Californium (28 page)

Van Doren is serious, and everyone agrees, and now I know Edie was right when she said it sucks to be cool. I mean, talking about
Star Wars
toys or debating whether or not the two girls in the B-52's are cuter than all four of the Go-Go's is a million miles away from cool. Just like gas station shirts and the sixteen-hundred-meter race. But whatever all this is, it's real, and it's nice, and it makes me feel like I matter.

S
ince fall, I've been depending on californium to keep the state pretty warm just like Keith said it would. And it has. I got through Thanksgiving and Christmas with long-sleeve shirts over the new band T-shirts I've been getting at gigs and record stores. My mom says she doesn't see how a couple of shirts can keep me warm enough, especially since I'm always ripping holes in them on purpose, but there's no way I'm going over to Treat's house to get my Packy jacket, and it's not like he ever does anything more than say, “Hey,” to me in English, and I say, “What's up,” and he says, “A preposition,” and we laugh, but that's it.

On rainy days my mom's at the door with my Yankees jacket, which I wear as far as Keith's house before stuffing it into my backpack, but I can't complain. It's only cold in the morning. Even on days when our front lawn is crunchy with frost, I can shove my hands into my ripped jeans and squeeze myself warm all the way to school.

It's a late winter morning like that, cold but not exactly freezing, when we get into the heat of Mr. Krueger's classroom and everyone's quiet. Keith's in the middle of a story about Sascha/Karen deciding if she's going to break up with her boyfriend for spring break so she can ditch school some days and go to the beach with him.

“That doesn't make sense,” I say. “If she has a different spring break, why would she need to do that?”

Keith doesn't answer. He's staring at the front corner of the room, which does look different somehow. Mr. Krueger isn't sitting behind his desk like he usually does until seven seconds before the bell rings, but that's not it. “Oh my God,” Keith says, and then I see it too. The periodic table chart is covered in butcher paper. Mr. Krueger is at the podium, a stack of papers in his hands. This is it.

Right after Christmas, Mr. Krueger told us we needed to get the holidays out of our heads. The periodic table test was coming soon now and we needed to know, in case we didn't already, that life doesn't take a vacation. “The elements keep doing what they do whether you got what you wanted for Christmas or not. Whether your team won or lost. Whether you got a date for the big dance or stayed home.” He tapped the chart. “Life goes on, people. So you have to as well.”

It was good that he reminded us. Me and Keith had stopped studying even a little bit on the weekends. Sometimes we had Filibuster gigs. Sometimes there were parties van Doren told us about. And there were two times Sascha/Karen broke up with her boyfriend for the weekend so Keith could come over to her
house to practice things she said any girl would want Keith to be good at and her boyfriend wouldn't do. On those weekends I'd go to some G-rated movie with my family, maybe a recital or some little show Colleen was in, and let Packy give me a lesson on making brunch if he didn't have to be up too early for his overtime Saturday shift.

So me and Keith started going to the public library again most days right after school to get our homework done and get ready for the test. You might not think Keith would still want to do that, but if all his homework is done when he gets home, his mom lets him talk if Sascha/Karen calls, which isn't all that often, but when she does call, it's these two-hour conversations where Keith mostly just listens.

When Mr. Krueger hands out the test seven seconds before the bell rings, it's just like he promised: a blank periodic table and that's it. “Show me what you know,” he says.

The thing about a big test is even if you know it's coming, you don't actually know how it's going to go or what exactly you'll do until you're doing it. I number all the boxes first, 1 to 103. It's easy. The top left one is 1, top right is 2, then back to the left for 3 and on like that until you get to 57. Somehow, 57 is magical and starts the lanthanide series, the separate table at the bottom of the sheet. The first row there goes 57 through 71; then you run out of room and have to pop back up to the regular table for 72.

I fill in the easy stuff next—hydrogen and helium, ones like that. The periodic table on my desk is looking like the real one now even if a lot of things are still missing. There are people around me
whose pencils aren't scratching and clicking anymore, but I knew I'd get to this moment where the easy stuff was done and I'd have to let things get a little weird, trust that my instincts will get it right.

I can remember 19 on the chart is
K
because in baseball scoring you make a
K
when a guy strikes out and the record for strikeouts in a game is 19. And if 19 is
K,
18 is
Ar
so it can spell out
ArK.
And Noah needed a forest of trees to build his ark and a famous forest is the Argonne, and so 18 is argon. It's right; I know it is. Then I remember to go back and write
potassium
under the
K
and that reminds me there's a lot of potassium in bananas and so 20 is calcium because I like to put bananas in my cereal before the milk.

I'm getting all the answers like that, the ones that make sense to me in ways our textbook never tells us. I even get californium right because of Keith, then berkelium because you always put the city right before the state.

It probably sounds crazy to anyone listening when me and Keith are talking about it later in the Bog. You might even think we liked it the way we're interrupting each other to tell different things we each did on the test the way guys talk about making a great catch or getting some girl to kiss them. Then Keith says he guesses we don't have to go to the library every day anymore and I say, “Yeah, thank God for that,” and we both get quiet.

.

In my journal later, I write about how it's weird to think I'm going to miss studying at the library every day. I know what it
is, though. Everything's changed. A couple times a week, Astrid gives me a wave or says, “Happy Wednesday,” which is nice and makes me look good in front of other freshmen, but it's not like she's waiting at my locker after school or abandoning the Senior Circle to have lunch with me in the Bog.

It's weird not having Treat around either. Keith's still mad about it, and I mean crazy angry. “He stabbed us in the back like Caesar did to whoever he did that to,” Keith says, and I say, “You mean Brutus,” because we just read that in my English class too. Keith looks confused but he nods, and I know he's talking about betrayal. It's just, I feel more sad about it now than betrayed because Treat isn't a bad guy. Not really.

One time in English, right after Winter Formal, Treat passed around pictures from the dance, saying how lame it was but he had to go because he'd been voted Freshman Ice Prince or something. And there he was next to Cherise in his black boots, black pants, and black T-shirt, one of those joke ones that's just a picture of a tuxedo, no real jacket or tie. It made me smile and feel kind of happy for him. There was another picture with the whole winter court, including Astrid, which you might think would make me jealous, but that feeling didn't come until I flipped to the couples picture with Treat and Cherise squeezed next to Edie and Dylan.

Worst of all, me and Edie are just math buddies now. It's been that way all winter and into spring. She won't even walk to the staircase with me after class. There's always a poster that needs to be put up for a UN Club meeting or flyers to get at Dylan's locker, or something else super important. It doesn't stop me from wanting to walk with her, and talk to her, and look at her, but at some
point back in January I figured the least I could do, as her buddy, was stop making her come up with excuses. So I started bolting for the door every day as soon as the bell rang, even before Edie had time to gather her stuff and stand up.

.

It's a Friday in spring, just after baseball season has started, that I wait for Edie just outside the door after Algebra. She looks surprised when I step up next to her. She's headed for the stairs, so she can't make an excuse this time.

I hold up a note I've folded into a tiny square. “I need you to deliver this to someone for me.”

She takes the note without looking at me, flipping it over since there's no name on the front.

“It's for you,” I say and she nods, serious-faced, and keeps walking. “Me and Keith used to do this thing with Treat where we'd put stuff out into the air to make it honest and true. I guess I was doing that in these letters I'd been writing to my uncle even if I'd never actually—”

“Okay,” she says and slides the note down into a front pocket of her jeans. “I'll deliver it to myself after school, when I have time to read it.”

I take a breath. “Okay.”

We're at the bottom of the stairs, stopped, and I'm out of things to say.

Edie nods. “Now is the time to go,” she says, grins just a little, and steps away without looking back.

The thing about Astrid ever being my girlfriend was that it was all hypothesis, like how Mr. Krueger says cold fusion is
hypothesis: “Even though it's possible, if we're honest about it we know it's not going to happen anytime soon, if it ever happens at all.” But the stuff with Edie, it was theorem. Everything I needed to solve it was right there the whole time. So that's kind of what the note says. As Edie's math buddy, I wrote, she needs to know Dylan Long isn't the right guy for her. Not that he's a bad person, but if she's
x,
he's
x
+ 3 (because he's three years older and is going away for college next year), and that can't be solved.
He'll be living far away and busy with hard classes and maybe his fraternity or Frisbee golf or whatever else college guys do,
I wrote.
So what you need to do is solve for y. Why you should go out with someone from your own class. Why you should go out with someone who has been friends with you since day one. Why you should go out with me.

.

Saturday morning, with Packy already off for his overtime shift, I make brunch for everyone. And just after, just as I'm washing the dishes and Brendan's drying, the phone rings.

I'm all soapy hands so Brendan gets it. “Hello,” he says, stays quiet for a minute, then covers the phone and looks right at me with a dumb smile on his face. “It's a girl, and she asked for you.”

This shock of nerves runs through me so fast and so hard I feel it swirl down my arms and into my bubbly hands. I rinse off real fast and say, “Is it Edie?” as I grab a dish towel. I'm saying it more for myself than Brendan, but he uncovers the phone and says, “Is this Edie?”

I put my hand out for the phone, giving Brendan the
You just dropped an easy fly ball
look, but he nods real calm, like he's gotten the out anyway, and hands the phone over. “Yep. It's Edie.”

“Was that your brother?” she says.

“Yeah, for about five more minutes until I kill him.”

She laughs and so I do too, and then we both breathe a couple times.

“I read the note,” she finally says, and the whole world outside the phone line stops. Now it's just my ear, Edie's mouth, and whatever she might say next, which is, “It's good.”

I start wrapping my wrist in the phone cord. “Thanks.”

“It really got me thinking about a lot of stuff.”

My cheeks tingle with how nice she sounds, with what she might mean by
stuff.
Then my mom's head pokes into the kitchen from the hallway. “Brendan! If you want me to drop you off at Kyle's, let's get a move on.”

Brendan tosses his dish towel on the counter as he walks toward my mom. “Reece is talking to a girl.”

“The car,” my mom says like she didn't hear a word Brendan said, but Colleen's behind her asking if I'm talking to a girl from her class.

“Hold on a second,” I say into the phone.

My mom turns to watch Brendan and Colleen, I guess to make sure they're heading for the front door; then she turns back to me. “Lock up if you go out anywhere with . . . ,” she says, her eyebrows up, her face frozen.

“Edie. You know . . . ,” I say, all casual, raising my eyebrows too because my mom really doesn't know.

My mom smiles. “Oh yes, Edie,” she says nice and loud. “Be home for dinner.” She blows me a kiss and is gone.

“Sorry,” I say.

“That's okay,” Edie says.

“You know, Filibuster's playing tonight—”

“I can't,” she says. “That sounds really fun, but I've got a date.” The world goes quiet again, library-on-a-Friday-night quiet, but Edie breaks it quick this time. “Aren't you going to ask me what I'm doing on my date?”

“Do I want to know?”

“Solving for
y,
” she says, and I can just see her standing in her kitchen, that grin she gives only to me.

I laugh and Edie does too. “Okay.”

“Okay,” she says soft and smooth.

“Now is the time to go?” I say.

“Now is the time to go,” she says, soft and final, and we hang up.

I'm so happy I don't care there's still a mess of dishes and they're all mine. I hit it hard and happy, wash-rinse-dry-return. My head is going to all kinds of happy places—first I'm just walking Edie to the stairs after class and holding her hand; then we're sneaking in a quick kiss at the bottom of the staircase before she heads off for her next class; then we're sitting side by side on a planter in the Bog, her thigh pressed up against mine, maybe her hand on the back of my neck, sort of tickling it.

The front door whines open and I almost drop a plate. I didn't hear anything until just now, just as someone is stepping into the house. Packy comes around the corner. “Good,” he says. “You're here.” I nod because where else would I be? “Where is everybody?” Packy says, and I tell him. “Good,” he says again. He looks me up and down. I'm wearing shorts and a black TSOL T-shirt.

“What are you doing home?” I say.