During our session the surprisingly polite Josh offers me a piece of gum, his pencil when I break mine in my overzealous scribbling and his notebook when I need another piece of paper, but I decline every time. My aversion to touching other people’s things, and other people for that matter, has earned me the unfair reputation of being a germaphobe, but I’m not trying to protect myself from germs. Hell, I’d lick a toilet seat if you promised me a TI-Nspire CX CAS Handheld graphing calculator with full-color display. And it’s not the algos I’m trying to avoid; those are actually almost pleasant to a math dweeb like me. No, it’s the other visions — the fractals — I try to stay away from.
The algos I get from his calculator tell me about math and math only. I mean, who (besides me) has any kind of emotional attachment to calculators? Calculators are used for one purpose and they pretty much soak up only a person’s math-related struggles. But the visions I would get from touching his phone, or pretty much anything else of his, or especially him, would tell me about all the rest of his issues. Seriously. All of them. Instead of any kind of helpful road map it’d be more of a chaotic flood of personal information, a monsoon of crap that has nothing to do with math. Stuff about his childhood, about his insecurities and fears, about his past traumas. And instead of enabling me to help him, those visions would just leave me feeling helpless.
Calculator visions are harmless drizzle compared to the tsunami I get from cell phones, with all their teenage emotional baggage. All the drama of Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat; all the texts, all the photos. When I hold someone else’s cell phone, I’m immediately dripping in cold sweat, swept away in a hurricane of things I really don’t need to know.
I need to know about the math and the math only. I’ve learned a few things in the years I’ve been doing this, often the hard way. Don’t touch. Don’t take on everyone else’s burdens. Don’t try to fix things. Just keep your damn hands to yourself.
Before we’re through with our session, I hold Josh’s calculator again to check in. The algo comes more quickly this time, as if the calculator now recognizes me as some kind of BFF. It whispers, in the weird language only I understand, that we’re heading in the right direction. We’ll have to keep meeting for a while, but I estimate that Josh will eventually lift his grade up to a solid C, which will be good enough for both him and his coach. How a C is good enough for anyone, I’m not sure I’ll ever understand. But somehow he will be satisfied by his own mediocrity, I’ll be thanked for getting him football eligible and we’ll both go on our merry way.
By the time Josh gets up to leave, his phone-checking detachment is nearly gone. I’m not exactly a warm-and-fuzzy girl, but Josh has grown comfortable enough to let down his cool-guy vibe a smidge.
“So. You and trig got a thing, huh,” he says, more a statement than a question. I don’t speak Teen as well as most of my peers, but I’m smart enough to figure out that he’s complimenting me, and a compliment about math is always enough to make me blush a little.
“Trig. Calculus.” I shrug. “I’m kind of an all-around math slut.”
He laughs and nods. “That’s cool.”
I’m sure I don’t need to explain how very uncool having a thing with trig is, but I am flattered anyway. I snap his book closed and slide it toward him across the table.
He hesitates to take it and when I glance up to see why, I find him studying me more closely than he has in the entire half hour we’ve been together. I shift uncomfortably under his gaze, unfamiliar with this level of male scrutiny.
“You know, you’re actually pretty cute in, like” — he pauses and tilts his head, trying to find the right description — “a hot-librarian sort of way.”
This one catches me off guard.
“Oh.” I look down and brush eraser crumbs off the table. “Okay. Thanks?” A much more traditional compliment about my looks is buried in this observation somewhere, but it’s diluted by the surprise in his voice, the word actually, and the librarian comparison. But I sense he thinks I should be flattered to get this little nugget from a guy like him.
I mean, I have to admit he is one of the more attractive kids I’ve tutored, although his purposeful effort at it is a bit of a turnoff. He does these little head flips to keep his boy-band hair out of his eyes, which ends up coming across like some kind of tic. His Nike T-shirt, with the word Determined emblazoned across the chest, makes me think it should have an invisible subtitle: to get in your pants. The Axe sex potion he has liberally doused himself in floats around him like a haze, smelling pretty good at first, but then eating away at your mucous membranes until all you can think about is fresh, unscented air. He has put a lot of effort into looking and smelling the way he does, but all I can think is that if he put that much effort into math, he’d probably get a higher grade than a C.
I hear the opposite kind of feedback about my looks: that I’d be pretty if I tried a little harder. Wore my contacts more often, put on a little more makeup, showed some skin. But to me, being pretty isn’t something worth trying at. It would be like trying at being tall. So I focus on accomplishments I can master: running a six-minute mile, solving the Riemann hypothesis, picking up dropped items with my feet. But putting an excessive amount of effort into being pretty? Not worth my time or my money. My beauty routine is limited to good hygiene, clothes that won’t get me picked on and the occasional coat of mascara when I’m feeling nutty. I mean, I’m not Amish, after all.
I guess my indifference to my own appearance is unusual. Most women could make a full-time job of trying to be prettier, and sadly beauty is the one thing that we, as a gender, work at the hardest.
Josh has thanked me and left by the time my friend Charlotte peeks her head into the room, glancing around quickly before her eyes settle on me. God love her, she smiles and tries to act happy, but I know it’s killing her that she’s missed Mr. Determined.
“All done?” she asks with a forced lightness. “I’ll give you a ride home.” She has private cello lessons with her orchestra teacher after school on Fridays and always checks in with me before she heads home, today more eagerly than usual.
“I have one more. But thanks.”
Charlotte nods and lingers for a moment. It takes everything in her not to ask.
“He was … nice,” I tell her, somewhat reluctant to admit it. “Nicer than I expected. You could fumigate an entire apartment building with his cologne vapors and I think maybe he thought he was doing me the favor, but he was polite at least.”
She raises her eyebrows innocently. “Who?”
God, she is such a bad actress.