The Secret Science of Magic

by Melissa Keil

  I sit up straight. I’ve been so busy trying to sort through the tangle in my head that I haven’t given much thought to how this must seem to her. I haven’t been pushing Elsie away. Not on purpose. Have I?

  Elsie swings her legs off her bed and walks around to face me. ‘Sophia, you’re taking a really long time to answer that question.’ She crosses her arms. ‘Do you … have you not wanted me around?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say slowly. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s that simple, Elsie.’

  Elsie’s mouth drops open. She snaps it shut again, blinking way too rapidly. But when she speaks, her voice is eerily calm.

  ‘Sophia, you’re going to have to explain that. Hey, I know, how ’bout you just pretend I’m an idiot?’ she says with a sharp smile. ‘Pretend I’m a moron whose brain moves a couple of clicks behind yours, okay?’

  I twist the damp towel, knuckles white. I have been trying for so long now to find the words to explain to my best friend why my future feels so terrifying, why I can’t face talking about university, or the prospect of her not being around for it. But I know I’m not capable of articulating the things I feel.

  Instead, I decide to focus on my most pressing dilemma. ‘See, Elsie, there’s this thing I’ve been trying to manage, or understand, I suppose is a better word. Something that I didn’t factor on having to deal with … this thing that I’m having, or was having, or, I don’t even know. With this boy …’

  I’m pretty sure my syntax is hopelessly jumbled. I can’t say his name out loud. I feel, once again, the failure of my own vernacular, the inadequacy of stupid, stupid words. I have this brief notion that perhaps I could express everything more clearly in a chart or a Hasse diagram, but I think I’d have as much luck trying to quantify the events of the past month using the marionette puppets that starred in the year-seven production of The Sound of Music.

  I glance at Elsie. She has been pacing back and forth in the free space between her clothes. The look on her face is one I’ve never seen before.

  ‘It’s all been a bit confusing, to be honest,’ I mumble. ‘He’s strange, but I think good strange, and then tonight there was this party … I mean, you know me and crowds, but I thought I could handle it. And I did. I was handling it fine. But then it got … well. I don’t know. There was this thing …’

  I take a deep breath, regrouping my thoughts into orderly rows and columns, and I give her a rundown, in dot points, of everything that’s happened over the last month. I even manage to dispassionately report everything that’s transpired since I landed on Joshua’s doorstep tonight.

  I don’t know how to explain the kiss. I could describe it with anatomical precision, since my eidetic brain remembers every nuance. I know that the scientific study of kissing is known as philematology, and that the scientists who study kissing are known as osculologists. It sounds like a cool profession. Useful. Enlightening.

  But out of all the things I lack the language for, I especially can’t articulate that kiss.

  I’m lost in the memory, so it takes me a moment to notice that Elsie has stopped pacing, and that she still hasn’t said a word. She’s blinking quickly again, her head tilted like she’s trying to hear something in the distance.

  She looks me square in the eye, and my heart makes an uncomfortable stumble because it is the first time she has made eye contact since I started speaking.

  ‘Elsie?’

  Elsie sits down heavily, right in front of me. ‘You went to a party?’

  I can’t tell if it’s the rain on the roof or the blood in my ears that makes me suddenly claustrophobic. ‘Yes. But it wasn’t a big deal. It was a last-minute thing –’

  Elsie holds up a hand. I search her face for any clue as to what is happening, but all I can tell is that her brain is whirring.

  ‘Sophia. When we got invited to Harriet Lohman’s sixth birthday party with the rest of our class, what did you tell me?’

  I swallow. ‘I said that Harriet Lohman was having a jumping castle, which, on average, are responsible for thirty people a day being hospitalised. And I think I said that I wanted to finish some geometry homework –’

  ‘And when we got asked to the year-seven formal by those guys from the debate team, what did you say?’

  I think for a moment. ‘I said that I didn’t want to hang out with Ben Bartlett because he didn’t understand fractional exponents – but to be fair, Elsie, he always spent the class reading comics on his phone, then asked me for help later. And, um, I said there was a Fermat’s Last Theorem documentary on TV that would be more fun.’

  ‘And what did I do?’ she says, in a voice that sounds too full.

  ‘You stayed with me, Elsie. You always stay with me.’

  She stands up, a shirt from her floor-pile clutched in her hand. ‘Rey?’ she says softly. ‘Tell me why you’ve been keeping things from me?’

  Without any idea what I should be doing, I stand as well. My skin is still cold, like the warmth of Elsie’s house can’t unfreeze it. Elsie backs away.

  Elsie has only a couple of photographs among the clutter on her desk – a picture of her with her brothers on a trip to India a few years ago, and two photos of her and me. In one we’re at Sizzler for her thirteenth birthday; we’re a few years older in the other, both wearing surgical masks and her mum’s scrubs. It was taken the last time we dressed up for Halloween, even though I talked Elsie into skipping trick-or-treating that year, which pretty much signalled the end of our Halloween tradition. Elsie is all broad smiles in both photos; I look like I’m made of marble. I’ve always hated photos of myself. No matter what I’m thinking or feeling when the picture is snapped, my face always manages to look blank and vacant. I always look insubstantial, diffused around the edges. I think it’s because I’m built of numbers, of data and facts and peculiarly firing synapses; maybe, in the real world, I am simply more faded, less there than everyone else.

  ‘Elsie, are you mad?’ I whisper, my eyes on the Halloween picture. ‘Please, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what I’ve done and I’ve had a really bad night and I can’t focus on you right now –’

  ‘You can’t focus on me?’ she yells. I jump, dropping the sock I didn’t realise I’d been grasping. The chatter from downstairs ceases. ‘When have you ever focused on me, Sophia? You think I don’t know that you barely even register I’m here?’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Elsie. Of course I notice you –’

  ‘Oh really? Then why don’t you ever ask about anything to do with me? You never ask about my plans for next year – you’re not even a bit curious about what I want or how I feel about anything! You have no idea what’s going on with me. Has it ever even crossed your mind?’

  ‘But, Elsie, you told me you didn’t want to talk about it –’

  She bundles the shirt in her hand and flings it at the wall. ‘God, that’s just something people say! Of course I want to talk to you –’ She laughs, but I have no idea why. ‘Who else do I have? Who else am I supposed to talk to?’

  I think back over this past year, running frantically over every conversation we’ve had. I know I have asked her about things. School and homework; her opinion on Doctor Who and Keanu Reeves and Maryam Mirzakhani. We spent three hours one Friday in June debating the relative merits of Mr Grayson’s thinning comb-over versus Mr Peterson’s fire-hazard toupee. Maybe I haven’t said much about the future. But I don’t know how to talk about something that makes me feel stressed and sad.

  I feel myself tunnelling into my centre, shrinking inside my skin in a way that I do when I’m overwhelmed, but never, ever with Elsie. She seems to take my silence as a statement, because her face becomes redder and her voice so much angrier.

  ‘I’m scared, Sophia – I can’t coast the way you can. And I’ve been busting my arse with band practice, which you never even acknowledge! When was the last time you came to a recital? When was the last time you asked me how it’s going?’

  ‘But you play the xylophone!’
I blurt. ‘It’s not a key part of the orchestra. Zimmy Taylor plays the cowbell and her friends never come to anything –’

  Elsie’s eyes widen. Horrifyingly, they also brim with tears. The last time I saw Elsie cry was when Ryan accidentally deleted Harold and Maude from their DVR. I can’t speak. I can’t process anything else tonight; the emotive centres of my brain are shutting down, underneath this awful, stomach-ripping sensation that something unrecoverable is spiralling out of my control.

  ‘That’s what you think of me,’ Elsie says, her dull tone more frightening than anything else. I can’t reconcile her inflection with the tears that are careening down her face, and all I want to do is crawl under her blankets and have her explain everything to me, like she always did when we were kids.

  ‘Elsie, please, just tell me –’

  ‘No,’ she whispers. ‘I’m done being your interpreter. I have made so many sacrifices for you. I’ve missed out on so much, all because my best friend has a breakdown every time anyone even suggests she interact with other humans. But the moment you find someone worth making the effort for, all that becomes meaningless –’

  ‘But Elsie –’

  ‘No. Stop,’ she says, sobbing now, heedless of my shaking hands and frozen face. ‘You’ve been holding me back all these years, Sophia,’ she chokes out. ‘You have no idea how lonely being your friend is.’

  And though I know it’s a physiological impossibility, somehow my heart feels like it has cracked into a million pieces.

  This time I don’t flee. I simply turn, and walk back down the stairs. Pumpkin, the ginger tabby, weaves between my legs as if to see me out, or possibly to hasten my departure by tripping me on the staircase. I have a vague impression of Colin, Raj and Ryan, silent in their warm lounge, their game of Trivial Pursuit abandoned. Distantly, I think I hear one of them call out after me.

  The street is damp and dark. I walk, my focus absorbed by the uneven footpath. I count in a Fibonacci sequence, always my go-to pattern when I was little, as comforting as the sheep Mum told me other kids count to help them sleep.

  The drizzle has turned into a downpour, which soaks my green dress through. I realise, as I stumble over my count, that somehow in this crap-storm of a night I have lost my copy of Six Easy Pieces, which, yes, I was carrying to a party inside my jacket pocket.

  I think it’s the loss of the book that finally breaks whatever spell was holding me together. Breathing is rapidly becoming problematic.

  I lie down on the nature strip, my forehead in the grass. It smells of dirt and wet green, but I breathe it in as if this earthly connection can resynchronise my body and disconnected brain. My entire world is reduced to filling my lungs. I wonder if this is what Houdini felt, right before he burst free from his water torture cell. The fact that this knowledge is now embedded in my brain is unutterably distressing.

  I don’t know how long I remain horizontal. Eventually I am so numb and cold that something in my hindbrain sparks to life, reminding me that a wretched evening is still no justification for hypothermia. I sit up, and realise I’ve been lying in a murky puddle of brown water, which has left two boob-shaped circles on the front of my dress.

  I pull out my mobile, blurring my eyes against the multiple missed call notifications, all from the one number. I fumble for my contacts, and I call the only person I can safely assume is also friendless and alone on a Saturday night. Though my throat is still locked, I managed to croak out my location. Then I bury my face in my knees and totally fail to cry.

  Toby’s Corolla pulls up to the curb with a very un-Toby-like tyre squeal. I drag my face up to see his bespectacled eyes scanning frantically through the windscreen. He’s out the door and across the road, only checking both ways twice, which is how I know this is a crisis.

  Toby skids to a stop. He drops onto one knee, right there on the roadside. I stare at his kneecaps, the damp already soaking his pyjama bottoms.

  ‘Sophia, are you hurt?’ he barks. ‘What happened?’

  I open my mouth. Strangely, all I have been able to think about for the fifteen minutes since I called Toby is Richard Feynman. How he hated studying English, detested the rules of language. He knew it was nothing but imprecise human conventions, arbitrary, made-up vagaries that had nothing to do with anything real. This phrase keeps floating through my head, in Feynman’s twangy voice: there is a difference between knowing the name of something, and knowing something. I suppose he meant that not having the words for a thing doesn’t make it any less true or real.

  ‘Did you not think to put on pants?’ I ask out loud.

  Toby’s face furrows. ‘No. I didn’t.’

  He stumbles as he stands, then reaches down and pulls me up, his hand briefly under my arm, though he lets go quickly as I wobble to my feet. Whatever he sees as his gaze runs over me renders his face less frantic. It sinks slowly back into its usual mask of blankness and irritation.

  ‘If this is one of your episodes or whatever, you should’ve called Mum or Dad. I’ve got half a dozen assignments that aren’t becoming un-terrible by themselves.’ He looks around the street as if only now realising that he is outside.

  ‘Toby, do you think I’m a horrible person? It’s okay if you say yes. I’d just really like to stop trying to guess what’s in your head.’

  Toby slicks a hunk of dripping hair from his eyes. He shakes off his parka and all but throws it over my shoulders. ‘God, I don’t have time for this,’ he mutters.

  Warm fabric wraps around my torso, enveloping me in a faint cloud of home-smells. ‘You don’t have time for me?’ For a second I think my voice almost manages to break free of its monotone.

  And for just the briefest second, I think I see something pass over my brother’s face. It’s gone too quickly for me to identify. ‘I don’t have time for teenage dramatics or whatever this is,’ he says uncertainly. ‘If, well – did something happen that I should know about?’

  Facts form an orderly queue inside my head. It’s almost welcome, this ability of mine to systematise and classify, even now, when I am so bone tired that the bed of damp grass at my feet looks appealing. I seem to have lost my will to speak, though. I shake my head.

  Toby gathers my discarded bag and thrusts it into my hands. ‘Right. Then let’s go. Get in the car, Sophia.’

  I figure I might as well follow a directive. Perhaps this is where my future lies – blindly observing orders, using my skills for whatever I am told to do with them. Like those mathematicians who cracked the Enigma code, but the underlings with names nobody remembers.

  I huddle in the passenger seat. Toby fiddles with the heating, cranking the temperature and aiming a vent my way.

  ‘Put your seatbelt on,’ he growls.

  I look over at him as I click my belt into place. Dishevelled and damp, he flicks on his wipers, but he doesn’t pull out into the traffic until he has slicked back his hair and untucked an errant bit of his pyjama shirt collar. It’s like he can’t move forward until he has smoothed and straightened himself into place.

  I wonder if a hug from my brother would trigger my anxious touch response? Most likely, all higher brain functions would cease, rendered catatonic from shock. I don’t think I have ever giggled in my life, but I have this sudden flash of Toby attempting to hug me with those spindly arms that he once sprained trying to hang fairy lights on our Christmas tree, and it almost sends me into hysterics.

  I face the road, deciding to focus solely on the windscreen wipers. I am unable to process anything more tonight.

  I rub a hand over my chest. Somewhere beyond the pounding palpitations, it hurts. Fact: My heart is only the size of a fist, but is capable of pumping blood through the one hundred thousand miles of vessels that cascade through my body. I know it is still doing its job. If I were prone to hyperbole, though, I could almost imagine that my heart has given up on me too.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The observation of black holes

  Suffice to say, everything
sucks. Everything sucks diseased monkey balls, on the body of a vivisected lab monkey, in the lab of a scientist plagued by chlamydia.

  If my life were following the path indicated by a dozen Hollywood films, then this would be the moment when I should be making my great, life’s-work breakthrough. I think I’m meant to be sketching the solution for the Riemann hypothesis on my windows with magic markers, unshowered and dishevelled. Sometimes I wish I were a character in a movie. Christ, I’d even settle for being a character in one of Ms Heller’s plays, safe in the knowledge that even though I am behaving absurdly, I am still following someone’s script.

  I shower, because I really don’t see the point of wallowing in my own dead skin cells. And I avoid writing on walls or windows. It doesn’t seem all that conducive to good work, and anyway, there are plenty of crisp pages in my perfectly functional notebooks. They feel like just about the only place where I can park my disquieted brain.

  He has called me on the hour, every hour, since I left him standing on that stairwell. I know this because I have spent most of Sunday working through the Vector Calculus syllabus from my university course, my heart palpitating every time the Doctor Who theme sings from my phone. Needless to say, I have not solved the Riemann hypothesis. I have made a total of three really obvious errors in my Lagrange multipliers homework, which is disturbing enough to send me back to bed for almost an hour.

  In between, I have watched two documentaries on the frogs of Costa Rica, and invented a new flavour of iced chocolate by accidentally mixing Milo with Mum’s antacid medication instead of soy milk. My stomach already felt horrible. Mylanta-Milo did not help.

  I have visited the IMDb page of every romance movie Elsie has ever given me, and created a table in my notebook listing relevant themes and plot points. It’s the only non-mathematical study I can think of that could possibly be of use. My research methodology may be flawed, but I do manage to draw some broad conclusions: that the adult women in these movies read nothing but Jane Austen, and are required to spend all their waking moments discussing their feelings. And that all resolutions must involve emotional speechifying, extended soliloquies that I am convinced no person could construct on the spot, no matter how many improv classes they’d taken.