If you Google mathematical fractal you’ll get images that look like lightning, or haunted snowflakes, or solar flares. Scary and beautiful, creepy and intriguing. That’s how they feel, too. The line between fascinating and frightening is a thin one. Lightning is cool to look at, but no one wants to get struck.
We’ve exhausted specialists and therapists and at this point I think the only hope I have of getting cured is to find the cure myself. My plan is to study neuroscience and see if I can’t figure it out. Take matters into my own vision-inducing hands. I’m good at solving puzzles — maybe it’s not such a far-fetched idea. Maybe the person with the problem is the only one motivated enough to solve the problem. It’s really my only option because frankly I’m not sure I can live with this for the rest of my life.
“Eva.”
I hear my name and glance up from the dinner table. My dad is looking at me expectantly.
“Huh?” I spaced out in the midst of the Mary and Martha story. Whoops.
“Could you pass the potatoes? Please?”
“Oh! Sure. Sorry.” I reach for the bowl, carefully avoiding the minefield of small cups.
“Everything okay, Ev?”
I wave away his concern and take a bite of meat loaf. “Fine,” I tell him. I smile and chew, and my nonchalance seems to appease him. I don’t tell him about Zenn or the haunting weight of his fractal.
What’s to tell, really? High school is rough on people and it’s not like Zenn is unusual. Sure, that fractal I got from his jacket was a little darker than most, but what if it hit me hard because I’m out of practice with anything but algos? I’ve been particularly careful lately.
I decide to test it out.
My dad’s cell phone sits on the table next to him, always on hand for pastoral emergencies. I debate picking it up, but I’ve learned my lesson with phones. His would be especially awful, with all the prayer requests he gets daily. Dying parents, sick kids, cheating husbands, drug-addicted friends — you name it.
So instead I take his glasses, which he only wears for reading. Without him noticing, I slip them off the table and hold them in my hands on my lap. The vision comes gradually, not in an instant like the one from Zenn’s coat. And it’s definitely a fractal, but a simple one, mostly a deep teal swirled with gray blues, a pattern like a chain. There is some darkness, a sense of heavy responsibility, but overall it feels manageable, sadly hopeful, cautiously positive, like all the books he reads while wearing them. I sneak the glasses back onto the table. Compared to that, Zenn’s jacket fractal seemed like something out of a Stephen King novel.
I decide to try my dad’s phone anyway. I press my fingers on it, as if I’m just sliding it across the table, and a darker fractal comes more quickly. It’s blackish green and clumpy, like seaweed. I see flashes of navy and crimson swirled together like blood and oil. It feels like divorce, death, heavy sadness, cries for help.
But still it is nothing like Zenn’s.
I remove my hand again and realize my mom is watching. She is nodding at something my dad just said, but she is studying me intently. She looks like she is about to say something when Essie bumps over her pink cup and I grab my handy milk-soaked rag.
After dinner I help with baths before doing the rest of my homework. Bath time is at least a two-person job at our house, and my dad is off the hook tonight because he has to be back at church for a meeting. So my mom and I rock-paper-scissors for who does washing and who does diapering and PJs. I usually don’t mind either job, but tonight, after all the spilled milk, I just want the driest job.
My mom fills the tub and strips the girls down while I put on a VeggieTales video for Ethan and Eli. I watch with them for a bit and Larry is singing one of his silly songs about a hairbrush when Essie waddles back into the room wrapped in a towel, her pink cheeks shining.
“C’mere, Esther Faith.” I wrap my arms around her and jokingly wrestle her to the ground. She giggles, but quietly. She’s the hardest one to rile up. I wouldn’t dare do any roughhousing with Ethan this close to bedtime or I’d never get him to sleep. I pat Essie’s silky skin dry and put on her nighttime diaper while she lies perfectly still, batting my dangling hair like a cat might play with a piece of yarn. We count together backward from twenty while I rub pink baby lotion on her skin, enjoying its warmth and softness. I don’t mind the mini-fractals she gives me, like little rays of orange sunlight. Her fractals are simple. Pleasant. Still untainted by the brutal world. I tuck her pudgy arms into her fleece pajamas and then sit her up so I can comb out her wispy hair.
Libby is next, and she barrels into the room, loud and naked. “Boysboysboysboys!” she yells. “Your turn!”
Ethan groans. “But I watching VeggieTales!”
“Mommy!” Libby yells. “Mommy! Efan is not listening to me!”
Essie sits patiently on the floor while I drag Ethan to the bathroom. Libby stops fussing as soon as he is gone. It takes about an hour, but eventually all the kids are bathed and dressed, tiny pearl teeth brushed, and in bed. My mom seems on the verge of saying something once the boys’ bedroom door clicks shut behind us, but I quickly excuse myself to finish my homework. If she thinks I’m having a rough time with the fractals, she’ll offer to take me somewhere else, to some psychiatrist or specialist she read about in a magazine at the doctor’s office. But I’m tired of dead ends and false hope. I’ll figure this out myself. So I give her a light smile and whatever she had been about to say is overruled by my false display and her overwhelming exhaustion. She collapses on the couch and I finish my math quickly so I can cross it off my list. I wouldn’t be able to savor it tonight, anyway.
It’s nearly eleven when I think about college applications
for the thousandth time. One of these nights I’m going to have to tackle them. But not tonight.
Chapter 5
On Saturday Charlotte drags me to a horrible-sounding Nicholas Sparks kind of movie that I’m afraid might make me vomit if I go with a full stomach.
“Come on … it has Bradley Simon in it!” she whines. “With his shirt off! You’ll get your money’s worth for that alone!”
“These movies are all the same, Char. Hot guy, beautiful girl. Impossible love. Bad dialogue.”
“Yeah, but there’s kissing. And partial nudity.”
I laugh at the way she raises her eyebrows playfully. “What has happened to you, friend? You used to be so sexless and levelheaded.”
“I know.” She sighs, almost sadly. “Things were way simpler back then.”