Icon of the Indecisive #3 of 3 (COMPLETE)

Chapter 17

That particular Saturday would have been Introduce Robbie to My Mom Day, and I wanted it to be because I wanted to ask about the beach party, but it didn't happen. Because she had plans.

She actually had plans! That was a good thing. She didn't want to admit it, but I suspected that she was having fun. For the first time in years. She and my dad separated over five years ago, and though she eventually accepted it, she didn't exactly start enjoying life right away. Before I went to college her life was all about me, and the things she had to do for me.

I missed her, but I wanted her to have a little fun too. It took almost two years of living alone again, but I think it was finally happening.

"Who are these plans with?" I teased. I called her on a Friday night, and caught her out with friends. I could barely hear her because there was something wailing a Bon Jovi song in the background.

"Someone at work. Can you not ask so many questions first? I really don't know what to think of this yet." To my knowledge she hadn't summoned the Goddess of Love just yet, so whatever it was, she wasn't feeling so conflicted about it. And I tried not to probe the hearts of people I actually knew, if I could help it.

"I trust you," I said, laughing.

"I definitely need to meet Robbie though. He's the basketball captain, right? The guy you were talking about last year?"

"No, Mom, that guy's just a friend."

"Oh, that's weird. Anyway—the house is a mess, so let me just take him out for pizza or something. I'll let you know when. Is he okay with that?"

"He'll follow you anywhere, Mom."

So that was how I got that Saturday just for Robbie and me, and we did something I had never done before.

I did math with a boy.

* * *

"Four out of five."

"Wait—what did I get wrong?"

"Number three. It should be 300.12 failures per million hours."

"No it's not. Give me that."

"I'm just telling you what's on the answer key."

"It's wrong."

"No, it's right."

We both reached for our phones and fired up our calculators. And then Robbie paused to look at his notes. "I messed up when I turned the page over."

"Yes you did."

Robbie laughed and uncapped his pen, starting over with the problem. "Why aren't you in applied math then?"

"I'm not good at it, but thanks for trying to flatter me."

"You're better than some of my classmates."

"We have stat in Psych. Some problems look familiar to me, that's all."

"Do you underestimate your abilities a lot?"

It was a joke, and it got him a poke in the rib. "I don't think I like calculating failure rates anyway."

"You won't have to do it if you're going to be a psychologist, that's true."

"Yeah, but three hundred failures per million hours? That's a lot of failures."

"It's not bad. Nothing ever runs twenty-four-seven for over a hundred years anyway."

"It's just weird that if this thing actually could be capable of running around the clock for that long, it'll still fail three hundred times. That's a lot."