Solving for Ex

Chapter 7

Chapter Seven

all favourable to tenderness and sentiment

For the next few weeks I sat in Mathletes practice, but I wasn’t really there. Solving equations and problems was so soothing that it was like a drug to me, and sometimes I used it that way. I could handle the drills during the Mathletes practices themselves. Sofia spent them flirting with Brendan the entire time, dragging her flower-perfume cloud through the room, asking questions that, judging by the speed with which she scribbled down the answers to the problems on the written practice, she damn well knew the answers to herself. I could barely stand it.

Brendan had put me to the task of doing drills at the boards with the underclassmen while he floated around working on individual writtens with the veteran members of the team, who didn’t need that kind of practice anymore. This was good for two reasons: One, it kept me too busy to watch Brendan standing so close to Sofia for an entire ninety-minute practice, and two, it gave me a chance to show off my mathematical prowess. In my best daydreams, Brendan saw me working out a complicated calculus problem or geometry proof, dragged me home after practice, and pulled me down onto his bed with him, recounting highlights from my performance during our own private one.

Now, however, my focus was in a different place. Don’t freak the hell out and either scream at Sofia or sink back into depressionland. Or both. My dry-erase marker squeaked against the whiteboard as I jotted down the main steps in my strategy for finding area with a Riemann sum. “Guys, we’re finding area using a series of rectangles, which is theoretically infinite in this case, right?” I waited for most of the underclassmen to look like they got it. “Okay. So we’re actually using the revised formula for area, length times height. The limit as it approaches infinity of the sum of i equals one to n of f of xi times delta x. So n stands for…?”

“The number of rectangles,” everyone answered.

I beamed. “Good. Good, you guys. And then, the xi will be equal to…”

“A plus i delta x,” a kid named Mohinder answered immediately.

“Okay,” I said. “Yes. Excellent.”

Brendan looked over at me. I turned and gave him a little thumbs-up, and he smiled. And for a moment, the math centered me, and gave my mind somewhere else to focusbesides on Brendan and Sofia and the particular chemistry that everyone could see between them.

It worked outside of practice, too. Each step of a problem was one more thing I could control. See Sofia walking in the hall, dream up a proof to solve. See Brendan smile and hug her, state the givens. Watch her laugh and touch his arm, state the theorem. For every five seconds that passed, work another step. If I got as far as solving it, duck into the bathroom and take a deep breath. And come up with something more difficult for next time.

So help me God, if they ever kissed, in front of everyone, I might end up solving the freaking Hodge Conjecture. At least then the Millennium Prize people would give me a million bucks and I could take a nice, long vacation.

Too bad solving those damn problems didn’t get me any steps closer to solving my love life. Every day that Brendan got cozier with Sofia was a day he stepped further away from me, and left me dangling at the edge of the black hole of depression that he’d been the one to drag me out of in the first place.

Brendan was my lifeline, and I had no idea how I’d handle things if I lost him.

By five weeks into the year, we’d whittled down the twenty kids interested in being Mathletes to the eight we’d need to compete in regionals with quizzes, drills, and the general pain in the ass that was twice-weekly practice.. Even if it was kind of a big deal at our school, Mathletes wasn’t big enough anywhere else to warrant an invitational competition, and so we’d had the AP Calc teacher come in and proctor our test for us, and that was that.