by Aubrey Rose
He had not dared to hope that Valentina would make it this far on the test. He thrilled to know that her mind was as top-rate as any of the other students there. He interviewed the other two boys in succession, leaving her for the end. Neither of the two other boys impressed him as much as Mark had. The red-haired one couldn’t explain his process except to repeat the particular steps he had taken, and Eliot needed someone who would be able to understand the broader strokes of the field he worked in. The same issue plagued the other student, who got frustrated while explaining his missteps on one of the proofs and clammed up completely when asked to describe his overall process of thought. No, he needed someone able to acknowledge their mistakes, someone who could talk him through their work. He hoped Valentina would be that person. If not, well, at least he had one candidate who could fill the spot.
Walking back down to the auditorium, Eliot felt his step grow lighter. She would do well, he knew it. She was a brilliant mathematician if she had gotten this far, and he already knew her temperament suited the internship. He walked into the auditorium filled with hope.
“Valentina—”
Her seat was empty. Eliot’s mouth stopped half-open. His thoughts turned slow, fuzzed.
“Valentina?”
There was only a note on the desk in the front of the room. He read it and crumpled the page in his hand. He looked out, as though expecting her to materialize from nothing into the seat where previously she had been sitting.
Eliot shoved the note into his pocket. He would not let her disappear so easily.
Fate told me I wasn’t a Disney princess, and I agreed. When the other girls at school wanted to play in imaginary royal palaces built out of cardboard and imagination, I went along. But I was never the princess. I was the funny sidekick lobster that helped the princess get the prince. What I never saw in myself—what nobody ever saw in me—was the slim grace of the hand that rests the tiara on her brow.
Instead, I looked to the older legends, to the stories my mother told me about the goddesses: their vengeances, their fury.
Me, Cinderella? A dainty, feminine orchid, destined to be plucked? No. I was Artemis, strong and intelligent and cunning.
Of Artemis,—her bow, with points drawn back,
A golden hue on her white rounded breast
Reflecting, while the arrow’s ample barb
Gleams o’er her hand, and at his heart is aim’d.
Nobody would come looking for me if I ran away, I thought.
I was wrong.
Princes don’t always go for the ones in glass slippers, it seems, and Eliot already had a hold on my heart that I could not escape from, no matter how fast or how far I ran.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know her name.”
Patterson’s brows sloped deeply into the wrinkled skin above his nose. He shook his head at Eliot, who paced across the oak floors of his office in vain.
“You have to pick a winner. We have to announce a winner. Today.”
“I have picked,” Eliot insisted.
“There is no Valentina Alastair!” Patterson looked at Eliot like he was a crazy person. Who knows, perhaps the man was right. Perhaps Eliot was crazy. But if there was one thing he knew, it was that Valentina was real, even if her name wasn’t really hers. And he wasn’t about to tell Patterson that his intended winner had turned tail and fled. It irritated him that the tablet system designed to preserve anonymity had backfired on him so miserably.
“She must have given the wrong name.”
“Then she must not want the prize. Pick another winner.”
“There isn’t another.” Even as he said this, Eliot knew the student he would pick if Valentina failed to materialize. Patterson sighed, crossing his arms and leaning back onto his desk.
Damn her! Why did she force him to chase after her? He felt ridiculous. He felt—
He felt as he had when he spoke to Clare for the first time, when she told him that her boyfriend was on his way to pick her up. He had persisted despite his mind telling him that he would surely fail, and eventually he won her over. Now, he felt the same stirrings of desire, the same desperate, ridiculous pangs of longing that made him rush headlong into foolishness.
“We can choose another for you, then. The Joseph kid. You mentioned him, and it would be beneficial for your status at the university...”
“Let me find her.” Eliot’s mouth set in a hard line. “Email the student list—”
“Dr. Herceg!” Patterson sounded incredulous. “Do you expect me to send out a missing persons alert for the winner of the most prestigious prize in the department?”
“Why not?”
“If you knew the kind of outrage that this would provoke—”
“Please!” Eliot knew he had reached the thin edge of Patterson’s tolerance, but he could not stop a last brutal effort. “Let me find her.”
“Then find her,” Patterson said. “Today. If I have not received an answer from you in the next two hours, I’m naming Mark Joseph the winner.”
“This is my internship—”
“Then stop acting like a fool! Eliot, I’ve tried to keep you here despite everything, but this is too much. I promise that the department will re-evaluate your fellowship.”
Eliot cast his eyes around the room. Truly, he must sound like a madman. Although every cell in Eliot’s body rejected it, he knew that Patterson had a point. Still, he needed to do everything he possibly could to find Valentina.
“Just one email—”
“No!” Patterson snapped down on the word as though cutting it off with his teeth. “You have until I leave campus tonight. I’ll be awaiting your reply.”
Eliot left the office, his shoulders slumped. Valentina—whatever her name actually was— had left him nothing with which to pursue her. She might well be a ghost. He had nothing of hers but her note—
Yes. Her note. He dug into his pocket and brought out the crumpled paper, running his fingertips over the lines. He stopped in his tracks and turned around, his eyes lifting back up to Patterson’s door. The department chair had stepped out into the hall and walked down the other corridor, away from Eliot.
Eliot stole a quick glance down the hallway, pretending to study the student research posters on the walls. When Patterson turned the far corner, he snuck back to the office and slipped into the doorway, crossing over to where Patterson had been sitting. He picked up the pile of homework sitting on the corner of the desk marked “juniors.”
He would find Valentina in here, if she existed.
Eliot hurried up the stairs of the library, looking for a corner to sit in peace. There was not enough time to go home from campus, and he hated driving in inclement weather anyway. He had to get this done before Patterson declared a winner. The department chair might have been bluffing, but Eliot didn’t want to chance it.
Outside the wind whipped tree branches against the large windows, the leaves slapping the glass panes as though trying to get inside from the cold. He found a long oak table to sit at and spread the papers out in front of him. Valentina’s note he took from his pocket and smoothed before putting it aside for reference.
Where to start? His first inclination was simply to dig through the pages as quickly as possible, but after turning through a few dozen assignments he realized that he was going too fast, possibly missing the right paper. And if he missed it the first time, he would have to go back through all of the pages. He sat back in his chair, his heart beating fast. There were hundreds and hundreds of papers in the pile, and most of the writing was numeric. The task seemed impossible.
No, he thought. Not impossible.
He took a deep breath and slowed himself down. He picked up Valentina’s note and studied the lettering. A slight slant to the right, a flourish on the letter y. The period and the dot over the i were not actually dots but tiny circles instead, as though she were trying to spite the mathematical description of a point. He ra
n his fingers across the paper.
Why am I doing this? Even as he asked himself the question, he felt the curl of desire rise in him. Quickly he tamped it down, ignoring the voice inside that screamed to him that she was a danger, that she had already edged into his heart. She was a capable mathematician. That was all he needed to know.
He reshuffled the papers together into one pile. How to begin logically? Of course. He began to sift through the papers, setting aside any obviously male names. That should narrow the pile down by half or so. More, even. The math department always slanted heavily male.
Minutes passed quickly as he went though the papers, the wind whistling outside of the window. It seemed that ambiguous names had come back into fashion, to his utmost irritation. Cayden, Laurie, Jax. He caught himself putting a Sam into the male pile and then reconsidered—what if it were a nickname? Slowly, carefully, he winnowed down the papers and was about to start in on selecting by handwriting type.
The lights went out. Instantly the emergency lighting system turned on, the red glow of the exit lights pointing a way toward the stairs of the library. Eliot tensed, clutching a pile of papers in one hand. He didn’t have time for this distraction.
Electric candles flickered over the tabletops of the library, and Eliot gathered a few of them to put in a circle around his papers. It would have to do. Sitting back down to his work, he began to sort through the pile again, this time separating by handwriting that slanted to the left and handwriting that slanted to the right. His eyes blurred from lack of sleep and the poor lighting, but his mind was sharply focused on the task at hand.
The pile in front of him grew smaller and smaller as he worked, and finally only one paper remained. Eliot checked and rechecked it twice, but it had to be this student. The slanting letters, the wide curves of the vowels, the slight flourishes, and the numbering he recognized from her work on the screen that morning. There was even a small circle over the i in her name. He held it up in front of him, the candles flickering light onto the pages.
Brynn Tomlin.
Eliot gathered the papers up quickly and raced down the steps of the library, almost tripping on the carpet in the darkness. He ran across the lawn and pulled open the door of the math department. The hallways here, too, glowed eerily with the emergency lighting system. Breathing heavily, he got to Patterson’s door and tried the handle before he saw the note taped to the department chair’s placard.
“Eliot,” the note read, “Electricity went off. Going home, will notify the Joseph boy about the Prize.”
Eliot slammed his hand against the door, the homework papers falling out of his grip and tumbling to the floor. Anger poured through him, a blind frustration that all of his efforts had been in vain. Shocked at the intensity of his emotion, he leaned his head against the door and willed himself to breathe slowly until the ferocity pumping through his blood ebbed.
Peace, Eliot. He folded Brynn’s paper and tucked it into his pocket along with her note. He needed sleep. The best solutions always came to him after a night of rest. This would be no exception. He knew there was a solution. He simply had to find it.
I ran all the way home and slammed the apartment door behind me, breathing hard. I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t deserve anything. I was a liar, nothing more.
“Brynn? You okay?”
Shannon peeked her head around the hallway from the couch where she had sprawled out. Tendrils of her red hair curled limply down her neck, escaping from the pins that tried valiantly to hold the mass of hair up. She had two more pins between her lips, and she took them out to speak more clearly.
“Hon, you look like you just saw a ghost! What’s wrong?”
I burst into tears, and Shannon immediately got up from the couch and came down the hall to put her arms around me.
“Brynn, hon, oh honey. What is it?” She led me to the couch where I collapsed, my head in my hands. “Was it that test?”
I shook my head, unable to speak.
“It must be bad,” she said, her warm hand rubbing my back as tears ran down my cheeks. “You never cry. Hey, hey. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
After going through almost an entire box of tissues I managed to tell her the story in between sobs.
“Oh, Brynn.” Shannon sighed. “You’re sure he helped you out on the test?”
“I don’t know what else it could have been,” I said, sniffling behind the tissue. “I didn’t know like half of the problems.”
“Then he’s an asshole.”
“Yeah.” I blew my nose and added the tissue to the growing mountain in the waste basket. “I just didn’t think he would do something like that, you know?”
“All guys are assholes. You remember that guitar player I told you about? Never called.”
“No!” I frowned in sympathy. Shannon had been so excited when she came home from that concert. “What a jerk!”
“That’s what I’m saying. The whole lot of them are just jerks and assholes. You want to watch a movie and forget about boys for a while?”
“What movie?”
“I don’t know, something with John Cusack in it?”
“You’re brilliant, Shannon, has anyone ever told you that?”
Shannon beamed at me, and it almost made me feel better. We spent the rest of the night ogling John Cusack’s sexy lips and even broke into the ice cream we had been saving for next week’s finals, completing the stereotype and loving every minute of indulgence. By the time the credits rolled across the screen the internship test seemed like a nightmare I could forget. I went to bed and found the small brass key in my pocket while taking off my jeans. I thought about throwing it in the trash, but put it on the side table instead, the heavy little key clinking on the wood. Maybe I would go back to the midnight piano room later. Much later.
The next morning the sun shone brightly through my window. No more snow. It was back to being California again. I was oddly disappointed.
A loud knocking at the door got me out of bed. It wasn’t even eight in the morning yet. Who could it be?
“Brynn? You got that?” Shannon yelled from her room.
“Got it!” I said, wiping the sleep out of my eyes and stumbling down the hall. In my heart, a secret piece of me hoped that I would find Eliot on the other side of the door. I brushed my hair down with my fingers and buttoned the top of my pajama shirt. If it was him, I didn’t want to look indecent. But when I threw open the door, Mark stood on the other side.
“What happened?” he said.
“Good morning to you, too, Mark,” I said. God, my morning breath was terrible.
“Where were you? Why did you leave before your interview?”
“Hold up,” I said, raising my hands. “How did you know?”
“The department chair guy, Patterson. He called my dad to tell him I had won the internship. They asked if I knew the girl who disappeared at the test. I assume he wasn’t talking about Quentin.”
Mark won. He had won. A stab of jealousy thrust itself into me, and at first I couldn’t breathe.
“Did... did you tell them?”
“No, I said I wasn’t sure,” Mark said. “I thought maybe you had a reason for leaving. I wanted to talk to you first.”
I sighed.
“Can we talk?” Mark leaned forward in the doorway, a concerned expression on his face. I couldn’t tell him no.
“Sure,” I said. “Give me a minute to get dressed.”
“One minute,” Mark said, stepping back. “And you’re not allowed to disappear.”
“Ha, very funny.”
The snow had disappeared as quickly as it had come, and with the sunshine above us it felt like spring had come back to California. I convinced Mark to go with me to a coffeeshop in the village near the university, where he bought me the biggest latte they had. I wasn’t about to chance running into Eliot again at the library cafe.
“So what happened?” he said once we had sat down with our coffee. “You always said you wanted
to go to Hungary. This was your thing.”
A fierce pinch of desire wrung its way through my heart. It aimed its line not toward Hungary, however, but directly at the figure of the eminent, the honorable Dr. Herceg. Eliot. I shook my head.
“Not anymore,” I said. “I don’t deserve it.”
“The hell you don’t. I’m going to tell the department chair it was you.”
“No!” My voice carried across the coffeeshop, and several people looked over toward us. I hunched over my latte, trying to look forgettable.
“Brynn, I heard them talking. Patterson wants to give me the Prize but that guy Herceg insisted that you’re the winner. And there’s no way I’m taking it from you. You won, fair and square.”
“No. Mark, it wasn’t fair. I met him before. Herceg. I think he rigged the test to help me win.” Now that I had to explain it, it all seemed so implausible. I expected Mark to ask why Eliot would help me, but he didn’t even blink.
“The test was anonymous, Brynn.”
“Then how did I get to the end without being dismissed? “
“By kicking ass, just like the rest of us. You’re smart, Brynn. Jesus.” He leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder reassuringly. “You did well.”
“I didn’t know half of the answers!” Tears threatened to spill down my cheeks. The second time I had cried in... god, in years.
“So? Neither did I.”
I raised my head. Mark’s face was completely serious.“What?”
“Are you kidding? That was the hardest test ever. I probably didn’t know two-thirds of the answers.”
“Quentin said he answered everything.” My lips trembled.
“Quentin is an overconfident asshole, of course he said that.” Mark leaned back in his chair. “There’s no way he got half of those right. Are you serious? That’s why you left?”
“That’s not the only reason,” I said.
“What else?” Mark waited patiently, but there was no way I was going to tell him about the piano, or about the way Eliot’s hand brushed against mine, igniting a fire inside of me.
