14. Amalia
Over the following weeks I settle into a routine between classes, the occasional tasks for se?or Gustav, and home.
My programming project is slightly up in the air because I can’t find an optimal solution for a few edge cases, and that’s exactly how Lupe finds me, head buried between my laptop and a book on machine learning.
Without meaning to, I glance up at her, and she’s all smiles while texting someone.
“Who’s the lucky guy?” I ask, laughing.
“Alek,” she whispers, and I frown because I thought she’d moved past that guy.
He hasn’t done anything wrong, exactly, but I can’t shake the feeling that something’s off about him even though Lupe swears he’s wonderful to her.
“Is he still traveling?”
“Yeah,” she says, and I catch the disappointment in her voice.
From what he’s told her, he runs some businesses across Europe and is constantly on the road, but he spends at least one week a month here.
I look at my sister, who has a particular kind of glow about her. Even I can tell she likes Alek, and I’d go so far as to say maybe a little too much.
“You’re literally glowing,” I tease her when another message from him comes in.
“Shut up, you’ll get it one day. When someone completely takes over your brain and you don’t even mind. Honestly, I feel like I’m floating.”
I doubt I’ll ever be as consumed as she is; my brain simply wouldn’t allow it. I’d spend the first week calculating the probability of us breaking up and estimating how long it would take him to get bored of my conversations about the things I care about.
Because my interests aren’t exactly typical, and finding common ground with people my age has always been a challenge.
I check the time and see it’s past three. If I want to catch the registrar’s office before it closes, I need to leave now.
I forgot to submit my original high school diploma, and they called me this morning asking me to bring it in urgently.
Outside, a light wind has started to pick up, and I love this kind of weather.
The kind where a hoodie over a T-shirt is exactly enough, where a few scattered leaves are skidding across the pavement, and the air carries that particular smell that promises rain before the sky has even committed to it.
Good thing I grabbed my rain jacket on the way out.
It’s not exactly subtle. Between the teal and the burnt orange and whatever that yellow-green stripe is doing on the left sleeve, I look like I dove headfirst into a paint store and came out victorious.
But honestly? I like it that way. At least I’m easy to find in a crowd.
I’m not entirely sure when I developed this thing for bright, clashing colors. Life is too short for beige, and my olive complexion and chestnut hair deserve a little celebration.
By the time I reach the main path through campus, the sky has gone that particular shade of gray that means the rain is done deliberating.
Students are moving faster than usual, hoods going up, someone’s umbrella turning inside out in the wind ahead of me.
I shift the folder under my arm and keep moving.
I don’t make it ten steps before Paulina appears directly in my line of sight, with absolutely no viable route of escape.
For the love of Gauss, what exactly did I do wrong in a past life?
The rain starts properly then, heavy drops darkening the pavement. An involuntary chill moves through me, and I pull my jacket a little tighter, trying to make myself smaller inside it.
Maybe she won’t look up. Maybe she’ll just walk past.
“Ame, I knew you couldn’t help yourself, even on a weekend. Go on, tell me — are you already on second-year material? Or are you getting a head start on your thesis?”
“I’m in a hurry, Paulina,” I say quietly, wanting nothing more than to drop off this document and go home.
Her eyes go to my folder, and unfortunately my reflexes are slow when her hands snatch it. Before I can process what’s happening, she’s already pulled the diploma out.
“Paulina, please put my diploma back,” I say, and I wish my voice didn’t sound so vulnerable right now, but it’s my original. I don’t have a copy, and I know that’s what they need.
Her eyes scan the document, and if I needed any more confirmation that she hates me, I watch her extend the diploma out beyond the columns we’re standing under, directly into the rain.
I lunge for her hand, but the girl steps right into the middle of the garden, where the rain is already becoming torrential, and holds my diploma above her head like an umbrella.
“Paulina, that’s an official document, please!”
“Aww, poor Ame. I’m sure a star student like you doesn’t need this sad little diploma in her file.”
I don’t know why, but those words break something in me.
Every moment someone laughed at me for being excited about a grade.
Every time I turned down plans to go over a lesson one more time.
Every instance when I was mocked because I was happy to get a good grade.
All of it hits at once, and I feel tears gathering in my eyes because I know my diploma is already destroyed.
For a few seconds I just watch her hold the soaked paper in her hands, and as if what she’s done isn’t already enough, with her eyes fixed on me, she tears it in two. Though tears is generous because at this point it’s absorbed so much water it just comes apart on its own.
“You should take better care of your things, querida.”
I watch her walk away while my diploma stays on the ground.
I don’t know at what point I ended up on my knees beside the piece of paper dissolving in front of me, and I have to lock a sound of pure frustration in my throat.
That paper represented my work. That diploma was the sum of every sleepless hour, every night I fell asleep with notes under my pillow.
And it was destroyed in a few seconds because I was too slow, too stupid to do something about it.
I feel the rain soaking through my jeans to the skin, but I don’t care. I’m locked in place, and I want to scream, want to tear something apart, but I can’t move.
“Amalia?” A voice comes from in front of me, and without thinking, I close my eyes when I realize who it belongs to.
Why today? Why right now?
“Amalia, for the love of every mathematician you keep naming in the worst situations, open your eyes and tell me what happened.”
My eyes obey, and when I meet his gaze, I don’t understand why something in me just settles.
Maybe because his presence tells me he could solve every problem I have, that he could take every fear I carry and tame it with nothing but the authority he radiates.
“It’s destroyed,” I whisper, lifting what’s left of my diploma.
His eyes go to the rain-soaked pieces, and I’m fairly sure he can’t even tell what I’m holding.
I watch drops of rain land on his forehead and his glasses, and only then do I realize he has no umbrella, no jacket.
“You’re getting rained on. I’ll be fine in a few minutes,” I say and wait for him to leave.
Because a normal professor would do exactly that. A normal professor wouldn’t give the slightest thought to my state or the fact that I’m on my knees in the middle of the garden next to the main faculty building holding scraps of wet paper.
But whatever Silas Vaughn is, “normal professor” doesn’t make the list.
“You’re soaked, Amalia. Let’s get out of here before your body becomes ninety percent water,” he says, and the only reason I look back up at him is the calm in his voice.
I know he already thinks I’m a disaster, so I get up and follow him as he guides me toward the building entrance.
Being the weekend, the hallway is empty. I sit down on a bench and try to shake off the water like a wet dog.
When I decide I’ve gathered enough nerve to look at him after my mental breakdown, I find him quietly seething next to me.
Why is he acting like I did something to him?
“I’d like to get home tonight, Amalia, so go ahead and tell me what happened.”
I run through what I could possibly say because I know for certain the truth isn’t going to help me. I’ve told the truth before, and that’s exactly how I made an enemy of Paulina in the first place. And now, without meaning to be, I’m irritated at him for making me explain.
I just wanna go home, crawl in my bed, sip some hot chocolate with cinnamon, and forget this afternoon.
“I wasn’t careful with my high school diploma, and it got wet in the rain,” I say so weakly I could slap myself, because the award for worst liar would go directly to me.
I have absolutely zero talent for it.
“Try again, and maybe this time it’ll be the actual story,” he says, and I notice his tone has shifted toward impatience.
“For the love of Newton, what does it matter what happened?” And this time I’m the one who’s exasperated.
“It matters because you’re defending a student who destroyed your property in public and you’re not planning to do a single thing about it,” he tells me, and that’s when it hits me that he saw the whole thing.
Wonderful. On top of knowing I have no sense of direction and that I panic when I don’t know the answer to a question, he now knows I’m the kind of person who lets herself get walked all over.
“If I do something about it, I’m the one who pays for it in the end,” I say, and I want him to understand that I have tried to hold my ground against people like her, people who have come after me over the years.
Maybe I win a battle, but they win the war.
Because in the end, what they do isn’t something you can punish. It’s perfectly acceptable to go after someone else’s work, perfectly justifiable to mock a person for being happy about something they earned. They are just jokes.
He takes a few steps toward me, and suddenly his presence is all I register. The scent of him — something clean, minty — his dark eyes, and those arms that are slightly tensed now, the kind where a few veins come through like they do in the shows, and the voice in my head goes quiet.
Since when do I notice men’s hands?
But somehow I know it’s specifically his hands I’m noticing, and without meaning to, I swallow against a knot in my throat.
That’s also when I see it. A small scar on his neck, faint and easy to miss, the kind that only reveals itself when you’re close enough to notice the details you have no business noticing.
The urge to trace it with my fingertip hits me out of nowhere, and I press my hands into fists before they get any ideas.
So in order to avoid making this afternoon a complete and utter disaster, I lift my eyes to his face. His features are slightly sharp, but I can say with complete confidence that if this man ever smiled, really smiled, my mind would go blank on the spot.
“You know what the secret is to winning that war with them?” he asks, and I just shake my head.
“Fear. They’re not afraid of you.”
“It’s not like I can become intimidating overnight. Look at me. I’m wearing six colors at once, my hair is always pinned up, I always look like I just rolled out of bed, and my glasses don’t exactly scream ‘public threat.’”
His eyes move over my rain jacket, then the bun that has become more of a ponytail at this point with all the strands that have escaped it, and finally my glasses.
And I feel warm.
“No,” he says, “but this,” and his finger taps my temple three times, “can be. Your intelligence is the most powerful weapon in your arsenal. Stop hiding it just so other people don’t feel intimidated.
You are the sharpest student on this entire campus, so stop getting down on your knees for people whose neurons checked out in elementary school.
Your worth doesn’t begin or end with a piece of paper, Amalia.
Your worth isn’t determined by your GPA or the score on any exam, it’s determined by everything you do with what you’ve built here.
Because a lot of people finish their degrees and disappear into the crowd.
Step out of the herd and you’ve already won. ”
I have absolutely nothing to say back to him, which is its own kind of miracle because, by the grace of Turing, I would absolutely ruin the moment with my blabbering.
My heart is racing, and I’m fairly certain it’s because I can feel that he means it.
Not as a compliment, not as a pleasantry.
He just means it, plainly, the way you state a fact.
I’ve always known I’m not exactly easy to keep up with.
That my brain runs faster than most people are comfortable with.
But being seen by someone who doesn’t just keep up, who actually gets it, I genuinely don’t know what to do with that.
When he lowers his hand, for just a fraction of a second, our fingers touch. And I know from the way neither of us breathes that the current passed through both of us.
My brain immediately begins explaining the humidity in the air and the static charge already built up in my hair, but my heart speaks over it for the first time, and it tells me that this is the first time I’ve had this reaction to another person.
Just as quickly as it happened, Professor Vaughn pulls his hand back and walks out of the building, flexing his fingers like he’s trying to shake off the feel of me. I know it takes me exactly six minutes and twenty-three seconds to be able to move again.