Chapter Twenty-Two #2
The assignment is brutal. Multiple regression problems, factorial ANOVAs, chi-square tests, and effect size calculations. Not your average homework.
I slide him a paper. “Let’s start with this multiple regression. Predicting anxiety from sleep, caffeine, and exercise.”
He scans the table quickly, brows furrowed in concentration.
Sometimes I wish he could see himself the way I do, giving his all to everything and everyone. It’s like he thinks he needs to be this genie, the shooting star in everyone’s lives, and somehow he manages it.
“Sleep and exercise are significant predictors because p is less than 0.05,” he says. “Caffeine isn’t. Negative betas for sleep and exercise mean more sleep or more exercise predicts lower anxiety. I’d check multicollinearity, too, just in case the predictors are correlated?”
“Yeah. That’s exactly it.” When I tell him we were moving on to logistic regression, he leans forward, his eyes bright.
“Easy. I can make more sense of it than the textbook.”
“You think you can relay it better than the textbook?”
He shrugs. “I read it three times, then again after an hour. That stuff’s locked in here.” He taps his head. “But they make it so confusing. I have a pretty good handle of it on my own.”
I can’t stop staring at him. He’s so naturally good at this, and he’s got no damn clue. No one catches on this fast, and for a second I think he’s so focused on hockey that he doesn’t realize how academically smart he is.
We spend an hour going through the formulas and testing out of order to see if he just memorized or actually knows his stuff. He gets each one correct, and I think he might even understand it better than I did when I took the course.
“You’re really good at this, Kian,” I say.
He shrugs. “If something interests me, I’ll learn everything I can about it.” He points to his assignment. “I did go over this like three times before I went to sleep though.”
I recall his random bout of insomnia, and how he’s always awake when I’m up late enough to text. I remember he said his dreams felt like memories of the past sometimes, and he’d always jolt awake as if he could catch them. “Have you been able to sleep?”
He’s silent, his Adam’s apple moving with each swallow. “Uh, yeah. I’ve been getting better.”
“Yeah? No weird dreams?”
He chokes. “What?” He laughs loud and awkwardly. “Are dreams even real? I mean, no one can prove them. There’s no record, right?”
I blink at him.
He swallows. “I slept great! Excellent! I mean—the normal amount of good. Just super normal sleeping stuff, you know?” He’s nearly breathless by the end of his sentence.
“Are you okay? Did you have a nightmare or something?”
He mutters something under his breath before he says, “Let’s take a break. That’s enough t-tests for today.”
“But—”
He shakes his head, standing from his seat. “You have your methods. I have mine. It’s break time, Scar.”
Reluctantly, I shut my laptop. Downstairs, the guys are still loud. I think the game’s in overtime, but when we get to the living room, they’re watching a nature documentary.
Aiden Crawford sits on one side of the couch with his girlfriend, Summer, on the floor between his legs as he finishes braiding her hair. Cole and Sebastian are setting up a whiteboard and a box of markers next to a Pictionary set.
“Who’s playing?” Sebastian asks, tossing markers at us. Kian snatches one midair and glances back at me.
“We’re in. She’s with me,” he says, no hesitation, and I barely get a chance to say anything before we’re all in teams and Kian’s up first.
His drawing looks like a mangled stick figure trapped inside a square. It makes me laugh because he’s so good at sketching his tattoos but miserable at drawing on this whiteboard.
He draws a rectangular-shaped thing, coloring it in and making it a little wavy.
“What are we even looking at?” someone says.
Kian doesn’t flinch, just keeps scratching lines onto the board, moving on to draw a circle, leading arrows straight to it. It kind of looks like a roll.
His tongue pokes into his cheek, waiting. Desperately drawing more arrows.
I tilt my head and it hits me. “Seaweed.”
Kian slaps down the marker, triumphant. “Boom. Suck on that!”
“What the hell?” Sebastian throws up his hands. “How did you even get that? It looks like a toilet paper roll.”
I shrug, giving Kian a high five. Aiden’s up next, and Summer’s shouting random words, missing it entirely. “Come on, Crawford. We are not losing to Kian,” says Summer. But then she gasps, covering her laugh as she says, “Ferris wheel.”
“Hell yeah, baby!” Aiden exclaims, dropping a kiss to her lips before falling back onto the couch. Seeing them so comfortable together makes something warm move through my chest.
Kian watches them too. The way Aiden exists with her, like she’s the center of his entire world, like every breath he takes belongs to her too. It makes all the other stuff feel minuscule.
I grew up watching my mom’s heart break over and over, then Sierra with her skating partner, and every time one of my sorority sisters got cheated on, it never seemed worth the risk.
The idea of giving myself to someone in a way that went so far beyond my body sounded like handing over my heart to a mallet.
“Scarlett.” Cole calls for me to go up.
I push off the couch, grab a card from the pile, and face the whiteboard. The word: scream. For a second I debate the obvious—drawing a stick figure yelling—but then I smirk. Kian loves costumes. So instead, I sketch Ghostface, the mask’s hollow eyes and open mouth.
I don’t even finish the second oval before Kian blurts, “Scream!”
The room groans, but Kian’s already on his feet, lifting me into his arms. I clutch his biceps, laughing helplessly as he spins me.
This, I think, is pretty close to perfect.