“Yeah.” Zenn steps closer. I hadn’t realized how tall he is, a good six inches taller than my five feet seven. Also hadn’t noticed how nicely the gentle swell of his chest highlights the Judson College on his T-shirt. If I were a normal girl, I’d push against it flirtily to camouflage my embarrassment and distract him. But I’m me, so I don’t.
He leans over and picks up the jacket. I reach out apologetically to brush my footprint off it, but then realize that would likely trigger another vision. I tuck my defective hands safely into my pockets.
“Sorry. I just … clearly have some issues …” I try to make my voice light, jokey, but he looks away.
“Don’t we all.” He gives me that half smile again, slips the jacket on and lifts his hand in a small wave as he leaves.
“Bye,” I mumble, and push up my glasses. Another sweating episode has caused them to slide down my nose.
Yeah, not sure if I could be any more cool.
I finally stumble out of the room, woozy and exhausted, and head home. I try not to spend too much time thinking about his fractal. I’ve learned that it’s best to put them out of my mind, because dwelling on them only makes things worse.
I used to call them feeling scribbles when I was little, because that’s exactly what they felt like: scribbles of feelings. Mostly hurt, shameful feelings. Mostly dark, heavy scribbles. When I got a little older, one of my many doctors referred to them as visions, and that term stuck for a while, even though it wasn’t quite accurate. I mean, I don’t see the future or anything. I’m not 100 percent sure I “see” anything at all. Even the shapes and patterns and colors are more feelings than visions. But when I eventually learned about mathematical fractals, that name stuck.
Fractals are exactly what they are. Never-ending patterns, like ice crystals or the spiral of a seashell. Mathematical fractals are formed by calculating a simple equation thousands of times, feeding the answer back in to the start. They are infinitely complex, which means you can zoom in forever and the pattern never disappears, and never gets any simpler. When I touch people or their stuff, that’s what my visions are like: patterns that go on forever, engraved, etched, carved so deep they can’t be erased. I get these glimpses into people — the insecurities and struggles that make them who they are — but only a bit at a time. One tiny part of the pattern that hints at the bigger whole.
The more I touch someone, the more I can see and understand, and the more I think I can help. But that’s my mistake. I can’t help. You can’t “fix” people like you can solve a math problem.
I couldn’t fix Jasmine Ortega, whose fractal told me that she’d been date-raped when she was fifteen. I discovered that back when she was my partner in Biology and we had to study our saliva, our hair and a drop of our blood under a microscope. After weeks of holding those glass slides of her DNA, her fractal became pretty clear. Nothing I could do would make that pattern go away. Nothing I could say would fix it. I had to keep looking at her every day, knowing that shame would haunt her for the rest of her life. We were just Biology partners, we certainly weren’t close enough friends to talk about it. I couldn’t even tell her I knew. Hell, I had no idea who the guy was that raped her, so I couldn’t even turn him in or make his life miserable. I was helpless. All I could do was know that bit of truth about her, and hurt for her.
I couldn’t help Trevor Walsh freshman year, when I learned he was gay from holding his sweatshirt during gym class. I see him now, nearly three years later, still dating Julia Ford, and there isn’t much I can do to save either of them the heartache that I know is coming. I’m not going to “out” him to his super-religious family. He would probably deny it anyway. All I can do is watch and wait. And hurt for him.
Not all fractals are so dark, so secret. Some people live happy lives without much trauma or struggle. Some people get over things quickly, or never let them sink in to begin with. The problem is, you can’t always tell which camp they are in just by looking at them. You can’t tell if their fractal will be a pink ray of sunshine or an inky mass of mountain ridges. People tend to hide all their darkest secrets, and somehow still look fine on the outside. This is why I keep my hands to myself: because you never can tell what’s beneath the surface.
I used to be more curious. I would touch people just to snoop. I’m not proud of it, but once in a while I’d want to know what made someone tick and I couldn’t help myself. I don’t do that much anymore, though. I learned I can’t control what information I get. Sometimes it’s like I’m stuck in a current and can’t swim free. I can’t give the information back once I have it, can’t erase it from my mind, so these days I keep my distance as my classmates goof around and hug and touch and just … live.
I try to block out the memory of the overwhelming darkness that came from touching Zenn’s jacket. Instead, I count sidewalk squares and hop over each one that is a prime number.
I could have called my mom for a ride, but it’s easier and quicker for me to walk. She’d come, of course, but she’d have to drag my quadruplet brothers and sisters along with her. By the time she got all their shoes on, grabbed snacks, buckled them into the car … It’s just simpler for me to walk. Any time I can make things simpler for my parents, I do. They’ve already done enough for me.
When I finally walk into the house, Essie and Libby greet me with lots of jumping and a flood of chatter. Well, Libby jumps and chatters. Essie just holds her pudgy, sticky, three-year-old hands out to me and I pick her up. Libby bounces in protest.
“EvaEvaEvaEva,” she chants. “Metoometoometoometoo.”
Libby never says anything just once. One day I counted and realized she repeats most things four times. Once for each sibling? Or just a way to endear her to a math-loving and slightly OCD older sister?
“Hold on, Libby Lou.” I drop my backpack by the front door and scoop her up with my other arm. Back at the same level, the girls start patty-caking with each other. I wonder if I’d be more of a people person, more warm and fuzzy, if I had grown up with siblings when I was younger. These four, they just get one another without any effort at all. Could be the nearly eight months they spent squished together in the tight quarters of my mom’s uterus, I guess.
“Where’re the boys?” I ask them.
“They in the bathroom on the potty,” Essie reports confidently, her th’s coming out like d’s and f’s. She always has her finger on the heartbeat — and the bowel movements — of the family. She prefers to report the details in a loud and emphatic voice to anyone who will listen.
“Both of them?” I ask.
“Yep!”
“This I gotta see.”
I put the girls down and they follow me to the bathroom where, sure enough, Eli and Ethan sit back-to-back on the toilet, legs hanging over either side, pants hanging around their ankles. My mom is lying in the empty tub reading her Bible.
“Tough day?” I ask.
Her smile is tinged with exhaustion. “The usual.”