Chapter 8 - I'll Be a Home for You

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JJ

I walk into the empty math classroom, immediately being stared down by old White men. Pictures of Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Archimedes, and the rest of their gang are hanging at the front of the room above the whiteboard. There used to be more of them, but Aang replaced them with our crew—Maryam Mirzakhani, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Terry Tao, and more.

My annoyance with him almost disappears, but then the cafeteria scene flashes in my head.

I tried to be nice because he stepped up at training yesterday. But why did he have to be such a jerk? Acting like I’m the only one who did something wrong last year. Okay, I shouldn’t have pretended I didn’t know him in front of Monique and Bryn. I shouldn’t have said that he’s not my type. But they’d noticed me staring at him in the corridor earlier that day and were insinuating I had a crush on him. And since a week before that, he’d called me “a vapid girl desperate for popularity,” admitting that I even knew him was the last thing on my mind.

The desk creaks when I throw my backpack onto it. A reminder on my phone goes off: Time to stretch!

I assess my loose, ripped jeans and pink crop top. It’s not ideal stretching attire, but I’m too lazy to change, and I have forty-five minutes until Mathletes. I do a quick warm-up in front of the whiteboard, set my timer to go off every thirty seconds, and put the phone on the floor. After some basic stretches, I move on to a left front split. Thirty seconds, and I turn into the right front one.

The door opens, and my back stiffens. Aang walks into the classroom with a stack of papers in his arms and stops dead in his tracks when he sees me on the floor. We stare each other down.

The timer goes off. He jumps and almost drops the papers. A scoff escapes me. He glares but walks around me to the teacher’s desk and starts shuffling the papers.

I move into a middle split and breathe deeply, attempting to lie down on my stomach. I have better stretches than Addy, and it has to stay that way.

The timer goes off again. I stand up and sneak a peek at the desk. The papers don’t look any more organized than they were before. What is he doing?

Focus on the stretches.

I kick my foot up and catch it above my head. I do thirty seconds of a heel stretch on both sides before moving on to a bow-and-arrow. I grab my right foot above my head with my left hand and thread my right arm across my leg. I smile and imagine being held in extension, the lights on me, loud music in my ears, the crowd shouting …

“What are you doing here?” He’s sitting at the desk, staring at me.

I drop my leg. “I’m stretching.”

“Why are you doing it here?”

“I had time before Mathletes started.” I shrug. “Since I got here on time, forty-five minutes early.” Early enough to make sure you didn’t change the schedule again. “However, you’re pretty late. I thought you were taking this math thing seriously.”

His nostrils flare. “You are so—”

The timer cuts him off.

I pick up the phone to switch off the timer. “I’m so what? I’m so smart? I’m so funny? I’m so pretty?”

He shuffles the papers with too much force.

“Do you need help with that? You seem to be struggling with putting the sheets in order.”

He slams the stack onto the desk. “Why are you actually joining Mathletes?”

“To get into Columbia.”

“Why? Do they have the best sororities?”

My phone digs into my hand. “You’re such a conde … condense … code …” My tongue tangles and my skin prickles. I should have used patronizing.

The worst possible thing happens. His eyes soften.

I turn on my heel and leave the classroom. I spend the next ten minutes in the bathroom, making sure the tears stay in my eyes and practicing condescending out loud in the mirror. The way it’s supposed to be pronounced, to avoid raising any questions.

Cursed Poland. If it wasn’t for the kids in my old class … if it wasn’t for the way they’d looked at me during English lessons … twenty pairs of ears and eyes, tracking my every syllable, like I was finally speaking my language, even though I was learning English just like them. So, I refused to speak out loud in class. If not for them, I wouldn’t have this problem now.

I blink away tears and refocus on Mathletes. It’s time for a vapid girl desperate for popularity and sororities to humiliate Aang at math.

When I come back to the classroom, the stack of papers is organized and everyone else is already there, sitting at the desks. All nine pairs of eyes shift to me.

“Hello, everyone!” I use my cheerleading smile and wave. “I’m JJ.”

They whisper to each other, looking at me.

Bile rises in my throat, and I’m transported back to Poland. To the murmurs, the raised eyebrows, the What is this Black girl doing here? stares. My pulse hammers against my wrists, and my vision gets spottier every second, until I hear the word cheerleader.

The tension bleeds out of me, and I can see clearly again. I’m not in Poland anymore. I’m in Massachusetts. They’re talking about me being a cheerleader. That’s good. That’s what I want.

“JJ! Welcome back!” Drew, now a senior, points to the free chair next to him.

“Hi, Drew.” I sit down, looking at his buzz cut. “What happened to your hair?”

“Lost a bet. Turns out 997 is a prime number. What happened to your hair?”

I shudder at the memory of my freshman-year curls. Or my frizzy, tangled bird’s nest, as I remember it. With the move, Dad didn’t have time to braid my hair anymore, and I was left to my own devices for the first time in my life. It was not pretty.

“Found a good hairdresser.” I toss my braids over my shoulder. “Do you like it?”

Drew leans in. “You look very good as a blond.”

I bat my eyelashes. “I know.”

“Okay, let’s start!” Aang shouts way too loudly, considering everyone fits in the first two rows of desks. “Welcome to the first Mathletes meeting of the year. We have four freshmen joining us. Everyone else, introduce yourself.”

A round of introductions begins. Besides Drew, there are two seniors and one junior I remember from my freshman year.

I smile at two sophomore girls. I’ll talk to them later. Tell them not to befriend cute Asian Americans who will spend most of their time monologuing about geometry and making you cry in a bathroom stall.

Speaking of which, Aang’s deep into explaining the intricacies of the Mathletes competitions.

“We send two teams, A and B, each consisting of four players, chosen based on the abilities demonstrated during the meetings, so please attend every week. Per regulations, each team must include one freshman and one senior, plus two sophomores or juniors. Since we won the state championship last year, we get a free pass to go to Nationals in March.”

Okay, so I win both Mathletes and cheerleading Nationals in March, and I’ll arrive at Columbia with a perfect American high school success story. Should be easy enough.

“Our first friendly competition is the Invitationals at Highbury High in a month.” Aang hands out exercise sheets. “Today’s topic is geometry.”

I smirk. I knew it. And I know what the first question will be.

“Before we do the exercises, let’s start with who’s Zu—”

“Zu Chongzhi?”8

“Yes!” Aang’s enthusiasm disappears when he realizes I’m the one who said it.

“Who’s Zu … Cho … Chu …” a baby-faced freshman with short locs stammers, trying to say it after me.

“Zu Chongzhi,” I repeat. “He was a Chinese mathematician. He held the record for the closest approximation of pi for over nine hundred years.”

A murmur of appreciation sweeps through the classroom. I look at Aang, and a gloating smile fills my face. “Do you want to continue?”

He narrows his eyes but doesn’t comment. Instead, he writes the mathematician’s name—using the Latin alphabet—and the symbol for pi on the board, and it’s aligned perfectly, like it was written with an invisible ruler.

He turns to us. “How about we play a fun game? Who remembers pi to the most decimal places?”

The younger students shout over each other, managing six decimal places between them. The upperclassmen push it to ten.

“Any more digits?”

“Eight,” I say.

His lips press into a thin line, but he writes the number down.

“Next one?”

“Nine.”

He writes it down. “Next?”

“Seven.”

He misaligns seven from the rest of the numbers. “Next?”

“Nine.”

“Next?” His knuckles go white around the marker.

“Oh, I think you should do the next one. As the captain, you know.”

“Oh yeah!” Drew says. “Show the cheerleader how it’s done!”

I wink at Aang, and he clenches his jaw so hard that he’s definitely going to get a headache.

He makes no move to write anything down.

I stand up and walk up to the board, my smile spreading. I take the marker out of his hand and fill in the next three numbers. “It’s three-two-three,” I say loudly before whispering so only he can hear me, “I memorized them earlier today. Figured you still only knew the first fourteen.”

There’s an interesting artery pulsing in his forehead.

“What’s next, Captain?” I push the marker back into his palm.

His fingers tighten, and for a second, he’s holding my hand.

I freeze. Aang’s hand goes slack, and the pen hits the ground. He quickly picks it up and turns to the class. “So … exercises.” His voice is hoarse.

I return to my seat at rapid speed and bury my face in the exercise sheet. This is what I should be focusing on. I answer the questions one by one. A-team, here I come.

Once everyone is ready to discuss the questions, Aang gets the freshmen to explain their answers. He gets more excited than they do when they get something right. He asks them for the reasoning behind the answers they got wrong. His tone falls into that effortless authority that made it impossible not to hang on to his every word when we were fourteen and chatting about math.

With every question, the freshmen grow more confident, and the hollowness in my chest grows larger as memories force their way into my consciousness. Sitting on the library floor, hidden between bookcases, textbooks spread around us. The moments I would catch him smiling at me, and he would avert his gaze and adjust his glasses.

That supportive smile was once given to me. The arguments made me laugh, not cry.

We’re on the last exercise.

“This one is extremely hard. It’s from Stanford’s Geometry 101 class,” Aang says. “I thought we could solve it together. Unless someone has an answer already?”

It’s a hybrid of geometry and logic questions. Since childhood, my parents have given me logic puzzles to solve. Good for medical thinking. So I have an answer, and I’m pretty sure it’s correct. But my hand doesn’t itch to go up.

Drew points at me. “JJ has an answer.”

“No, I don’t,” I say quickly.

He taps my exercise sheet. “I can see it.”

“I don’t think it’s correct, so we should go through it together.”

Aang stares at me. I avoid his gaze.

“Okay …” He frowns. “Let’s do it on the board together.”

It turns out my answer is correct. The hollowness consumes any satisfaction I would have felt just thirty minutes ago.

The bell rings, and everyone hurries out of the classroom. I try to pack up as fast as possible, but I drop my pencil case, and my stationery flies everywhere. One of my pink pens travels to the teacher’s desk, where Aang is grabbing his backpack. He spots the pen next to his foot and picks it up, turning it in his fingers. He walks past me and leans over my exercise sheet.

His eyes drill a hole in my paper. “Even I didn’t get it right on the first try.”

“Seems like you’re getting stuck on the A-team with me this year.”

“Unfortunately.” He grits his teeth like saying it has caused him great physical pain. “Welcome back.” He drops my pen on the desk and leaves the classroom.

8 祖沖之 (Jóu Chūng Jī)