest of him.

  Well, hey.

  He’s not bad. Better than not bad, actually. But not at all in the same way as Josh.

  His very short, nearly black hair reminds me of an animal pelt: so shiny and thick that I wonder if maybe water would bead up on it, like it does on an otter or a seal. His eyes are dark, but more of a deep gray than a brown, with impossibly long, thick lashes. He blinks once, twice, and I realize that if I had been wearing my glasses, I definitely would have noticed his eyelashes first. Holy crap.

  The overall darkness of him is striking. My eyes have to adjust after the Scandinavian golden glow of Josh and Charlotte. Like Josh, this kid is objectively attractive: symmetrical features, straight nose, full lips. But like Charlotte, he’s not trying too hard. No hair flipping. No overwhelming body spray. Just the lucky recipient of a desirable gene pool.

  Unembellished. Nothing fancy.

  He inhales and lets it out in a heavy sort of sigh — the kind my mom makes after a day when my siblings have sucked every last ounce of maternal instinct from her exhausted body — and then he inhales again. He probably smells the remnants of Josh’s cologne.

  “The kid before you,” I say. “He’s pretty fond of his Axe.”

  His mouth twitches in a near smile and he rolls his eyes. “Let me guess: Josh Mooney?”

  I can’t help but laugh. “How’d you know?”

  He shrugs. “He’s in my gym class. Has a gallon-size tank of that shit in his locker. I’d know his stank anywhere.”

  I feel my guard lowering. “Someone needs to tell him that more is not necessarily better.”

  “To a kid like that? More is always better.” He shrugs again. “Unless it’s IQ points.”

  I like that this kid isn’t impressed by Josh’s brand of High-School-Musical popularity. The fact that Mr. Sexy Hands is not the president of the Josh Mooney fan club makes me think that he and I might just see eye to eye. Late or not, he’s forgiven.

  I don’t even smell the cologne anymore. All I smell is a soapy mix of Safeguard and Tide, and maybe a hint of mint emanating from my new pupil. His clothes are clean but not new or trendy: just a gray T-shirt from Judson College (which became Judson University several years ago) and jeans that look worn out from actual overuse rather than some Hollister marketing strategy. The green canvas army jacket he hung on his chair looks about twenty years old, probably a Goodwill purchase. You can still see where a name patch was once attached to the chest.

  He scrubs one beat-up hand over his close-cropped hair, which looks like maybe he cut it himself with clippers. He also has a small scar, a tiny crescent moon like a baby’s fingernail, just under his left eyebrow.

  “Did you bring your calculator?” I ask.

  “Huh?” He looks up at me. Again with those eyelashes! “Shit,” he murmurs. “I forgot. Sorry.”

  I push down the panic. The calculator itself is not the issue; I have one in my backpack. It’s the algos I really need. Without his calculator, I’ll actually have to spend time trying to figure out where he struggles with math.

  I look at his hands again. His eyelashes. And I think maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, spending some extra time with this one.

  “It’s okay. I think I have mine.” I reach for his trig book instead, hoping it will give me some insight into where we need to start. Books don’t usually work as well as calculators; something about paper is less … absorbent? And while kids struggle with their math homework, the book usually sits on the desk, oblivious to their frustration. A disinterested observer presenting a problem, not an active participant trying to find a solution. Calculators have witnessed the battle firsthand, clutched tightly in nervous fingers, wrong formulas entered, wrong answers given. They know. But sometimes, when I’m desperate, books will give me something to go on. I press my palms firmly against the cover and wait … but there is nothing. Not even a flicker. Given the fact that he needs a tutor, I’m guessing he either never opens his math book or it sits on his locker shelf 99.9 percent of the time and hasn’t had a chance to absorb the feelings that go along with his math frustrations.

  “I’m sorry … I forget your name.” To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention when Mr. Haase told me about this kid. Blah, blah, blah, new to the school, blah, blah, blah, needs help with trig. Same story, different student. I think his last name is Bennett, but his first name was something weird …

  “Zenn,” he says. His voice is like gravy. Like … melted peanut butter.

  “Right. Zen. Like …” — I pinch my middle fingers and thumbs together and place them, palms up, on the table — “Buddha?”

  “Kinda. But two n’s. Like …” — he makes a circle with each of his hands and overlaps them slightly — “Venn diagram.”

  Oh, lordy. He’s using math analogies. I think I’m in love.

  “That’s an interesting name.”

  “Yeah.” He nearly snorts. “I have interesting parents.”

  “Ha. Who doesn’t, right? I’m Eva. Like …” — I put on my gangsta voice and hold my hands in what I can only assume is a gangish symbol — “you neva met a girl named Eva?” It’s the kind of thing a girl trying to be pretty probably wouldn’t do. But we’ve already established that I’m way too cool to worry about such things.

  He full-on smiles now, with both sides of his mouth. I can’t tell if he finds me amusing or if he’s a little embarrassed for me.

  “Neva Eva,” he says. His gangsta voice is much more street than mine.

  I blush, even though it’s not like he said I was cute in a hot-librarian sort of way. I’m not sure why I blush, actually. I look down at the trigonometry book and stammer, “I, um, I’m named after Évariste Galois? He was a French mathematician.”

  “Ah. So I must be in good hands, then. Mathematically speaking.”

  I blush a little more at the mere mention of hands.

  Good lord, what the hell is wrong with me? I’m turning into Charlotte!

  I stall, trying to think of how else I can figure out where he’s struggling with math. I think Mr. Haase said he does okay on tests but rarely turns in his homework, which makes me think he’s either cheating on the tests, or he’s lazy. But his hands are not the hands of a lazy guy.

  Crap. Without the algos to help me, I have to rely on my people skills, which I’ve already mentioned is not my strongest skill set.

  “Is there something in particular you’re having trouble with?” Asking someone what they don’t understand is kind of pointless, but I’m not sure what other tack to take.

  Zenn doodles shapes on his notebook paper. I can’t seem to tear my eyes away from the tip of his pencil or the hand that holds it.

  “Time management,” Zenn offers, and I look up. His mouth is quirked in that half smile and I can’t tell if he’s joking. “Well, that, and graphing amplitude and period cosine transformations.”

  Aha! Now we’re talking. I grab my pencil and draw two axes on my paper. “That I can help you with.”

  I work through a problem, catching his eye occasionally to make sure he is not distracted, but his eyel
ashes end up distracting me. I lose my train of thought twice.

  Jeez. Pull it together, Eva.

  We get through a couple of problems but I feel inefficient without my calculator visions, like I am wasting his time. I plod on, reminding him more than once to bring his calculator next time.

  When our half hour is up, he stands and stretches, thanks me and grabs his book in one of his rugged hands.

  “See you next week, cleva Eva.”

  I’m starting to wonder if my flushed cheeks will ever cool off. “You bet.”

  You bet? When did I start saying you bet? Weird.

  He’s already out the door and down the hall by the time I notice that he’s left his jacket behind. I grab it and I’m halfway across the room when the fractal hits me hard.

  Chapter 3

  Holy shit.

  They usually don’t come that fast or that hard. Even fractals usually creep up slowly, like a migraine, and then spread like when your hand has fallen asleep and starts to regain feeling one tingly bit at a time. But this one, it does not creep. It does not tingle. It hits me like a cement truck of inky-black lightning bolts, a crimson hurricane, and I am on my knees on the linoleum floor before I even realize what caused it.

  I toss the jacket away from me like it’s covered in tarantulas. I was so hypnotized by Zenn’s cute-without-trying looks and charm-without-effort manner that I picked up his coat without thinking. Like a normal person would.

  I rub my forehead and find it slick with a fine layer of sweat. For a second I think I might throw up, but the wave passes. Eventually I stand again.

  That one was nothing like an algo. It was a full-out massive whack of a fractal, a chaotic, messy jumble of dark feelings as heavy and real as my dad’s fifteen-passenger church van. Nothing specific, nothing clear. Just the weight of a concrete block on my chest.

  This is why I don’t touch people’s stuff. Even really cute people’s seemingly harmless stuff.

  I hook his jacket on the toe of my boot and kick it back toward the table. I’m in the process of trying to lift it, with my foot, back to its spot on the chair when I hear the door open behind me.

  It’s him, isn’t it? I know it’s him.

  I try to think of how to make this — me balancing on one foot with his coat dangling from the other — look less weird, but my mind is completely blank. I kick the jacket back to the floor, lower my foot and turn around.

  “I just …” I gesture lamely to the floor. “You forgot your jacket.”

  “Yeah.” Zenn steps closer. I hadn’t realized how tall he is, a good six inches taller than my five feet seven. Also hadn’t noticed how nicely the gentle swell of his chest highlights the Judson College on his T-shirt. If I were a normal girl, I’d push against it flirtily to camouflage my embarrassment and distract him. But I’m me, so I don’t.

  He leans over and picks up the jacket. I reach out apologetically to brush my footprint off it, but then realize that would likely trigger another vision. I tuck my defective hands safely into my pockets.

  “Sorry. I just … clearly have some issues …” I try to make my voice light, jokey, but he looks away.

  “Don’t we all.” He gives me that half smile again, slips the jacket on and lifts his hand in a small wave as he leaves.

  “Bye,” I mumble, and push up my glasses. Another sweating episode has caused them to slide down my nose.

  Yeah, not sure if I could be any more cool.

  I finally stumble out of the room, woozy and exhausted, and head home. I try not to spend too much time thinking about his fractal. I’ve learned that it’s best to put them out of my mind, because dwelling on them only makes things worse.

  I used to call them feeling scribbles when I was little, because that’s exactly what they felt like: scribbles of feelings. Mostly hurt, shameful feelings. Mostly dark, heavy scribbles. When I got a little older, one of my many doctors referred to them as visions, and that term stuck for a while, even though it wasn’t quite accurate. I mean, I don’t see the future or anything. I’m not 100 percent sure I “see” anything at all. Even the shapes and patterns and colors are more feelings than visions. But when I eventually learned about mathematical fractals, that name stuck.

  Fractals are exactly what they are. Never-ending patterns, like ice crystals or the spiral of a seashell. Mathematical fractals are formed by calculating a simple equation thousands of times, feeding the answer back in to the start. They are infinitely complex, which means you can zoom in forever and the pattern never disappears, and never gets any simpler. When I touch people or their stuff, that’s what my visions are like: patterns that go on forever, engraved, etched, carved so deep they can’t be erased. I get these glimpses into people — the insecurities and struggles that make them who they are — but only a bit at a time. One tiny part of the pattern that hints at the bigger whole.

  The more I touch someone, the more I can see and understand, and the more I think I can help. But that’s my mistake. I can’t help. You can’t “fix” people like you can solve a math problem.

  I couldn’t fix Jasmine Ortega, whose fractal told me that she’d been date-raped when she was fifteen. I discovered that back when she was my partner in Biology and we had to study our saliva, our hair and a drop of our blood under a microscope. After weeks of holding those glass slides of her DNA, her fractal became pretty clear. Nothing I could do would make that pattern go away. Nothing I could say would fix it. I had to keep looking at her every day, knowing that shame would haunt her for the rest of her life. We were just Biology partners, we certainly weren’t close enough friends to talk about it. I couldn’t even tell her I knew. Hell, I had no idea who the guy was that raped her, so I couldn’t even turn him in or make his life miserable. I was helpless. All I could do was know that bit of truth about her, and hurt for her.

  I couldn’t help Trevor Walsh freshman year, when I learned he was gay from holding his sweatshirt during gym class. I see him now, nearly three years later, still dating Julia Ford, and there isn’t much I can do to save either of them the heartache that I know is coming. I’m not going to “out” him to his super-religious family. He would probably deny it anyway. All I can do is watch and wait. And hurt for him.

  Not all fractals are so dark, so secret. Some people live happy lives without much trauma or struggle. Some people get over things quickly, or never let them sink in to begin with. The problem is, you can’t always tell which camp they are in just by looking at them. You can’t tell if their fractal will be a pink ray of sunshine or an inky mass of mountain ridges. People tend to hide all their darkest secrets, and somehow still look fine on the outside. This is why I keep my hands to myself: because you never can tell what’s beneath the surface.

  I used to be more curious. I would touch people just to snoop. I’m not proud of it, but once in a while I’d want to know what made someone tick and I couldn’t help myself. I don’t do that much anymore, though. I learned I can’t control what information I get. Sometimes it’s like I’m stuck in a current and can’t swim free. I can’t give the information back once I have it, can’t erase it from my mind, so these days I keep my distance as my classmates goof around and hug and touch and just … live.

  I try to block out the memory of the overwhelming darkness that came from touching Zenn’s jacket. Instead, I count sidewalk squares and hop over each one that is a prime number.

  I could have called my mom for a ride, but it’s easier and quicker for me to walk. She’d come, of course, but she’d have to drag my quadruplet brothers and sisters along with her. By the time she got all their shoes on, grabbed snacks, buckled them into the car … It’s just simpler for me to walk. Any time I can make things simpler for my parents, I do. They’ve already done enough for me.

  When I finally walk into the house, Essie and Libby greet me with lots of jumping and a flood of chatter. Well, Libby jumps and chatters. Essie just holds her pudgy, sticky, three-year-old hands out to me and I pick her up. Libby bou
nces in protest.

  “EvaEvaEvaEva,” she chants. “Metoometoometoometoo.”

  Libby never says anything just once. One day I counted and realized she repeats most things four times. Once for each sibling? Or just a way to endear her to a math-loving and slightly OCD older sister?

  “Hold on, Libby Lou.” I drop my backpack by the front door and scoop her up with my other arm. Back at the same level, the girls start patty-caking with each other. I wonder if I’d be more of a people person, more warm and fuzzy, if I had grown up with siblings when I was younger. These four, they just get one another without any effort at all. Could be the nearly eight months they spent squished together in the tight quarters of my mom’s uterus, I guess.

  “Where’re the boys?” I ask them.

  “They in the bathroom on the potty,” Essie reports confidently, her th’s coming out like d’s and f’s. She always has her finger on the heartbeat — and the bowel movements — of the family. She prefers to report the details in a loud and emphatic voice to anyone who will listen.

  “Both of them?” I ask.

  “Yep!”

  “This I gotta see.”

  I put the girls down and they follow me to the bathroom where, sure enough, Eli and Ethan sit back-to-back on the toilet, legs hanging over either side, pants hanging around their ankles. My mom is lying in the empty tub reading her Bible.

  “Tough day?” I ask.

  Her smile is tinged with exhaustion. “The usual.”

  I nod at the boys, each with a board book on his bare lap. “Any luck?”

  She’s been trying to potty train them for weeks now, but they refuse to be tamed. Essie and Libby were bribed with sticker charts and new toys, which was good for my parents’ diaper budget. I just hope it doesn’t mean they’ll grow up to be slutty girls who give it away to any cute boys who buy them dinner.