******
Line Integrals Independent of Path
Seven o'clock the next morning found me lounging around on Suril's bed. I was eating Apple Cinnamon Cheerios with strawberry Soy Good milk because Mr. Shah had finished all the regular milk in his ginger chai last night. I'd decided after one spoonful of cereal that I didn't really like strawberry soy milk because it tasted a lot like rice and was on the pulpy side of the barometer. Suril was sitting beside me, drinking coffee and making revolted faces.
"I never liked that pasty vegan jizz," he scoffed, turning up his nose. "Dad's always trying to get me to force it down. Barf Pi. I say, if mankind was meant to drink soy then it would come outta your Mama's tits."
"Then we'd all need nipples the size of 200mL beakers to pump out this mush." I dramatically raised a spoonful of pink gloop and then slopped it back into the bowl. It made a very satisfying sound, reminiscent of Mr. Khan telling me I'd gotten another hundred and ten on my latest Pre. Calculus test. "Plops ahoy!"
"Gross Jane!" Suril gagged as he wiped at his comforter. "I feel like Elmo took a leak all over my bed."
"How can Elmo pee pink? He's a Muppet and Muppets don't have urinary tracts." I raised another spoonful and let loose. Some soy soup splashed on my nose. "This is some pungent plopping. But eat it I will because I don't waste of the foods."
"There's another reason why you're my brother from a different mother." Suril blew at his coffee. "Mom thinks white people waste too much food."
"They do, you've seen our esteemed peers in the cafeteria." I ate some more cereal. There were a lot of vulgar textures drizzling inside my mouth. "Now I know two Moms that like me, Ma and Bianca. That's a pretty good haul for thirteen years I'd say."
"You know, I've had all night to get used to the idea that you made out with Rafe Moretti and I still can't even believe it." Suril shook his head, looking reverent. "It's like someone came up to me and said 'A uniform shell of matter exerts plenty of net gravitational force on a particle located inside it.' It's just so...weird and whacked."
Suril had been going on in this vein since last night. He was astonished like the escape speed of Earth was 11.2 km/s. "It's only practice for the party," I reminded him for the dekillionth time. "I'm Ionic and Rafe is Non-Polar and never shall my solute dissolve in his solvent."
"So what the fuck? He still thinks you kiss better than Katrina and we all know how much skankyass experience that hobag's got." Suril flashed his incisors at me and patted my cheek with coffee cup warm fingers. "You're totally doing me proud, you know that? I mean first you hire Rafe to pound Conner McGregor and now you've got two hot guys interested in you. Two! As in a Diprotic Acid! This is so the kinda love triangle worthy of two Hydrogen atoms bonding with an Oxygen atom to form a water molecule. I say you better milk this for all it's worth, my friend. It's not gonna get any better in this lifetime."
"I wish I had some milk," I said mournfully, stirring my cereal sludge in a counter-clockwise direction. "Say, this triangle you keep talking about, is it equilateral?"
"No, it's isosceles dumbo." Suril sipped at his coffee. "You and Lucan are obviously equal lengths, Rafe not so much. God I wanna check this Lucan guy out. If he's related to Rafe then you know he's gotta be fine."
"He looks a lot more Italian than Rafe does." I downed another mouthful of Cheerios. "And his tattoos are molecular. I want some now; I never knew you could get math kinds. Wouldn't it be thrilling to get something that really takes you back, like the Quadratic Formula? We already know how useful it is, imagine if we made it fashionable too?"
"Fuck that is so hot." Suril had a glazed expression plastered across his face. "Equations tattooed all over this ripped, buff, six-pack...glistening with sweat...mmmm..."
"Well naturally teaching Advanced Calculus and Partial Differential Equations tutorials all day will leave a person sweaty." I made more plops with my cereal. Some drops landed on Suril's arm.
He wiped his arm on my hair. "That shit stinks to Io."
I figured soy strawberry sludge was good for the hair, afterall hadn't The Body Shop made a fortune bottling crud like this? I scrubbed my droplet-infested cheek into my hair. "Well Io no." I burst into giggles and accidentally sprayed out a bunch of half-chewed cereal. I held out my spoon to Suril. "Now do you wanna try some?"
He smirked at me. "Remember the time you messed up a Hess's Law question?"
I scowled and pouted and sulked. "That was lower than the melting point of Neon."
"Then no, I wouldn't like any weirdo hippy pink Jane spit-up."
I stuck my face in Suril's and made a grand production of eating with my mouth wide open. "Mmm mmm, look at me, I'm not dying of clogged meaty arteries and kilometre high cholesterol."
"And people wonder how I turned gay." Suril shoved my face away, disgusted. He was just passing a lot of polyatomic gas because no one had ever wondered that and only me and Rafe knew he was gay anyhow. "You better not've kissed Rafe like that."
"How should I know how I kissed him?" I stuck my lips to the edge of my bowl, tilted it and drank down the remainder of the thick goo. Next time I'd use water for my cereal if there wasn't any milk left. At least I knew I liked H2O. "The whole time I was so dizzy I didn't know what was going on. He kept making me feel all funny and I couldn't even remember that Q equals C delta T equals C(Tf - Ti). I mean what kind of moron forgets something so obvious? It's like forgetting the Collision Theory."
"If someone's a really awesome kisser then he'll make you forget all kinds of stuff. Trust me, I know."
I pondered that over a good wrist chew. "Are you hypothesizing that Rafe is a really good kisser?"
Suril peered at me over his coffee cup. "You tell me, I've never kissed him. Though God, what I wouldn't give to be able to."
"How can I know? I have no additional data with which to make further comparisons."
"Do you like it when he kisses you?"
"I might like it better if I didn't forget a lot of important things."
"Jane, when you're being kissed you're not supposed to be thinking about equations," Suril told me patiently. "You're supposed to be concentrating on how your partner is making you feel...and how you'd like to make him feel in return."
"Well I'm kinda sure that I kissed Rafe back," I replied dubiously, frowning. "He said I did anyway and I kept forgetting to struggle. I never got to kiss his neck though, do you think I should be polite and return that favour?"
"It'd be a damn crime if you didn't!" Suril set his coffee cup down on his desk. "But here's the real question...once Katrina dumps Rafe, would you still want him to kiss you?"
I thought about the way Rafe's mouth tasted and the way his body had felt pressed against mine. I realized that I liked kissing Rafe as much as I liked the Factor Label Method. "I guess. I like Rafe a lot, he said I was kind of awesome and that I was sort of cute too."
"Aww, my baby girl's all grown up," Suril cooed, tousling my scraggly hair. "Wanting to kiss cute boys and their older brothers."
I couldn't have been more shocked had I discovered that the density of Air was no longer 1.21 kg/m3. "But I don't want to kiss Lucan."
Suril blinked at me, looking bemused. "What, seriously?"
"Yes, why would I?" I remembered how Lucan had quoted the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics to me and felt a bit warm.
"You didn't even wanna kiss him when you were groping the equations on his chest?"
"No. I mean, I don't think Lucan has a girlfriend that he wants to dump."
"Good Ganesh." Suril rolled his eyes. "There doesn't have to be a girlfriend involved you stupid hoser!"
I made teeth marks in my thumb. "Well why else would he want to kiss me?"
"Oh I dunno...maybe because you're smart and sweet and funny and cute?"
"I suppose, if you're into that." People were a lot harder to figure out than equations were, I thought. "Anyway, all this kissing kerfuffle isn't exactly living up to the hype-otenuse." I sniggered at my own joke. "I say
, what's the good of it if Katrina has to watch? One fraudulent move and she'll make fricassee out of my innards."
Suril frowned. "Yeah, there is that little speed bump. Rafe's plan is kinda shaky; he doesn't know Katrina like we know her."
"I'm a long time sufferer of the Katrinaphobia for very valid reasons." I shuddered and gave Suril a pleading look. "Maybe while you recuperate you could think of some better plans? I'm not having too much luck with that."
"I'll bet you're not, what with Rafe's tongue constantly jammed down your throat," Suril said, smirking.
"His tongue wasn't jammed down my throat, I would've suffocated if it had been." I wound some wet hair around my finger. It looked like a Mummy's finger wrapped in hair. "It was mostly just touching my tongue and sometimes licking my lip."
"Katrina is so gonna kill you, whether you're struggling or not," Suril declared, voicing what I pretty much knew to be true. "Let's just hope pervy bra girl keeps her yap shut."
"How many times do you think a person can see a bra before the fun wears off and they tell Katrina Rafe kissed me?"
"Since when have I ever been interested in a bra?"
I left Suril's house and sat on my driveway directing ants until Angelina rattled and sputtered up to the curb. I vaulted down the pavement, putting on my sandals as I scurried to avoid my ant brethren. I'd always been a firm believer in the freedom of the foot and ant alike.
"Top o' the mornin' to yeh lad," I proclaimed in my best Irish accent, shutting the car door behind me. "'Ave yeh seen Colleen O'Donovan, aye she's a bonny lass indeed. Jacket potaters?"
Rafe was looking very nice today. His black hair was wet and spiky. He smelled fresh, like he'd just stepped out of his bath. His freckled cheeks had been scrubbed clean and were slightly red from the coolness of the morning. I wanted to kiss them and maybe even kiss his mouth too.
Rafe turned his blueberry, oxidant-enriched eyes on me. "Didn't I tell you to cool it with the Irish bullshit?"
"Sometimes my mouth talks lgippy tummy when my brain doesn't even say so." I buckled my seatbelt and then craned my neck to the side. "You gave me a hooky, did you know?"
"Oh shits," Rafe muttered, his cheeks reddening further. He gently skimmed my neck with his fingertips and I felt very fluttery from it. "Janie, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get that carried away last night."
"I don't mind." I touched my neck with my finger like Rafe had. It didn't feel tingly at all, which I thought was odd. Maybe only Irish lads could make it do that. "Suril said it would be a crime if I didn't give you one back."
"Well fuck, I won't say no to that." He grinned wolfishly, his eyes falling onto my mouth. He was such a sweet, young chap. "You know what they say...practice makes perfect."
"They also say that the bite of the Mexican beaded lizard is highly hemotoxic."
"They do say that don't they?" Rafe did some fancy lane changing. "So how'd your lab write-up go?"
"I didn't get to start it until eleven o'clock," I cried indignantly. "I've never, ever started any piece of homework that late, ever. It was a travesty of justice. It was a mockery of the educational system. But don't tell anyone though, I don't wanna jeopardize any of the scholarships I might get."
A strange, closed expression crossed Rafe's face. It didn't take a Biochemist to figure out what was wrong. I patted his hand consolingly. "Don't worry Rafe, you'll end up with at least one scholarship once I'm through tutoring you, I promise. We'll both make Bianca proud, how's that?"
"You stayed out that late with Lucan?"
I stuck my head near his ear. "Did you have a bologna on mayonnaise toast for breakfast? Your voice sounds like it's coming out of Angelina's exhaust pipe."
Rafe cleared his throat, scowling as we passed a Petro-Canada. Skyrocketing gas prices must've been getting to him too. "So what did that asshole do, seduce you with some stupid math bullshit? Nevermind that he's seven fucking years older than you and you're still a minor!"
I pulled at my lower lip to see how far it would go. 2.93 centimetres would be my rough estimate. "What would Lucan wanna seduce me for?"
Frowning, Rafe gave me a sidelong glance. He stopped at a red light and then studied me like I was a factorial. "Because he's a punkass pervert. I already told him to leave you alone, you're too good for him! He's got enough skanky chicks hounding after him anyways."
I blinked a few times at Rafe. He was acting like the anions of a weak acid undergoing Hydrolysis. "That doesn't make too much sense. Lucan's a TA of Advanced Calculus and Partial Differential Equations and he has integrals and derivatives tattooed all down his chest. I'm just a grade twelve student and all I have is a birthmark on my chest."
"So is that what you did all night?" Rafe's voice was tighter than a Nun's arsehole, as Grandma would say. "Stare at his stupid tattoos and remember the good old days when you used those stupid equations in grade four?"
"I didn't know how to do Calculus in grade four," I told Rafe, waving in a friendly manner to a garbage man struggling with a green bin. He gave me the finger. I thought that wasn't very nice. "I only looked at Lucan's tattoos for a few minutes and then he drove me home. Grandma and Suril were making fun of the old guys on baseball and they were so excited that you kissed me and invited me to your house for dinner and said that I was better than Katrina that they asked me a billion questions and I had Smarties ice cream with some peas that Grandma's friend Muriel Wallace brought over, she grows them in her garden and they're sweet so they're good in ice cream – you crunch a pea, you crunch a Smartie – and then we watched Queer as Folk which is Suril's favourite show and they kept asking me more questions and there was a really long sex scene in Queer as Folk but they didn't show any man parts, which was fine with me 'cause I see a lot of that in Suril's porn magazines anyways and then I showed them my rhombus rock too." I took my rhombus rock out of my pocket. "Remember him? Suril said he was too cute to boot and Grandma said his rump was too plump but I disagree, he's only sedimentary afterall."
Rafe parked the car in the school lot and turned off Angelina. He didn't seem upset anymore, probably because Angelina wasn't guzzling up gas. "You and Lucan didn't go anywhere?"
"No, didn't you hear? I only looked at Lucan's tattoos for a few minutes and then he drove me home. Grandma and Suril were making fun of the old guys on baseball and they were so excited that you kissed me and invited me-"
"I get it Janie." Rafe rested his arm across the back of my seat, his knuckles lightly stroking the side of my neck. I shivered. Rafe's voice got husky. "Did you know I had a naughty dream with you in it last night?"
"That's understandable," I replied, cuddling my rhombus rock to my elbow. Rocks were most partial to hard, bony places. You could never snuggle them to your boobs like you could a zucchini bread. "I did hire you to thump Conner McGregor afterall. Maybe you were having performance anxiety?"
Rafe narrowed his eyes. He looked a bit hacked off as he took a deep breath and slowly let it out. I was surprised when he tucked some hair behind my ear and said softly, "We were alone in a classroom together and you were all sexy and shit. You were my teacher and I was being a really bad boy."
I squirmed in my seat excitedly. Rafe's touching me was making shivers puddle in the pit of my stomach. It felt like hundreds of particles were colliding inside of me, making and breaking bonds. "Was I teaching Chemical Bonding within the framework of Quantum Mechanics? Or did I go the math route with Numerical Linear Algebra?"
Rafe's finger stuttered against my neck. "Um...the first one. I know Chemistry is your favourite subject."
I beamed at him. "Was I angry with you because you didn't pass in your term paper on A Semi-Empirical Huckel Molecular Orbital Analysis of Internucleotide Phosphorothioate Diesters?"
Rafe's lips parted and he blinked at me. I thought his eyes were as deep and wonderful as Particle Rectilinear Motion. His breath tickled my ear. "No, you were angry because I wasn't paying attention. I was excited...you were making me very excited Janie."
<
br /> "Who wouldn't be excited learning about the rotation and vibration of molecules?" I frowned, puzzled. "But why would I be angry if you were excited? That doesn't seem much like me."
Rafe sighed and scrubbed his hand through his hair. "You know what? Forget I said anything. We should probably be getting inside anyway."
"Just don't tell Katrina about any of this," I warned, unbuckling my seatbelt. "She might think you had one of those soggy sex dreams that boys get."
Rafe smacked his own forehead. I supposed that since Lucan and Guido weren't around to thump him, he had to do it himself.
We left the car and walked up to the nearest entrance. A couple of boys and girls were lounging around on the steps, being bad and smoking on school property. It seemed to me that a lot of students at school smoked and they didn't really care where they did it.
A tall, lanky boy wearing a necklace of big orange wooden beads asked Rafe, "Hey man, you hittin' up McGregor's bash this weekend?"
"Yeah, I'll be there," Rafe answered, stopping at the foot of the stairs. "You guys?"
"Totally man, the boys from Phi Kap are bringing over a few kegs," big beads replied. "It's gonna be off the hook."
"I heard a bunch of them richass St. Anne bitches are coming too," another fellow wearing a backwards Calgary Flames hat said, referring to the all-girls private school. "And we all know how hardup for action them sluts are!"
One of the girls, a very pretty Chinese girl, giggled as big beads and Calgary Flames whooped and gave each other high fives. "Rafe honey, you better be saving me a dance. You still owe me from Devon's party last month."
"Just make sure Katrina doesn't see it," the other girl, a blond with a tiny stud in her nose, put in. She blew a bunch of smoke in my face. "That girls surfs the Jell-us Sea."
"Yeah, so I'll gotta jet. I'll catch up with you guys later," Rafe said rather abruptly, jostling his way through the double doors.
Behind me, Calgary Flames asked loudly, "Who's the dork following Moretti?"
"Yeah and what's up with her rubbing that rock on her elbow?"
"They didn't even say anything to you," Rafe muttered flatly as we headed up the stairs. "They barely looked at you."
"They saw me nuzzling my rhombus rock." Rafe was now striding down the hallway and I had to run to catch up. "He only likes elbows and knees. I named rhombus rock you know, wanna hear?"
Rafe rounded a corner and bumped into Mrs. Schatz, the German teacher. "No running in the corridors," she shrieked, her curly brown and grey hair bouncing around her jowls.
Scowling and snapping something rude in Italian under his breath, Rafe headed off while Mrs. Schatz was still yelling.
"His name is Radon," I declared happily, catching up. "That's the very last Noble Gas on the Periodic Table you know."
Rafe halted so suddenly that I kept going and only stopped when Rafe seized my wrist and yanked me back to him. "Doesn't that bullshit bother you?"
My eyes widened. "Not really, I think Radon should be where it is. It's density at 0 degrees is 9.96 x 10 to the –3 g/cm3 anyhow."
Rafe said a very strange thing to me then. "Don't ever let anyone tell you that you're not good enough to be with them, okay?"
I stared up at him. His expression was fierce. "Who would do that?"
"Those dumbfucks back there for one." Rafe glowered and raked a hand through his hair with a lot of violence. "You aren't some fucking dork...like you aren't good enough to be with me...you're fucking brilliant Janie."
"Thank you Rafe, I can never get tired of that compliment," I announced, beaming. "It's like learning about the instantaneous center of zero velocity...how could a person ever get tired of that?"
"I thought you were such a freakshow when you first came up to me," Rafe said quietly, looking away. "I didn't even wanna talk to you. I thought you had some kinda weirdo crush on me and that's why I mention I had a girlfriend. And now, I've only known you for like two days and I can't stand that those losers were ignoring you and judging you and how fucking hypocritical is that?"
"I just thought you were some druggie ruffian until I saw your freckles up close." I patted Rafe's arm. He was being as nice to me as working out relative acceleration equations were nice. "We're all just humans whose brains are encased in the same cerebrospinal fluid."
"What I'm trying to say Janie is that you've become my friend."
"I've never had two friends before," I whispered breathlessly, awed.
Rafe took a step closer to me. "And I know it sounds crazy because we haven't known each other for very long but I think I'm starting to think of you as something more."
"Well I am your tutor too." I was surprised that Rafe had only just started thinking of me as a tutor, unless in his mind I was more of an employer sort of figure? "Say, do you wanna work on Physics now? We never even started that yet."
Rafe opened his mouth to say something and then shut it.
I rolled my eyes. "Okay, okay, we can go back to Math or Chemistry. But this time we have to do proper Chemistry, like the kind where delta Hr equals Q/moles and not the kind where we kiss a lot."
"You're the boss," Rafe agreed, sighing.
I grinned so hard that the parabola of my mouth really did stretch from negative infinity to positive infinity. We both made quick stops at our lockers, I dropped off my titration lab to Mr. Barker and then we went to the library where I tutored Rafe in Physics until the bell rang.
"Meet me at my locker at lunch," Rafe ordered, shoving his papers into his textbook. "We can finish up the rest of this sheet then."
"I might be a bit late," I warned him, zipping up my schoolbag. "I have Pre. Calculus before lunch and I like to talk to Mr. Khan after class. He said I'm the brightest student he's ever taught but I'm not allowed to tell anyone in my class because they might get mad."
Rafe couldn't reply because a bunch of loud grade ten boys swarmed him, looking for a 'hook-up.'
French class dragged by slower than you could say 'Je ne comprend pas.' I spent most of the time planning my course syllabus for when I was really a Professor of Chemical Theory within the framework of Quantum Mechanics and mumbling Vrai ou Faux in different accents every time Madame DuBois shrieked "En francais s'il vous plait!"
In Global History, I pondered what a good way for Katrina to dump Rafe was. Rafe wouldn't pretend to be gay and he wouldn't hit me in front of Katrina so what other options were there? What else did people dump other each for?
A sluggish-looking boy with sleepy eyes and shaggy brown hair was slouched in the desk next to mine. He was drawing a naked woman on his desk while Mr. Bough discussed the conflict in the Gaza Strip.
I nudged his gargantuan sneaker with my sandal. "Say you wanted your girlfriend to dump you so you didn't have to, what would you do?"
Sleepy boy turned his half-lidded, sleepy blue eyes on me. "Kiss her best friend dude," he drawled out in a slow, lazy voice. "Chicks think, you know, kissing's cheating."
I frowned down at my copy of 'Molecular Modeling in Heavy Hydrocarbon Conversions' which I'd hidden under a bunch of boring Global History notes. Sleepy boy and Rafe seemed to be working from the same angular frequency. "I can certainly see that you're into w equalling 2Pi/T equalling 2Pif."
"Dude, what kinda pie?" Sleepy boy was now drawing his naked woman's pubic hair in the shape of a butterfly. "I love pie, like ardently."
"Pi as in the ratio of the circumference of the diameter of a circle."
"That's a lotta 'ofs' and 'thes' dude. Mostly I'm all about that cherry pie shit but I won't say no to, you know, pumpkin." Sleepy boy brushed some of his shaggy hair from his eyes. "Do you think her tits are, you know, chimmi chunga enough?"
I leaned a bit closer to Sleepy boy's desk and pondered the graffiti. Apparently snoozing wasn't his only talent. "She needs a tattoo like 1 Pa equals 1 N/m2."
Sleepy boy pointed at me in a floppy way. "Dude. Excellento." He chewed on the top of his pen. "Maybe I can, like, compose a theme here. A but
terfly theme, you know? It can be like...you know...an expression of fragile innocence."
"Baaaaaaarium. These day who hasn't got a butterfly tattooed on their ankle or on their tit?" I chewed on my pencil, not wanting to be left out of the action. "I say give her something you can really sink your teeth into...like a list of Physical Constants. You know, the Gravitational Constant, Boltzmann's Constant, the Permittivity Constant,
Rydberg's Constant and so on and so on to infinity positive."
Sleepy boy tossed his pen on his desk, his eyes suddenly wild. He looked like he was having a nightmare. "Dude, like don't impose the structured tyranny of like...the establishment...onto, you know, the pure manifestation of...my mutiny against society's rigid oppression of the...you know, Thinker of Free Thought."
"But in not embracing the permanency of Physics' constants, you automatically negate the title of 'Thinker of Free Thought' thereby condemning the purity of your art form to subsist as nothing more than meaningless smut by which you merely appease the sheep-like, perverted tendencies of the masses," I said, chewing some of my hair.
Sleepy boy's eyes opened all the way. "Dude," he whispered hoarsely as his head lolled back. "Dude that's, you know, concentrated." He fell asleep. A trickle of drool oozed down his unshaven chin.
Once I got back to reading 'Molecular Modeling in Heavy Hydrocarbon Conversions', Global History passed like Grandma's gas after eating Phyllis Melhorn's onion gorgonzola soufflé. My last class of the morning, Pre. Calculus, was easier than balancing a Mechanism and since I'd already completed every question and every equation in our textbook, I continued with my outside reading.
When class was over, I showed Mr. Khan 'Molecular Modeling in Heavy Hydrocarbon Conversions' but we couldn't discuss it in depth like I wanted to because he had a staff meeting to attend. I got excited because I thought that maybe the Pre. Calculus syllabus was going to be reworked to include a more extensive, complex course load but Mr. Khan just laughed and said that the meeting was about the growing number of students smoking on school property. Even I could admit that that was clearly a problem.
"If you're not part of the solution then chances are you not using the Quotient Rule," I told Mr. Khan.
He burst into hoots and jovially thumped a stack of grade eleven assignment. "How right you are Jane, how right you are!"
Mr. Khan was my favourite teacher. I wanted to marry him but he already a wife.
I went downstairs to my locker and was on my knees, unloading my morning textbooks, when my ears picked up a very bad word.
"...fucking faggots."
I glanced over as my heartbeat quickened.
Conner McGregor was a few feet away, casually leaning his massive bulk against the wall while his friend, a fellow Cro-Magnon called Matt Cormier, was chucking his books into his locker.
"That Paki fag was asking for it," Conner growled, his pale eyes narrowing. "Kissing another dude right outside Alicia's building. I don't care how many fags are allowed to get hitched, I think it's fucking sick."
"That little ass-raider's lucky I wasn't around," Matt bragged, slamming his locker door shut so hard that I jumped. "I would've put his queer ass in a fucking coma. He wouldn't be panting to suck dick then."
"You should've heard the little shit screaming," Conner jeered, smirking. "I should've taken a leak all over his ugly face. He prolly would've been begging for it."
"No he wouldn't have," I contradicted, petrified. I stood up on gelatinous legs and tried to tell myself that this was the right thing to do. It wasn't easy, what with the murderous way that both Conner and Matt were glaring at me. I wanted to flee like decreasing pressure on a system in equilibrium wanted to shift to the side with more molecules. I had no experience with bad boys. Katrina was the worst person I'd ever faced and she just said cruel things and played pranks. Conner actually looked like he wanted to physically hurt me...like he had Suril. "He didn't do anything to you."
"You hear what she just said?" Matt demanded incredulously.
"Yeah, I heard," Conner said quietly, striding towards me.
I clutched 'Molecular Modeling in Heavy Hydrocarbon Conversions' to my chest, trying to keep my screaming heartbeat from pounding outside of me. "Wh-what you did was wrong," I stammered, clumsily stepping backwards. "Suril wasn't hurting anyone; he didn't deserve what you did to him."
A terrible expression marred Conner's face. He grabbed my arm and yanked me close before I could even move. 'Molecular Modeling in Heavy Hydrocarbon Conversions' fell to the floor with a loud clatter. "You listen here you little fag-hag," he hissed, his fingers grinding against my bone. "You keep your fucking hippy bullshit to yourself or I'll do you like I did your butt-fucking queerboy, understand?" He shook my arm so roughly that my teeth rattled.
"a equals v2/R," I gasped, nodding my head frantically.
"Fucking cunt," Conner spat, shoving me hard into my locker. He purposely stepped on my book, his face livid. "Telling me what to do."
"Dumbass bitch," Matt snarled, glaring at me over his shoulder. "She and the nerd fag were always tight, I remember those losers from junior high."
"Wait until that fucker gets back to school," Conner threatened in a low voice as he and Matt disappeared down the stairwell.
"Girl you should not've been talking smack to them boys," a tall black girl with long, orange-blond hair said. She was standing outside of the girls' washroom and watching me. "Don't you know who they are?"
I nodded as I picked up 'Molecular Modeling in Heavy Hydrocarbon Conversions' with shaking hands. The cover was bent and muddy from Conner's sneaker. For the some reason the sight of it made a row of tears leak down my cheeks. I rubbed the cover on my jeans and finished packing up my schoolbag for my afternoon classes.
"You okay?" Orange hair came over to me and handed me a crumpled tissue. It had mascara and violet eyeshadow smears on it. "You can use the other side hon."
I shoved the tissue into the corners of my eyes and then handed it back to orange hair. "I'm a smelly tofu hot dog," I mumbled, closing my locker door. "I was scared. I've never been threatened before."
Orange hair smiled at me kindly. "You just keep out their way and you'll be fine."
I left my locker and went upstairs to Rafe's. My arm throbbed with every step, like a reminder that I wasn't strong enough to stand up to bullying boys. I felt even worse than when I'd messed up that Hess's Law question. I'd never liked fighting and arguing with people and I'd always thought that that was one of my better qualities but right now it felt more like a character flaw and a big, fat weakness.
Rafe wasn't at his locker but was sitting a few metres away, on the wide windowsill at the end of the hallway. His books and lunch were spread out beside him and when he caught sight of me, he smiled. "I hope you didn't forget that today's our S day lunch Janie."
I took off my schoolbag and hoisted myself up beside Rafe. "I didn't forget. I have spinach salad and a starfruit and Skittles."
"You want some Snickers?" Rafe broke his chocolate bar in half and held it out to me. "I've also got spaghetti with salami in it and some...Janie?" Rafe caught my wrist. "What happened here?"
There was four finger-shaped bruises darkening the skin of my arm. They stood out like a Ksp problem on a page full of second partial derivatives. "Conner did it," I mumbled, feeling ashamed of myself. Would Rafe think I was a big wimpy noodle too?
Rafe stared at my arm with narrowed eyes. His face was draining of colour.
"Don't be mad at me," I whispered, squirming in his grip. "I don't like when people yell at me, it makes me sad. I already don't feel very good because of what happened."
"I could never be angry with you Janie," Rafe said in a very soft, gentle voice. "Tell me what happened."
I looked down at Rafe's hand holding mine and felt better inside my stomach. I told him what happened.
There was a silence when I was done.
"That motherfucking bastard," Rafe suddenly snarled, his voice colder than the
melting point of Oxygen.
My gaze flew to his face. His cheeks were now scarlet, his eyes angry slits of Bromothymol Blue. "I'm not a very strong girl," I admitted, petting my piece of Snickers bar. "I just wanted to stick up for Suril but I don't think I did a very good job of it."
"You are a strong girl Janie," Rafe told me fiercely. "Don't let some jerkoff prick like McGregor make you think otherwise."
"But I was really scared," I murmured, chewing on my bottom lip. "And I wanted to run away like Bases want to ionize to form OH ions."
"But you didn't run, did you? You stuck it out even though you were scared and don't like people shouting at you." He tilted my chin so that I had to look at him. "That's what makes you so brave."
My heart skipped a beat. I hadn't thought of it like that. I'd always just figured that being brave meant that you were able to makes witty, snide remarks about the bad guy's mother before you trashed him into intestinal juices. "I despise violence but I had to speak up didn't I? What Conner did wasn't right. Suril didn't do anything wrong."
"This weekend I'm gonna kill McGregor," Rafe hissed, tightening his hold around my fingers. "And I'll do it because you're my friend and I want to. I'll break every bone in that asshole's body for daring to lay a finger on you. He'll never walk again let alone play fucking football."
I tugged out of Rafe's grip and hugged him as hard as I could. I wanted to touch his heart because he didn't care that Suril was gay and he didn't care that I was a loser nerd. He was nice to me anyway and made me feel happy about myself and liked kissing my mouth and thought I was brave. "I'm your tutor too," I added, my voice muffled by his shoulder.
He kissed the top of my head and hugged me back.
"I cried a little bit," I confessed, taking my lunch out of my schoolbag. I felt a lot more like eating now. "Conner stepped on my copy of 'Molecular Modeling in Heavy Hydrocarbon Conversions' on purpose and he bent the cover and got mud all over it and that hurt my heart a little bit. I don't know why tears came out of my eyes but they did. Skittles?"
Rafe took a handful of Skittles. His gaze was soft when he looked at me and I couldn't see any sign that he was secretly laughing. "You don't have to come with me to McGregor's party on Saturday."
I swallowed a mouthful of Skittles juice and said around chewing, "Scalar products?"
Rafe's mouth twitched. "If I'm not doing this because you hired me then you don't need to pay me do you? I'll just figure something else out."
I stuffed a big piece of spinach into my mouth and thought for a while. Rafe may have beaten up a lot of guys and sold drugs during school hours and was Katrina's boyfriend and wasn't 'with it' scientifically but his heart was made of pure Au. I didn't think any other boy at school would have sat with me like this and told me that I was brave and hugged me like he was trying to diffuse into my bloodstream. If I was Rafe's friend then that meant that he was my friend and friends helped each other.
"I think you're as cool as Gauss' Law for magnetic fields," I mumbled around a slice of starfruit. "And since you're my friend too, I guesstimate that I don't mind doing a favour for you. But if Katrina comes after me then I'm running away at a speed of 10 to fourteen m/s."
"You don't have to do this," Rafe said, swigging down a bunch of Sprite. "I'm being serious."
"I know, I want to. Sorta." I shyly scraped my teeth against my piece of Snickers bar. "No one ever thought I was brave before."
"Christ you're cute." Rafe gave me a little cheek pinch. "I really wanna kiss you but I just ate a bunch of salami."
"I think you're cute too Rafe," I enthused, refraining from giving Rafe a cheek pinch back. I had promised him that I wouldn't do that anymore. "I'd like to tuck you into your blankies and give you some warm milk to help you sleep. But not Soy Good milk, that taste like rice and a little like the bunions you get on your feet."
Rafe gave me a dirty look and wouldn't share his sugar cookies with me until I started waxing poetic about some of the worst period episodes of my life, paying special homage to bloating and monthly irregularities and surprise messy undies and by then Rafe couldn't stuff cookies into my face fast enough. While eating, I tutored him in Physics until lunch was over and then he walked me to class so that he was there in case I ran into Conner. Rafe said that we could go to Conner's party late and that way he'd be too drunk to recognize me. I told Rafe that I gave that plan 2.34 x 10 to the sixteen opposable appendages up.
When my last class of the day finished, I found Rafe waiting for me. He was leaning against the wall and nodding coolly to all the people that said, "Hey man, what's up?" to him. A lot of people that said that, including two teachers and a bunch of guys from the Arabic gang. I wondered what would've happened if I'd hired the Arabic guys to beat up Conner. Probably I wouldn't've gotten kissed because I was a white infidel. But probably they would've declared a good Jihad on Conner (especially if I'd told them that he and his family were big supporters of the American invasion into Iraq) and then they would've busted up his vital organs and he wouldn't've been around to bruise my arm.
"How was Bio?" Rafe asked me, nodding to a group of 'punks', including pseudo-punk boy from my English class who saw me with Rafe and gave me a thumbs up.
"It was to me what Kirchoff's Voltage Law is to me," I declared, taking Radon of my pocket because he was being frisky by digging into my thigh. "I.e. something that has been known to me for a bit of time."
"I don't know why you're still in high school," Rafe said, shaking his head as we walked up the stairs to his locker. "You should be in university someplace, doing your PhD."
"That seems to be a bit of a common grievance," I admitted, cuddling Radon to my bony knuckles. "Though you know what they say...a cyclotron is just a linac coiled into a spiral. Say, did you know that the world's largest cyclotron can be found at TRIUMF in Vancouver? A beam of negative Hydrogen ions make 1500 spiral turns in this great big acceleration chamber that is 17 metres in dia-"
"Honeycakes!"
Every hair in my nose stood on end.
Katrina, wearing a very low slung, tiny jean skirt and a thin scoop-necked yellow t-shirt, flung herself into Rafe's arms. "I haven't see my gorgeous man in ages," she pouted and attacked Rafe's mouth with her own. She made a lot of moaning noises and wiggled her butt around while she did this.
"Don't look Radon, it's X-rated!" I closed my palm around my rhombus rock and told him about Hund's Rule while I tried not to think about Katrina finding my leftover odours on Rafe's mouth. "When electrons occupy orbitals of equal energy, one electron enters each orbital until all orbitals contain one electron with their spins parallel."
Rafe wrenched away, his cheeks red. "Baby," he sputtered and didn't seem to know where to go after that.
"Did you miss me huggy honey bear?" Katrina cooed, stroking his chest as she curved herself to his side.
I flossed my front teeth with a few strands of my hair in high relief. I had never understood why people wasted money on dental floss when there were hundreds of flossing implements growing right out your own head. People just liked to waste money, I thought.
"Course I did, sweetie." Rafe slipped his arm her waist and smiled at me. I didn't smile back, mostly because my hands were in my mouth but also because it was suspect of me to be smiling at the boyfriend of Katrina. "Janie's been a fantastic help. She's patient and smart and I'm not even worried about my Chem. test anymore."
Katrina's eyebrows shot up to her hairline. "Janie? You call her Janie?"
My heart skipped a beat at the incredulous annoyance on Katrina's face. "The Tyndall effect is the visible path produced by a beam of light passing through a colloidal dispersion or suspension," I cried, doing the on-the-spot 'I-have-to-pee' dance so that I wouldn't run away...yet.
Katrina looked at me. She looked at Radon cuddling my knee. She looked at the hair hanging out of my mouth. "Janie," she said, and by some miraculous intervention of the Virgin Mary, as Bianca called her, Katrina burst into a pile of giggles.
"My pasteurization date is in 1.542 x 10 to the negative four nanoseconds if you know what I mean." I added a bit of giggling to keep things friendly. "Afterall a Siberian onager is only as bewildered as the taxidermist who eats japonica seeds on Yom Kippur. Okay, chowder!" I tried to slink off while Katrina was giggling and pointing at me with her lip gloss wand but Rafe pulled away from her and stepped in front of me.
"Where the hell are you going?" He was looking angry for some reason. Maybe it was because his lips were now pinkish and shiny and he looked like an orphan who'd gotten into the Constable's wife's berry patch. "We hardly even touched Physics today and I've got that assignment due next-"
"You need a study break honey-baby," Katrina interrupted, sliding back to Rafe's side with a lot of boob action. She traced his lower lip with the tip of her finger. "My parents won't be home until tomorrow night and I'll need someone to keep me busy all night."
"Fats are triglycerides," I whooped, clicking my heels together. Then me and Radon made tracks down the stairwell.