Zenn Diagram Read online

  Charlotte looks stunned. “Yes. Yes. I do.”

  “My little sister plays the violin. Her name is Lilly?”

  Of course Charlotte knows this. She’s only spent the first month of school plotting 1,001 ways to use Lilly Mooney to get to Josh, but she’s too nice a person to employ any of them. The fact that Josh knows something about her has caught Charlotte off guard.

  Maybe boys aren’t as stupid as I think.

  Josh further chips away at my stupid-boy theory by saying, “I like your earrings.”

  Charlotte touches them self-consciously. “Really?”

  He nods. Suddenly I feel like I’m the third wheel. I hadn’t expected Josh to do more than give Charlotte a dismissive S’up and be on his way, so I’m not sure how I feel about this development. I want Charlotte to be happy … but with Josh? Poster boy for popularity and the in crowd?

  I close Josh’s math book with more force than I have to. I don’t think we’re going to make any more progress today. Not with math, anyway.

  Josh glances at the clock, then almost reluctantly picks up his book and calculator. “Damn. I gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.” This is directed at me.

  Then he looks at Charlotte and says her name like it’s a secret. And a statement. And a promise.

  I see her whole body soften, like her bones have liquefied.

  “See you around?” he adds.

  “For sure,” she says, a little too enthusiastically.

  I cringe. She is such a goofball.

  But Josh doesn’t seem to notice. Or he doesn’t seem to care. He touches her arm lightly as he walks past.

  The door closes and Charlotte collapses into a chair. “Oh, my God! That went so much better than I thought it would.”

  I want to agree with her, but it would be rude to admit I was expecting a disaster. “See?” I say. “He’s pretty nice.”

  “Pretty nice? He’s, like, utter and complete perfection.” I don’t know if Charlotte’s rosy cheeks are from excitement or from Jessica’s well-stocked makeup kit. “He knows I play the cello! And he likes my earrings!”

  “He’s observant,” I give her, reluctant to join the lovefest because, yes, I admit it: I feel a little jealous. Not about Josh in particular, but about feeling desired. Having someone look you in the eyes, say your name, know something about you. It’s been a long time since I’ve allowed myself to think about that possibility.

  Well, it’s been about two years.

  During sophomore year, I went on the only two dates of my life. The first was with seemingly sweet Chad Morgan, who had dimples and blue eyes and looked like he could have been on some Disney Channel show playing the slightly nerdy but stealthily cute neighbor. We went to a movie and everything was going great — he laughed at my lame jokes, he bought me popcorn. Then halfway through the movie he slid his small, damp hand onto mine and it was ruined. I tried to ignore it at first, concentrating on the story on-screen. But the longer his hand sat on mine, the clearer the fractal became. Orange-and-red hot bolts of anger issues. Bright green streaks of competitiveness to the point of dysfunction. I pulled my hand away in the guise of eating popcorn, but blue-eyed Chad was done for.

  Not too long after that, class clown Logan Boggs asked me out and, even though he wasn’t really my type, I figured at least he’d make me laugh. Then he held my hand as he walked me home from the frozen yogurt shop and I was overwhelmed by what I suspected was a dark cloud of racism. Or homophobia. Something heavy that scared me away from him immediately.

  I know not every boy has those kinds of issues. Logically, I know that. But everyone has some kind of issue. Some insecurity or bias or stubborn shortcoming. Later in a relationship maybe that kind of stuff isn’t so deal-breakery. Usually by the time you learn about people’s “damage,” you’ve become attached, maybe even see it as endearing. But to learn about someone’s dark secrets right away, when any red flag can send you running for the hills? That’s a whole lot harder. And it’s a big part of the reason I’ve decided I just have to be alone ... for now.

  Most of the boys in my school aren’t interesting to me, anyway. They try too hard, they care too much about things that don’t matter to me, they just seem immature and ridiculous. Until now, no one has lured me out of my cocoon of denial. But the rosy glow in Charlotte’s cheeks reminds me what I’m missing.

  “Are you ready to go?” My voice is uncharacteristically snippy. “I’ve got a fuck-ton of homework tonight.”

  Charlotte sighs and stands up, oblivious to my tone. “Is a fuck-ton more or less than a shitload?”

  “Oh, way more. A fuck-ton more.”

  She nods blandly, accepting my expertise on expletive measurements without question. “Do you need a ride home tomorrow, too?” she asks, dreamily.

  “Nice try.” I laugh. “But I’ve got a kid after him tomorrow.”

  Zenn, I want to tell her. Zenn, Zenn, Zenn.

  I bite my tongue and follow her out to the car.

  Chapter 8

  All day on Tuesday I feel restless and fizzy inside. It’s not like I’ve never had a little crush on a guy before, but somehow this is different. I feel anticipation (and a little bit of fear) pooling in my stomach and then overflowing to every other part of my body. Why, I’m not sure. It’s not like Zenn has shown any hint of interest in me. He remembered my face. He smiled at me maybe two times. He made a couple of corny sheep jokes. He has been cordial at best.

  But those hands, those eyelashes, that charming smirk … and something about that haunting fractal. That vision is probably why I feel a little bit of fear mixed with the infatuation.

  I assume the quiet knock on the door before Josh and I are finished with our lesson is Charlotte, trying to make a love connection. But when the door opens this time, it’s Zenn. A few minutes early, even.

  Josh looks up. He seems disappointed. I am not.

  “Sorry,” Zenn says. “I’ll just wait out here.”

  Josh stands and gathers up his things. “It’s cool, bro. We’re done.”

  It might be my imagination, but I think Zenn cringes a little at being called bro. Can’t say I blame him.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Eva.” Josh pronounces my name Eve-ah, like the robot in WALL-E . My turn to cringe a little. I mean, it’s a nice name. It’s just not my name.

  Josh gives Zenn a manly nod as he leaves. Zenn crosses the room and sits down, shaking his head. “We have three classes together and he still doesn’t know my name.”

  “Apparently, he doesn’t really know mine, either.”

  Zenn smirks and then produces a calculator from the pocket of his coat. “Not only on time but with my calculator.”

  “Nice work,” I say, and I take the calculator to give the algo time to brew. Zenn flips through his math book to find the appropriate section. He’s not paying for this session, but I realize that I’d probably pay him to sit here and study his hands. They are fascinating. My pastor dad’s hands are soft, for holding and praying and serving. Zenn’s are a workingman’s hands, for hard, outdoor, physical work, not office work at a computer. I wonder what he does to make them look that way. Can’t just be putting away carts at the Piggly Wiggly.

  I tear my eyes away and look down at the calculator. I’m not getting anything. Not a tingle or a whisper. Just like when I held his math book. Nada.

  I try to hide my confusion and have him start on a sample problem from his homework. He works on it, slowly but correctly, without my help. Does he even need me at all?

  Well, crap.

  I want to ask him why he’s here. But tutoring is good for my college applications and what do I care if he wants to waste a little extra time doing math? So I just keep my mouth shut and we go through his homework problem by problem. I give him hints when he gets stuck. In our half hour, he nearly finishes it.

  When we’re done he closes his book and I slide his calculator, useless as it was, back across the table. He stands up, remembering his jacket this time. />
  “Hey,” he says, his voice a little hesitant, gravelly, intimate. “I was thinking …”

  My hands start to tingle and I wonder if I’ve accidentally touched something to trigger a vision, but no: they are resting safely on my lap. I feel my heart beating in the soles of my feet.

  “If your church wanted to repaint that van, I do that sort of thing.”

  Oh. Okay. Not what I was expecting — or hoping for — at all.

  “You … paint vans?”

  He nods, kind of wagging his head side to side. “Well, other things, too. But I’ve done some motorcycles and, like, logos on cars for businesses.” He digs a slightly crumpled business card out of his pocket and sets it on the table. “I work out of a body shop on Powers Street. If they’re interested, have them give me a call.”

  I study the card but don’t pick it up. Don’t want to risk having a fractal while he’s standing right here. “You can get rid of the headless sheep?”

  “Absolutely. We can do something more subtle. Like … bright purple with unicorns. Maybe some rainbows.” He says this stone-faced but his eyes flick with the first real bit of humor I’ve seen in him today.

  I laugh. “Okay. I’ll let them know.”

  After he leaves I carefully pick up the card while I’m still seated. I have bruises on my knees from my fall on Friday, so I’m erring on the side of caution. But the card doesn’t trigger anything. The more disposable the item, the less it seems to absorb fractals. The card says Port Dalton Body Shop with his name, Zenn Bennett, handwritten beneath the logo.

  Well. He wants to paint my van. And unfortunately that’s not a euphemism for anything.

  Chapter 9

  I mention Zenn’s offer to my dad at dinner, while I’m cutting up bites of overcooked chicken for four preschoolers who, frankly, act like they would rather eat poop.

  “Hey, Dad,” I start, making sure I don’t act too invested in the idea yet. “I meant to tell you. I’m tutoring a kid at school who paints vans —”

  “Libby. Stop putting peas in your milk,” my mom says.

  Libby looks up at my mom, a handful of peas poised over her cup. She puts the peas back onto her plate and then sticks her hand into her milk, trying to fish out the few floaters she dropped in before she got caught. To no one’s surprise she knocks the whole thing over and starts to cry. I grab my rag.

  My dad doesn’t miss a beat. “He paints vans?”

  “Yeah. Well, other stuff, too, I guess. But he said he could help … update the church van.”

  I try to be gentle about the van around my dad. Although he has never admitted to it, I wonder if he might have been the artist of the headless sheep.

  “Ethan, eat your chicken.” My mom is inching toward madness tonight. I hear it in her voice.

  “But I don’t like chicken!”

  “You like chicken nuggets,” my mom points out, her teeth clenched.

  “These not chicken nuggets.”

  My mom shoots my dad a look of exasperation, but he’s looking at me.

  “How much would this updating cost?” My dad has an amazing ability to tune out chaos. I’m guessing that comes from enduring a decade of church council meetings.

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “But I could ask him?”

  Eli dips a piece of chicken into his bowl of applesauce, probably trying to moisten it up, and accidentally bumps his cup, sending it over.

  “Oh, for the love of God!” my mom yells, which makes Essie start to cry now. “We’re going back to the flipping sippy cups. I swear!”

  I don’t know who my mom thinks she is threatening. We’d all be thrilled to go back to the sippy cups.

  Probably sensing that his gift for tuning out chaos is contributing to my mom’s drift toward madness, my dad grabs the rag and starts mopping up the second cup of milk. My mom is tossing dishes into the kitchen sink. I probably should just let it go … but …

  “So … the van?”

  “Fine, Eva,” my dad says, more curtly than usual. “Ask him.”

  Before he can overthink his sentimental feelings about the Loser Cruiser, I hop up and start making myself useful.

  After another round of bath time and bedtime times four, I finish my homework and commandeer the one computer in our house. My mom and dad are watching Revenge, their television guilty pleasure.

  I stare at the online application to MIT, although I know it nearly by heart. I know them all by heart: Northwestern, University of Chicago, Stanford. But I never get much farther than staring. It’s not the essays that overwhelm me; my strengths are math and science, but I can write a mean essay if I have to. My ACT and SAT scores are more than respectable and if I do an interview, I should be fine once I get past the initial handshake. What makes me stumble is the biographical information, where I have to talk about my family. I mean, it took me years to even tell Charlotte that my mom and dad are not actually my mom and dad, so I don’t know how I’m going to spill it all out to strangers in a succinct paragraph.

  I don’t have to put it on my application. I could just pretend that my family is traditional and leave it at that. But I also know that my situation is unique, and it might be the thing that makes me stand out in a sea of overachieving eighteen-year-olds. I’d feel guilty using my family’s tragedy to give me a boost, but my real parents are dead. I never got to know them. If getting into college is one tiny good thing that comes out of their death … so be it. Right?

  I just don’t know how to present myself as the appropriate mix of orphan and overachiever to an admissions board. And even if my grades and test scores and dead parents were enough to get me in, there’s the cost. Holy good God, the cost.

  It costs $62,946 for one year at MIT. Pretty similar costs for any place I want to go. (Gotta wonder where they get that extra $46.) Four years would cost $251,784. Our house isn’t even worth that much.

  The university websites are wonderful, all the text written in an informal, laid-back voice that makes you fall in love with them. They say things like, If you are admitted to *insert school name here*, we will make sure that you can afford to come to *school name* and We will help meet every single cent of your family’s demonstrated need. Um, yeah. Right. Maybe if I sell my soul. How can they possibly promise that?

  The websites say that, after all that free money they can’t wait to throw at you is doled out, the average cost for a student is closer to twenty-five thousand dollars. As if that lessens the sting. It’s still a hundred grand for four years. My dad only makes about seventy-five thousand per year, and he supports a family of seven!

  If I apply to all these schools — and I really, really want to apply — and I get in … how can I put that pressure on my parents? How would I ever pay them back? First they rescue me from orphanhood and then finance a completely overpriced education when they still have four more kids to raise?

  In my fantasies, I go off to one of these prestigious universities, solve a medical mystery, cure myself, and make my first million before I’m thirty. Then I pay for the quads to go wherever they want for college so they don’t have to deal with this kind of stress. Reality is that I’ve been researching scholarships, which is depressing because they come mostly in chunks of less than a thousand dollars. And the amount of work you have to do just to apply for the scholarships would be overwhelming if that’s all you did. But when you go to school and tutor and do things like student council so you have something “leadershippy” on your college applications and help take care of four three-year-olds, it’s enough to make you weep into your spilled milk.

  I have found one scholarship through a big corporation in Madison that gives out twenty-five thousand dollars per year for four years. That’s most of what I might realistically expect to pay at MIT or a school like that, given the “needs-based” aid they hand out to families like mine. The scholarship is extremely competitive, probably more competitive than even getting into MIT in the first place. But as far as I can figure, it might be the
only way for me to bankroll my education.

  The key to that scholarship — the Ingenuity Scholarship — is having something that sets you apart. Some unique talent or skill that makes you one in a million. They are vague in their description and I’m not sure if my math talent, or my visions for that matter, would qualify me. I know it’s worth a shot, but I just haven’t been able to get up the nerve.

  Tonight I stare at the application again.

  Please tell us about the skill, talent or aptitude that makes you unique.

  Well, where do I start? With just one touch, I can tell if you are stressed out or happy. With two touches, I can determine if you had a good childhood or a dysfunctional one. And if you let me hold on to your arm for a half hour or so, even though it might make me pass out, I could probably outline the top ten ways you are messed up. How’s that for an aptitude?

  I’m tempted to write this, but instead I focus on my math skills. I write about how I was doing long division in preschool, how I rarely have to be “taught” anything when it comes to math: all you have to do is show me a problem and maybe give me an example and I get it. Not like I learn it. Not like I memorize it. I just understand it inherently and completely. I try to blend confidence and modesty with a sense of humor. I write about how when I was in grade school and most of my friends kept diaries or made scrapbooks of pop stars, I kept a notebook of math jokes and riddles: What geometric shape is like a lost parrot? A Polygon! or Why was the math book sad? It had too many problems. I talk about how, in a world of shades of gray, sometimes it’s nice to have black-and-white answers.

  I write a brief, pared-down summary of my family history — parents died, Mom’s sister dropped out of college to take care of me. I leave out a lot: how she met and married the young pastor at her church, how they adopted me, their struggle with infertility, the quadruplet siblings that were the end result. That might all seem too unbelievable, like I’m just making stuff up for attention. So I give them the basics but try to downplay the drama of being an orphan. Don’t want to seem like I’m milking it for sympathy.