Sylvie
It’s morning and we’re on the road before Knox tries some small talk. “Is there anybody you want to see while you’re home?”
I shrug, still hurt over him shutting down my questions last night. “Not really. Maybe Dr. O.”
“Your doctor? Like . . . your pediatrician?”
“A doctor, not my doctor. A doctor of math.”
“A math doctor.”
“He was my teacher. Dr. Ogasawara. I was in AP Calc BC my senior year, it’s basically like extreme math for nerds, and there were only six of us who were taking it. And I’m like . . . I’m not good at math.”
“So says the girl in extreme math for extreme nerds.”
“Touché. I mean like, it doesn’t come naturally to me. I get to a certain point in a problem and my brain starts to sputter out, like there’s only so many little math plates I can keep spinning at the same time, and then crash they come down, and I have to start over.”
“Everyone feels that way about something, I think.”
“I don’t want to, though.” I can feel myself putting on an apologetic smile to soften what I’m about to say.
“I like hard things. I can do a lot of hard things. I can get up before dawn and run a 5K and go straight to a zero-hour class and I can be on for all of that. I thought I just needed time to get used to Calc BC. Things are only hard until you get used to them.”
Knox is thinking next to me.
“Don’t do the thing,” I tell him.
“What thing?”
“The thing where I make a blanket statement like that and you immediately start poking it for holes. I am positive that there are holes in that statement. I’m positive that there’s all kinds of things I haven’t experienced yet that are just out there, waiting to humble me with big superior smiles on their faces.
But between the stuff with my mom and with Cal and all the rest of it, the hard stuff I can’t control, it’s nice to have a handle on the hard things I can.
Like, I can force my brain to run through the equation again.
And again. And again, until I get it. I took like six practice convergence tests before the AP exam, and I failed the first three.
Then I stopped failing them. So it’s true. At least for me.”
“Sylvie.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t going to do the thing,” Knox says quietly.
We’re all alone on the road. On either side of the car, corn is gently waving to us.
“Sometimes,” he says, “I feel like you’re reacting to things I don’t say, or do. Like you go blind to the fact that it’s me sitting next to you, and not somebody else.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Have you had somebody in your life who pushed back at you like that? Who does ‘the thing’?”
“He called it playing devil’s advocate,” I mutter.
“Did it work?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did it help you think through all the sides of your opinion? His questioning you?”
“No. I don’t tend to, like, state an opinion without having thought it through. I think a lot. Probably too much. All that did—all he did—was make it clear that he thought I was stupid. And then I was forced to make an argument for why I wasn’t.”
“Hence the defensiveness.”
“Yeah,” I say, after a second. “I guess so. Has someone ever done that to you?”
“No. I think people do that more to girls than to guys. At least from what I’ve seen.”
“Ugh.”
“I think there’s also the feeling that if you push on a guy too hard, he’ll stop arguing back and take a swing at you instead.”
“So what you’re saying is that I need to start punching people more.”
“Yeah,” Knox says. “Probably solve all your problems.”
Behind us, Winslow is making sweet little sleep woofs. “He’s chasing dream squirrels,” I tell Knox. “Maybe a rabbit.”
“Does he catch them?”
“No. Are you kidding? This is my fantasy, and so he never catches anything small and furry and cute. There are never any teeth involved. Just lots of happy chasing.”
Knox glances at the cast on his arm. “That dog only has one thing on his mind. Violence.”
“Hey!”
“I’m kidding,” he says. “Two things: violence and cuddling.”
“That’s better.”
“What’s Dr. O like? Why do you want to see him?”
“Well, I went to him for a lot of extra help. And I felt bad, because it was usually during his free periods, and I’d walk in to see him grading a giant stack of problem sets, but he’d put them aside and make time for me.
And eventually I just . . . started to tell him things.
We talked about college, at first, and places with good math programs. He wrote my letter for Northwestern.
When stuff with my mom got bad, he was the one who set me up with a counselor at school to talk about it.
And then the funeral. He was the only one of my teachers who came, and he and his wife brought brownies, and he told me to call them if I had any trouble on the road this summer. Which—”
So much for always thinking before I speak. My mouth ran way far ahead of me. The funeral? Really?
And I know Knox was paying attention. And I can tell he’s making a decision about what to say next.
“Do you think,” he asks, “we should see if Dr. O wants to go get lunch with us?”
“No,” I say, relieved beyond words, beyond reason. “I think that would be too complicated to work out.”