The Calculus of Change Read online

  Tate raises an eyebrow.

  I laugh. He caught me. Am I see-through?

  “We meet there. We walk to Ike’s,” I say.

  “Okay. I’ll buy the coffee.”

  “Deal, but I only drink coffee if it’s a mocha,” I say.

  He laughs. I just made Tate laugh again, and I could listen to that sound on repeat. If I had a pen and paper, I could write a song to the sound. It’s not high-pitched, but not low or booming. He laughs in D-minor.

  “A mocha is not coffee. It’s a hot milkshake.”

  “Great, then you can buy me a hot milkshake.”

  “See you at the benches,” he says.

  ***

  I have to remind myself that today I’m a senior and I’m meeting Tate Newman at the place where everyone at Bentley who matters hangs out, and this is all okay because talking to Tate about nothing makes me feel like something. And no one cares where I happen to meet new friends.

  I stand next to a group of kids I’ve probably never talked to in all of our school years together. As I watch the girls around me, I’m conscious that I’m not wearing a chic pair of knee-high leather boots. Likely because I can’t get a pair of leather boots to zip over my calves. They’re the cool kids. I’ve never been a cool kid. What was I thinking, meeting him here?

  I breathe and sit down. I question my decision to sit down as soon as I do it. Cross a leg. Uncross the leg. Look down at my thighs and cross a leg again. Repeat. Try not to think about my thighs or my calves or some other part of my body that would disqualify me from wearing what I want. Where the hell is he? It’s been fifteen minutes since the bell rang, and on the day I finally decide to the brave the benches, Tate would forget. Or worse, decide he had something better to do than hang out with me and a calculus problem. I scan the crowd for someone I know, but then a girl with long blond hair—Stacey?—moves, and I see Tate.

  He’s surrounded by another group, again with the energy and the lit-up face and the attention of everyone in this general area. I forget what I was thinking because thinking isn’t something I can do when Tate makes everything in me vibrate. And that’s before he looks at me.

  He’s midsentence when he spots me sitting on the bench, watching him, legs crossed. His smile suspends time. He waves me over, and I am not my calves or my thighs or my awkward legs crossed, because Tate sees me.

  “Guys, this is Aden, the girl I was telling you about. Calculus wiz, and she’s awesome, too.”

  I laugh.

  With Tate stands a freckled, redheaded girl I’ve never seen and Paul and Alana, friends of mine. I smile at the redheaded girl and immediately forget what Tate said her name was. I didn’t realize Tate and I had mutual friends. This fuzzy, fluffy, bird-in-my-stomach thing is happening and the stupid smile, and I wonder if everyone can see it. I feel transparent.

  “We know Aden.” Paul elbows my arm with familiarity. I smile and nudge back, glancing at Tate. He raises an eyebrow in surprise, those gray blues vibrant, interested. Surprising Tate just became my favorite thing.

  “You all know each other?” Tate says.

  “We do.” I amaze myself with the ability to speak because my body and mind are saying everything should be to the contrary.

  “Yeah,” says Alana. “It’s the choir thing. We’re tight.” Alana winks at me.

  “Awesome,” Tate says. We look from each other to Tate. “I love it when cool people know each other.”

  I can’t focus on anything other than Tate and the space he consumes, a universe.

  “We have a bitch of a calculus problem to solve,” he says. He puts a hand on my shoulder, pointing me in the direction of Ike’s.

  I disintegrate.

  ***

  I concentrate on the sounds our feet make as we walk side by side to Ike’s—it makes me feel sane. Otherwise I’d lose myself when Tate is next to me, and I’d end up saying something embarrassing and not sane. Four feet walking forward. The sound is soft on grass, and then there’s the crunch of the first autumn leaves underfoot. Louder on concrete. Like the sound of bongos and then the clash of symbols. We make eye contact. Tate’s eyes are filled with a kind of wonder, and suddenly there’s this word on the tip of my tongue . . . hope.

  He holds the door open for me, motioning for me to go ahead. I squint up at him.

  “I’m perfectly capable of opening a door,” I say.

  “Prove it.” He steps aside and the door slams shut while the two of us stand there staring at it.

  I push him to the side with my hip and grab the door handle.

  A man behind us clears his throat before Tate makes a big deal out of walking through the doorway.

  “Thank you,” Tate says. “This is so kind.”

  I roll my eyes and continue holding the door for the man behind us.

  “Yes,” says the man. “Thank you.” I can’t tell if he’s annoyed or joking.

  Then Tate reaches around the stranger and grabs my hand, pulling me into line with him, into him. I glance at the man, hoping he sees the apology on my face.

  As we stand in line together, Tate puts a hand on my back, between my shoulder blades, inching me forward. My skin burns in the best way underneath his hand.

  The barista looks from me to Tate.

  “A small mocha, please.” I take the lead.

  “Whip?” He writes some kind of symbol on the cup.

  “Obviously,” I say to the barista with a smile.

  Tate elbows me. “Thatta girl.”

  “Glad you approve.”

  “Approve? Nah. I totally worship you.”

  “Wow. All it takes is whipped cream? You must be easy.”

  “You have no idea,” he says with a wink.

  This feels like flirting, and I’m on fire, and how do people do this—flirt—when everything inside feels ablaze?

  I want to say something witty, but I can’t speak or breathe or function. His hand is still there, a torch between my shoulder blades, a slow, sweet burn.

  Tate pays for both of our drinks. “You better make this mocha worth my while,” he says as he removes his hand from my back.

  “I’m sure I already have.”

  We sit in the corner next to the window.

  “So you’re a genius, right?” Tate is pulling his math book out of his backpack.

  “Yes, but I’m not doing this for you.”

  “I’d never ask you to,” he says without irony. “But I can’t get a C in this class.”

  “Because of college?”

  “That and my dad.”

  “Pressure?”

  “Well, I’ve spent the last eighteen years tricking him into thinking I’m smart, like him.”

  “But you’re not?”

  When he smiles at me, it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Not in the way he thinks.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He runs a hand through his curly brown hair. “I don’t know. I’m a lost cause.”

  “I don’t get it. Why?”

  “I hate math,” he says.

  “So? You don’t have to love math, or even be good at it, to be smart.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why is math so important to your dad?”

  “Math and science. All of my grades, really. I think it’s the whole neurosurgeon thing.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not like he expects me to be a doctor, but he thinks I’m an idiot because of what I want to be.”

  “Well, what do you want to be?”

  “A musician.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool.”

  I have this vision of Tate and me playing music together, and it’s so powerful I look at Tate and wonder if he can see my thoughts.

  Tate stares down at his coffee cup, turning it in circles, his mind lost in his dad’s unfulfilled expectations.

  “Your dad wants you to have more security in life.”

  “I guess. But it’s l
ike he’s asking me to be someone I’m not.”

  “Yeah, it sucks to feel like you’re letting him down.”

  “Yeah.” He looks up for just a minute, and when our eyes meet, something I can’t name passes between us. It’s more than understanding; it’s recognition. We both know what it means to live up to impossible standards. Even if no one says it out loud, I carry so much weight for my family—the weight of my dad’s unresolved grief and the weight of my brother’s everything. And Tate, having to be someone he’s not to make his dad proud. I get it.

  “So what do you play?” I say.

  “What?”

  “You want to be a musician: what instrument do you play?”

  “Piano. I play the piano.”

  “Really? Classical?”

  “Jazz, mostly. But I can play bits of anything.”

  “Do you sing, too?” I ask. We could play an epic duet.

  “Hell, no. I can’t carry a tune to save my life.”

  “I can.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  I answer him with a smile, too hypnotized by the fantasy of us onstage together to say anything else. Tate on piano, me singing with my guitar, bright stage lights, the two of us imbued with our music.

  “I’d love to hear you sing sometime.”

  Love.

  “Sure.” My answer is sure out loud, when, really, the answer is something more like I’ll sing to you and in you and with you and about you.

  “So what about you?” he says. “What do you want to be?”

  “Like, when I grow up?”

  He laughs.

  “Because, isn’t that pretty much tomorrow?” I say.

  “Or a few months. Or years.”

  “I don’t know. I want to be a math major.”

  “Figures.”

  I stick my tongue out at him.

  “I might double in music composition. But only if I can find a program that will support the kind of song writing I love.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Mostly folk and rock.”

  “Where are you applying?” He takes a drink of his latte. A piece of curly hair falls into his eyes. I wish I could lean forward and brush it away.

  “NYU, Brandeis, and CU.”

  “Top choice?”

  “I think it’s Brandeis.”

  “Really? You know that’s a Jewish school, right?”

  “In fact, I do, Mr. Jewish.” I wink at him.

  “So what’s the draw?”

  “Um.” I pause. “My mom went there. She’s Jewish, and she—” I don’t know why I just talked about my mom in the present tense. It feels easier than dropping the casual she-died bomb on him right now.

  “Really? You know, officially, that makes you Jewish, too?”

  “I know,” I say. “But I wasn’t raised that way or anything. So I don’t feel Jewish.”

  “Well, maybe you just need to find a way to connect with it.”

  “How?”

  “Take a trip to Israel.”

  “Ha. Yeah, right.”

  “Seriously, you should look into it. It’s called Birthright. You can get a fully funded trip. Find out who you are, Aden.”

  “I know who I am, Tate.”

  Tate leans back in his chair, and I swear I could jump into his smile and stay in its warmth forever.

  Mom

  There are three pictures of my mom in the house. One is of her hugely pregnant with me, on a bicycle. It’s in a frame on my dad’s nightstand. When I want to stare at that one, I have to make sure he’s not home. I know my dad looks at that picture every night before falling asleep, because each morning I find it face-down in his bed and I set it back on the nightstand. It’s been a strange, unspoken ritual between us for years. In the mornings when Jon and I get up for school, my dad is already downstairs eating toast and drinking coffee. So I get ready in Dad’s bathroom and Jon uses ours.

  A few years ago it started bugging me that his bed was always unmade. Especially because my dad is so particular about the way we park our car and where we store the TV’s remote control. It seemed out of character. My mom used to make the bed and throw decorative pillows on it every morning. None of the pillows matched, and it drove my dad crazy. All the plaids, stripes, and solids converging on their bed. My mom would laugh at my dad’s uptight need to have everything color coordinated and neutral, and he, in turn, laughed at her need for vibrancy. After she died I never once saw their bed made, and I don’t know what my dad did with my mom’s pillows. So I started straightening their bed, which was when I found her picture buried in the blankets.

  When I turned the picture over and saw my mom’s joyful face a little swollen with pregnancy staring back at me, all the wind rushed out of my lungs. She’s squinting into the sun, hand shielding her eyes, her awkward bike helmet small in comparison to the size of her belly. I’ve looked at the picture so often, half the time I think of her, I see her pregnant on a bicycle.

  The other two pictures hang on the wall leading to our basement, and they’re part of picture collages. In one she’s kissing me at my kindergarten graduation. Her hair is a fluffy brown mess of curls that fall over both our faces. My cheeks are unnaturally pink. I remember begging her to let me wear makeup as I watched her get ready in the morning. She laughed and said that I could wear a little blush just this once because it was my special day. In the other picture she and my brother are casting a fishing rod into a river together. Their hands are intertwined over the rod, and they’re both laughing. My mom has a brown vest on with bright orange feathers peeking out from the many pockets.

  I think she loved being a mom. The mom I see in my memories is so fogged up with the few pictures we have of her in the house. I think I remember the camping trip where she and my brother are fishing, but I’m not sure. I know I can’t remember when she was pregnant with me on a bicycle, but it’s as though I can.

  I hate that my memories of her are fading, replaced by moments in time that I don’t know if I remember. I hate that the essence of her is trickling out of me day by day, year by year. The older I get, the farther away she is. So often I wonder, What would my mom have said or done? She would’ve kissed my blushed cheek, laughed with her head thrown back while holding a fishing rod, or waved at me with a pregnant belly from her bicycle. I try to believe that she’s somewhere, that she’s more than the still life in those three pictures, that her spirit hasn’t ceased to exist, but I can’t make her show up for me when I need her.

  Tate

  There’s a small mocha and a large latte on the table between the two of us. The latte must be the size of my face, and if Tate weren’t so tall, I probably wouldn’t be able to see him over the top of it. I keep my head down, trying so hard not to get swept away in the current pulling me toward him. But when I’m with Tate, everything is more alive—not like fireworks, like a thousand buzzing Christmas bulbs, a low hum, the colors all twinkly.

  I sit tall, peering over the latte, teasing him about the monstrous size of his coffee.

  “I know,” he says. “It’s one of my vices. Large lattes and sour candy. Lots of sour, lots of candy, copious amounts of caffeine. Lots of peeing.”

  I laugh. He pulls a pack of Sour Patch Kids out of his backpack and tosses it on the table.

  “Help yourself,” he says.

  “Thanks.” I help myself to a handful.

  It’s a little early for Sour Patch Kids—third period—but I’m not one to turn down candy.

  Liz Weedle walks by our table. She waves at Tate. She’s wearing Converses, skinny jeans, and a cardigan set. She’s boyish but cute. Unquestionably thin. Tate gazes after her as she walks away. I cross one leg over the other. I wonder if she eats.

  “She’s kind of beautiful, right?” Tate says.

  “What?”

  “Liz. You’re staring.”

  “I guess,” I say. “I mean, I am staring. You think so? Beautiful, I mean?”

  “There’s something about her.”


  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s in her body. The way she carries herself.”

  “How does she carry herself?”

  He smiles and twirls the mechanical pencil he’s holding. “I don’t know. Kind of like a bird.”

  His answer surprises me. I’m not sure what I was expecting him to say, but it certainly wasn’t something about a bird.

  “A bird?”

  “Yeah.” He takes a drink, twirls his pencil. “I guess it’s also her sharp features. But the way she walks. It’s like she’s weightless.”

  “What’s so great about being weightless?”

  “Freedom.”

  His smile is all mischief and come-hither.

  I sigh. I wonder what freedom feels like.

  I’ve already finished the calculus homework, so I open my scribble notebook where I write ideas for song progressions and lyrics. I rework the verse I wrote yesterday, studying the new arrangement carefully, and when I look up, Tate is staring at me. Our eyes meet, and I’m lost in the warmth just before he smiles; I see light and no judgment, and I’m a puddle on the table soaking our drinks and Sour Patch Kids.

  I watch as he erases the same set of numbers on his worksheet for the third time in a row.

  I put my finger on the paper next to the numbers and symbols. “You can’t move the Y over before you solve Y plus P,” I say.

  “Oh. Right.” He starts to solve the problem and then throws his pencil onto the table. “I need a break.”

  I wonder how he can need a break right now, when he’s so close to stumbling on the solution.

  “Do you ever just drive?” he says.

  “Sometimes. Come on, keep going. Don’t you see? You’re almost there.” I point to the numbers on his worksheet.

  “Eh.” He says it like it just doesn’t matter, and I can’t imagine how he can look at those symbols and numbers without needing them to make sense. But in a way I guess it’s liberating—just throw the pencil down and walk away.