Double Digit

by Annabel Monaghan

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Well, that’s just a little childish. Ignoring your problems doesn’t make them go away.” Oh, yes, he did.

  The word childish echoed in my ears. I’ll admit now that maybe bringing up pimples in this situation wasn’t the quickest path to getting the romance back on track. I’ll have to check with Cosmo on that one. But childish? Really?

  “I’m not ignoring a problem. The problem is solved. Jonas Furnis’s guys are caught; they’re gone. The pimple has resolved itself. Why am I going to keep thinking about it? I’m not going to keep buying Clearasil when it’s been gone for three months!” I knew I had to get off the pimple thing, but when an analogy works it’s hard to let go of it. And then I sat up to face him, hoping I’d seem more sane. “I just want to move on. I don’t want to fight the bad guys or be on the run. I just want to be here, doing what I’m doing. And be with you, of course.”

  He brushed my hair from my face. “I feel like I can’t leave. Like I should quit my job and be your bodyguard.”

  “Sounds good to me.” There was an opening where I thought I could get away with kissing him. But he just shook his head.

  “That’s the problem—I feel like I could do that. I could move up here and build some sort of a force field around you so that you could stay safe and become who you need to become. But I’ve already quit one job to be with you. I’m scared I’m going to do it again.” He put my hair behind my ear but stared at my shoulder. “You know how you’re always worried about being that girl? Well, I’m that guy. It’s insane.”

  “What if who I’m supposed to become is just your girlfriend?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why?”

  “It terrifies me. That’s not who you are.”

  “How about I decide who I am?”

  “I’m sorry, I know. I just feel like we’re a little out of control.” When he finally looked at me, he said, “Do you ever feel like we’d both be a lot better off if we just put this whole thing on hold?”

  No. Never. Not even one time for one second. “Sometimes.”

  “I mean, think of all the things you are going to miss by having me here or you being in New York.”

  None, no things. I have just calculated a list of exactly zero-point-zero things that I am going to miss. “Sure, but we can figure it out, right? The balance. Like we talked about. When I’m here, I’ll be here; and when I’m with you . . .”

  I’ve had this dream a bunch of times where I’m driving a car and I’m trying to steer it straight, but it keeps turning into a tree or toward a cliff or something. I wake up feeling exactly like I felt in this moment. My voice was threatening to crack and my mind was racing, searching for the Rewind or at least the Pause button. We sat in the most gruesome silence. I stayed sitting, legs crossed to make a little barrier around me so that he wouldn’t be able to feel how fast my heart was beating.

  Finally, he sat up to face me, taking both of my hands in his. “There is no balance. When I am with you, I am completely off balance. It’s all about you and us, and I completely lose track of myself. I don’t know how I’m going to really start my career when my mind is so split. And you . . . this place is your dream come true, and you only get it for four years. To hear you saying maybe you just want to be my girlfriend . . . I can’t let that happen to you.” He wiped the tear that I’d been ignoring off of my cheek.

  What’s happening? Are you breaking up with me?

  “It’s not breaking up.” Even my internal monologue was turning on me.

  “An hour ago you loved me.”

  “And an hour from now I’ll still love you. But we’re going to give up too much of ourselves for this. Maybe when we’re . . .”

  “I think you should go.”

  “No, no. Let’s talk about this. I don’t want you to think I’m not . . .”

  “I’m asking you to leave right now.” The big tears—the ones that come with sobs and snot and puffy eyes—they were close. I needed him out of there. Now.

  He picked up his bag, the one without the toga, and leaned over to kiss me on the forehead. “I don’t think you understand how I . . .”

  “Please go.” As soon as the door closed behind him, the tears came in force.

  TODAY IS THE TOMORROW YOU WORRIED ABOUT YESTERDAY

  AT THE BEGINNING OF OCTOBER, I went to a lecture about how evaporative cooling is the primary mechanism responsible for the stabilizing effects observed for gas phase additives. Maybe not the most romantic topic in the world, but the idea of cooling and stabilizing made me think of John. I guess everything did. It seemed to me that the initial intensity of a relationship has its place, like the extra power a jet engine needs to get off the ground. If we could have hung on until we hit a cruising altitude, the cooling off would have been a welcome break. If cooled gases result in structural stability, maybe it would have been the same for us.

  It had not been one of those long and messy breakups. The morning after he left, he called me at eight. I was sound asleep, having been up most of the night.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “This wasn’t how this weekend was supposed to go.”

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t think you understand how much I love you.”

  “Here’s what I understand.” The cobwebs were clearing from my head, and my eyes stung from all the crying. “You love me so much that you can’t be with me. It’s not me; it’s you. You need your space for your career. I’ve turned into a clingy freak. I get it. Here’s what I need you to understand. You broke my heart. Again. And I’m going to get over it. But not if you keep calling me to see if I’m okay. You’ve made sure I’m not okay. Got it?”

  “You sound really angry.” Thanks, Dr. Phil.

  “I am. Please don’t call me back.” And I hung up because I’m super tough. Well, I hung up feeling kind of tough because I’d been practicing that little speech all night. Then I just started crying again.

  I’d done the self-indulgent breakup thing before. Same guy, same feeling. And the thought of wasting another six weeks crying, shoveling ice cream down my throat, and reciting the lines to The Notebook made me angrier than I already was. I was in my own personal heaven, with my whole life ahead of me, and I wasn’t going to let John ruin it with his “We’re too out of control” and “Maybe we need some time” garbage.

  At least that was my mantra during daylight hours. At night it was harder. I let myself cry when I thought it would make me feel better. I’d replay that last scene in my head, sure it was the pimple talk that sealed my fate. And I’d type endless texts that I’d never send. Some frequent repeats were:

  Was this whole thing a joke?

  Can I come see you this weekend?

  Do you ever think about me?

  I love you

  I hate you

  Can we talk?

  Honestly, I never sent them. Because I’m disciplined like that.

  Other things that made me think of John: all music that had played on the radio that summer, steak, any variety of tree, the sound of a foreign language, men in suits. I was careful to shy away from all of these triggers, but some things were impossible to avoid. Even the back of my hand made me think of what the back of my hand used to look like when he held it. How are you supposed to avoid seeing your hands?

  But I jumped into my classes and joined a mathematics methods club. It’s called the Roaming Numerals because they travel around New England competing in math competitions. It’s awesome. Clarke was trying to get me to join the Hackers Alliance, tempting me with access to the inaccessible and free pizza.

  On the first weekend that I would have been in New York with John, I heard Professor Halsey speak for the first time. It was an overview of his research in nanotechnology, which promised to change everything about the way we fuel our homes, grow our food, and perform brain surgery. His work looks at changing things on a nano level, by altering matter that is a
nanometer in size. He said this: “A nanometer is how long your fingernail grows in a second.” I almost passed out. I mean, a piece of regular computer paper is 100,000 nanometers thick. How can you change something so small? And then how can the result of changing something on that level be so huge? I’ve heard people on TV describe the moment their lives changed—a near-death experience, a new baby, a great idea, love at first sight. I was surprised to find out that mine would be at an under-attended lecture by an eighty-year-old man in a chemistry lab basement. (And it was also not lost on me that I would have missed this if I’d gone to see John in New York.)

  Halsey was not charismatic or even engaging, but his research was so brilliantly thought out and his findings so clearly groundbreaking that I felt like he was unlocking a vortex of information that would change science forever. I ran home and downloaded every single one of his published research papers and read until three a.m. They were pure poetry. I had a thousand questions and even more ideas. There was no doubt in my mind that his work was my future. I knew that I could help him with his research and fantasized that I could take it to the next level. Professor Halsey’s destiny was tied to mine; I just had to meet him.

  On Monday morning I marched over to his office to offer my services. Sitting behind a desk as gatekeeper to his office was Bass. How many jobs does this guy have? “Sorry, Digit, Professor Halsey doesn’t employ freshmen. I started this gig last year as a sophomore and had to beg for it.”

  I wanted to say, Yeah, but you’re wearing a T-shirt that says ON THE OTHER HAND, YOU HAVE DIFFERENT FINGERS, and while I want to tell you that I have a bumper sticker that says that on my wall at home, and it honestly is one of my very favorites, I really should mention that I am a thousand times more qualified for this job than you are. Instead I said, “I know I’m a freshman, but I’m . . . well, I have this . . .” I had to stop myself. I realized that at MIT I wasn’t that different from anybody else. Ah, the irony! How long had I spent trying to wrap my head around my differentness? And now that I had, I wasn’t so different at all. You couldn’t throw a paper airplane without hitting a genius around here.

  I tried a more direct approach. “I’d really like to talk to him for a second if he’s free. I stayed up all night.”

  “He’s not here, and he’s never free. But I’ll tell him you say hi.”

  Rewind and replay this scene every single day that week. I wrote letters and sent my resumé and high school transcripts. I gave him an essay expressing my thoughts on my favorite one of his research papers. No luck. On Friday Bass asked me to kindly stop calling. And loitering.

  So, instead, I took a part-time job working for Ernest Marcello, a math professor who was trying to use mathematical algorithms to predict the economic impact of tripling the use of nuclear power, adjusted for the human health risks. I applied for the job and was hired to start immediately, and it took me two weeks to realize why no one else wanted it. The research was completely bogus, the professor was insane, and the entire project seemed intended to justify his presence on campus while he wrote a spy novel in his spare time. But it gave me access to a big chunk of the library of ongoing scientific research at MIT, so I stuck with it.

  My parents and Danny flew in for parents’ weekend in mid-October. Tiki’s parents couldn’t come because her great- grandmother was in the hospital, so she went down to Virginia instead. We had a family dinner in Cambridge that first night, and I’m pretty sure I never stopped talking. My dad was happier than I’d ever seen him, like some lifelong dream was finally materializing before his eyes. My mom fussed over my hair (roots!), my room, and the below-seventy-degrees weather.

  My dad kept his arm around me for the whole walk back to the Marriott, forcing me to walk as slowly as he wanted me to. “You’re okay?”

  “I like to think so.”

  “I mean about the John thing. You’re really over it? I was concerned that the breakup would ruin your freshman year.”

  The great thing about MIT was that no one really knew John, and no one ever asked about him. Over time I was able to sort of shut him out of my mind because there was so much else going on. But my dad’s overall dadness cracked me a bit, and it felt good to start crying. We walked very slowly.

  “It’s fine. I mean obviously not fine. But he’s right that maybe it was too intense, and that it’s hard to be in college having a relationship with someone who’s not. I just can’t believe we’d go from being that close to not even talking at all. He’s just totally dropped out of my life.”

  “But aren’t you the one who told him not to contact you?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Mr. Bennett called. He was very upset, wanted to know what his idiot son had done this time, to quote.” See, my dad could totally do that, without relying on air quotes.

  “He called me childish. But I was a little hard on him.”

  “I can imagine. Poor guy.”

  “Why do I feel like you’re on his side?”

  “I’m always on your side. You know that. It’s just that I kind of feel like I owe him.”

  “What? For saving my life? Seriously? Are we going to keep giving him points for that? If I just send him a thank-you note, can we call it even?”

  Dad laughed and tightened his grip around my shoulder. “Sure, it’s nice that he saved your life. But I feel like I owe him for loving you in the right way.” I didn’t say anything because I was pretty sure I was going to start to cry again. “I always dreaded meeting your first boyfriend. I wondered who would ever be good enough for my daughter. And this summer I was sitting in the yard with John, and he started telling me how worried he was about ruining your time at MIT. He said he always wanted to be adding something to your life and was afraid he’d be taking something away from you in college. I didn’t have an answer for him, but I thought to myself: This must be what ‘good enough for my daughter’ looks like.”

  “Boy, is this not helping.”

  “I know. But I’m not sure it’s fair for you to be acting like he ended it.”

  Sometimes I’m not so crazy about people being honest with me. “I miss him so much, Dad.”

  Dad squeezed my shoulder. “Life is long, sweetheart. You never know. In the meantime, you have all this freedom so that you can make the most of your time here.”

  “Isn’t freedom just another word for nothing left to lose?” I was quoting one of his favorite old songs.

  “Oh, you’ve got a lot left to lose, sweetheart.”

  Danny and I left my parents at the Marriott and went back to my dorm.

  “How many people die from hypothermia here every year?” Danny was rubbing his hands together and banging on the radiator, a trick to spontaneously produce heat that he’d seen in a movie.

  “I know, right? It’s fifty degrees, and I feel like I’ll never get warm again. January’s going to be ugly.”

  Danny walked around my room, picking up everything in his path and examining it. “I still can’t believe you’re in college. And that you live so far away. I’m assuming you like it because you didn’t shut up at dinner.”

  Could he possibly be trying to tell me he missed me? I hadn’t really thought about him alone in the house with Mom and Dad, table for three every night. “I definitely miss you guys, but it’s been pretty amazing being here. I mean, it’s how I imagine coming out is for gay people: it’s like I am finally allowed to talk about all this stuff that’s been floating around in my head all these years. And there’s so much stuff I don’t know that I sometimes can’t sleep just thinking about it.”

  Danny was smiling. “Nerd sanctuary. Awesome.” He ran his finger over Tiki’s Adam Ranks poster. “You keep a kidnapped guy’s artwork just to remind you of the good old days?”

  Uh, yeah, hello, other subject that keeps me up at night. “No, and I am thinking I may accidentally destroy that poster.”

  Danny was shaking his head but still staring at the poster. “Don’t destroy it. This 3-D overlay
thing he does—it looks like it’s alive.”

  Danny and I decided to go for a walk around campus, figuring it was probably just as cold outside as it was in my room. I took him around the Brain and Cognitive Science building and past the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. I showed him where Professor Halsey’s office was. I told him about my dream job and how I knew that it was just a matter of time and patient stalking before it was mine.

  “Digit, you are one nutty squirrel.” He pulled off my hat and messed up my hair like he used to do when I was seven. Ahead of us, we saw a couple kissing on a bench, feverishly and without any regard for the dropping temperature. Danny whispered to me, “Get a room. And an electric blanket.” I started to laugh, but then saw that it was Howard. And that blonde he was with was not, I repeat not, Tiki.

  I didn’t say anything to Danny, just shuffled him ahead and looped back around to my dorm. I took his arm to steady myself. My first reaction was rage. I felt as if my hair could have spontaneously turned red and stood straight up on its own. Then I felt sad, so sad and disappointed for Tiki, who was completely committed to their relationship and had gone to MIT just to be with him. And then panic. I couldn’t tell her. There was no way that the words would come out of my mouth, no way. I was not going to be the messenger, the one to break her heart with an offhanded Guess what I saw on my walk this weekend? No way.

  Looking back, which I’m really going to have to start doing a lot less of, telling Tiki the truth about Howard would have been a lot easier than the mess I got into for keeping my mouth shut. And by “mess,” I mean stuff like assault, abduction, and felony treason. You know, a mess.

  I BRAKE FOR HACKERS

  I LOGGED EXACTLY NINETY MINUTES AT THE Copley Place mall with my mom, less than I’d promised but more than she expected. I got an army green midweight jacket, a brown sweater (my choice), and a gray sweater with navy blue cuffs (her choice). I swear sweaters are getting more complicated every year.