Eventually, I find myself sitting alone in the kitchen with a microwaved slice of apple pie, reading an article on my phone about the latest failed Riemann hypothesis proof. This time, it’s a German mathematician with giant sideburns, who has spent the last seven years of his life working on something that was immediately proven to be a waste of time.
I feel the last of my energy fade. My eyes fall on Dad’s souvenir fridge magnets, little reminders of seemingly every place we have been. Some of our holidays have been okay – like our trip to the Sydney Observatory, and that time we went to Rottnest Island and Toby coaxed a baby quokka right up to my hand. But a lot of our holidays have been unmemorable, and some unequivocally disastrous, like that time we went to Cairns with Auntie Patricia and her family, and everyone came down with gastro.
I push away my pie and turn off my phone. I briefly consider my buoyant mood from earlier in the day, and its possible, probable source. And then I quickly relegate both to the far archives of my brain.
I know there is an axiom in experimental mathematics – out of everything you try, most things don’t work.
But how useful would it be to know, before you set out on a journey, if the destination was going to be worth the effort?
CHAPTER EIGHT
The eccentric orbits of binary stars
I sleep badly, jerking awake whenever I start to drift, my thoughts becoming more erratic as the house settles into silence. Needless to say, I feel like balls the next morning. My skin is a sallow shade of day-old coffee, the blue circles under my eyes evidence of a night spent staring at the ticking hands of my clock.
I do manage to make one decision, though. Whatever faltering social experiment I have been conducting needs to stop, immediately. I have enough uncertainty in my life. There is no room for another ambiguous variable.
Of course, this resolution is predicated on said ambiguous variable behaving in a logical manner. The limited data I’ve gathered to date should have been evidence enough that this wouldn’t be the case.
Because on Wednesday, as I’m deflecting Elsie’s probing questions while struggling to keep my eyes open in Biology class, Mr Grayson’s vintage movie projector at the back of the room starts to whirl. It floods the dreary lab with flickering light – and then begins broadcasting a Doctor Who Christmas special. It’s the really great one where David Tennant and the TARDIS materialise on the space-liner Titanic. The projector is shoved on top of the grimy shelves at the rear of the lab, and as far as anyone knew, was for decoration only. It’s still covered in a thick layer of dust and doesn’t look like it’s been touched, and it’s not connected to a power source that anyone can see. No-one can figure out how it is working. David Tennant’s pretty face bounces among the projected stars, smiling at me through the dust motes. Mr Grayson has a bit of a meltdown when he can’t make it stop, eventually yanking the safety switch and cutting the electricity to the entire wing. It doesn’t help. Through the darkness, the Doctor continues grinning at me for another thirty seconds before fading into the ether.
Joshua vanishes from the lab before I can catch his eye.
I hold the pieces of this incidence in my head, but shuffling them around and evaluating them in varying orders does not help it make sense. What’s even more puzzling? When I do bump into Joshua in the hallway near the water fountains, our brief exchange somehow segues to the relative merits of cheese sandwiches, with or without Vegemite (Fact: Joshua does not like Vegemite), and NASA’s latest theory on the bright spots of Ceres.
On Thursday in Physics, I open my pencil case to discover that all of my pens have been capped with tiny felt fez hats, tassels and all. It’s unbelievably useless, but it makes me involuntarily laugh out loud. Mrs Angstrom glances up in alarm, presumably at the foreign sound coming from my desk. She asks me if I am feeling okay, and threatens to send me to the sick bay.
I start catching Joshua in these odd fleeting moments, snatched conversations filled with the strangest small talk, irrelevant, but somehow never dull. I see him for a couple of minutes at the lockers before Chemistry class, and bump into him in the hallway a few times between bells. I notice that Joshua rarely seems in much of a hurry to get to class, and that he’s never without his battered notepad and a novel, but only intermittently carries actual school books. Twice after school I clock him perched on the damp park bench near the main gates, and even though I need to catch my bus, my feet linger there for just a few extra minutes, always curious to see what direction our conversations will take.
Like a nebulous element in the atmosphere that has suddenly become perceptible, there he is. In the background in Biology, frowning as Damien waves something on his phone at him; disappearing behind the Humanities building as Elsie and I hurry across the wet grounds to lunch; hunched in his long jacket and tweed cap as he treks through the carpark, heading who knows where. Whenever I turn around, it feels like he’s hovering just on the edge of my vision, long hair covering most of his expression, half-smile always in place.
I’m not sure I want to deal with any more surprises. But part of me continues to look over my shoulder. Perhaps I’d just forgotten what it’s like to walk these corridors with any sense of … anticipation? At least, that’s my reasoning for why my eyes are constantly scanning the space around me.
Friday lunch, and I’m waiting for Elsie near the Careers office. For someone with a solid ten-year plan, my best friend’s sessions with the careers advisor are a mystery to me. I have no idea what she finds so useful amid the motivational posters of soaring eagles and baskets of cats. Elsie doesn’t have anything in her future to stress about. I said as much to her on our way to homeroom this morning, but I’m not sure she appreciated it. In fact – judging from the stiff set of her shoulders and her one-word responses to my questions – I’m guessing she was a bit annoyed with me. I’ve racked my brain, but I still can’t figure out why. And when I mentioned it to Joshua in the thirty seconds we had between bells, his face became kind of odd and scrunchy, and he rushed off down the corridor, leaving his Legal folder balanced on the water fountain.