“Well, louder than I need, anyway.”
“Sorry,” he whispers, just as loudly. “Now she’s drawing lines from the middle to the… circle part… I don’t know how to tell you where the lines are going… They’re like spokes on a bike tire.”
“Wheel.”
“What?”
“On a wheel, not a tire. Never mind. Just think of a clock. Where are the lines going?”
“Huh?”
“Like, twelve o’clock, three o’clock?”
“Oh yeah. Twelve, one, two, three… like all the numbers, pretty much. Wait, more than twelve… like…” He mumbles some, then, “Fifteen or sixteen.”
“So… she’s drawing a unit circle?”
“What’s that? She’s putting those numbers around the outside like she did last week, like square root of two and stuff. Is that right?”
I resist the urge to remind him that I can’t verify anything he’s describing. “Sounds right to me,” I whisper, even quieter than last time to see if I can bring his voice down.
“Why’s it called that?” he asks, a bit louder, like he’s trying to bring my voice up.
“Well, it’s just a circle with a radius of one. It doesn’t matter whether it’s one inch or one mile, it’s just one whatever unit, so they call it a unit circle.”
“Yeah but so what?”
“Well, she’s writing angles on it, right? And how long the lines are? It’s just like in geometry with those special triangles, like a 45-45-90 triangle has a hypotenuse that’s the length of a side times the square root of two. Except if the radius of the circle was two, all those numbers would need a two in front of them but that’s not the point. It’s like reducing a fraction; you divide out the common factors and you’re left with… well, a unit circle.”
“Okaaay… but so what? What’s it for?”
At that moment I realize the room is dead quiet. No talking, no squeaking.
“That’s probably what she’s about to tell us,” I whisper.
“Correct on all counts, Parker,” Ms. McClain says. “Have you taken any trigonometry before?”
“No. When Molly and I do homework we look ahead to see what’s coming. It makes it easier to follow what’s going on in class.”
“That’s something you all should be doing,” she says. “Especially those of you who can see the board but can’t seem to keep your eyes open this early.”
Clunk shuffle clatter. “Hey!” Laughter.
I guess she kicked some guy’s chair to wake him up—I don’t know the voice—there are lots of voices I don’t know yet.
Luckily what follows is twenty minutes of talking without much writing on the board. Then she passes out worksheets for us to collaborate on and then it’s D.B. reading to me. He’s better at describing triangles than circles: “It has a little square in the corner, and the small side is a one, and the slanty side is a two, and the angle is between the little side and the slanty side, and they want to know what the sine is…” I pretty much know the answers right away, but he doesn’t, so I walk him through it all. I get him to say sine instead of sin but I can’t get him to say hypotenuse at all. I think he’s afraid it conflicts with his masculinity, like saying chartreuse or armoire.
We finish almost at the same moment the bell rings.
“Hey, Parker?” he says while we pack up. He’s actually whispering now. “Thanks for helping me, okay?”
Hearing this makes me flush a bit. Like I’ve done something wrong. Have I?
“Thanks for helping me,” I say. “Um, your name’s Stockley, right?”
“Yeah. I guess you heard someone else call me that, huh?”
I feel a twinge. He said it in a normal voice so I can’t tell if it’s a dig from our first conversation or a coincidence.
“Ms. McClain, yeah.”
“My name’s Kent Stockley but people just call me Stockley, I guess ’cause of football and I wear my jersey a lot. But you can call me D.B.”
“But it means…” I’m not sure where to go with this.
“Nah, we all call each other douchebag all the time, me and Scott and Oscar and… well, everybody. But I like D.B. better.”
“Okay. Then I guess it’s only fair that you can call me P.G.”
“Does anyone else call you that?”
“Just Faith.”
“Faith… Faith Beaumont?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow, okay, cool. Hey, we should hang out sometime.”
“Oh, I don’t hang out with Faith.”
“Yeah, well… I… okay, see you tomorrow.”
I can’t tell if that was an actual goodbye, as in he’s walking away, or not.
“Okay, later,” I say.
It occurs to me that he maybe was asking to hang out with me, not with me to get to Faith. I feel myself frowning and relax my face. I’m used to people wanting Faith, not me, which suits me fine, but I don’t like it when I misunderstand anything.
“D.B.?” I say.
No answer.
Then Scott says, “He’s gone.”
I concentrate on closing up my bag. I’m afraid that even saying “Okay” would open a conversation.