“Good,” he says, and I don’t know why, but it feels like he might be able to hear that voice inside my head.
First I spilled coffee on him. Now I’ve officially fallen apart in front of him too.
I avoid his gaze, but when I reach for my notebook and laptop to pack up, I realize my wrist is in his hands.
As if catching himself, he pulls back like he’s been burned and runs his fingers through the strands of hair falling across his forehead.
Before I can collect myself, Mr. Vaughn has already left the room, and all I’m left with is one single thought:
Why do I have the impression I scared my math teacher?
Everything around us is made of numbers. The first thing we do when we wake up? Check the time. Every object in our home was manufactured at some cost and sold at some price. Getting from point A to point B is just gallons of fuel and miles logged against the clock.
That’s why numbers have been the one constant in my life. With an alcoholic father who taught me how many beer bottles one can take to the head before you stop counting, I figured out that the only things in life that don’t come down to numbers are the ones I’ve never been able to understand.
Emotions. Feelings.
No mathematical formula can tell me what threshold of provocation will push a man to commit a crime, or what theequation looks like for someone falling instantly in love with another person.
I watch her weave back and forth across campus and try to work out what exactly is going on with Amalia Sanchez, more precisely why I can’t seem to pull my eyes or my mind away from her.
What makes her different? Is it the nerve she had to correct me in the middle of a lecture? Those eyes that go twice their size when she’s caught off guard? Or the fact that, apparently, a single question from me was enough to trigger a panic attack?
I know why I asked her that question. I don’t like people who think they’re smarter than me, especially students who believe they know more than they actually do.
But when I watched her focus drop and her hands start to tremble, something tightened in my chest.
Another new reaction.
And now, officially, I’m curious.
I watch her rush across the courtyard with that bun she’s wearing, exactly five strands escaping it, glasses slipping toward the tip of her nose, dressed like someone sneezed every color in the spectrum onto that dress.
And yet, why can’t I look away?
“Silas, how are you settling in with the schedule?” The dean’s voice reminds me I’m not alone in the staff room.
“No issues,” I answer, but my eyes are still on Amalia, who’s stopped to talk to some guy.
He looks familiar, maybe from class, but before I can place him, she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and pulls out her phone.
Did they just exchange numbers? Why would she do that? And why does that sit wrong with me?
“Did you manage to get settled in the new apartment? You know we could have arranged on-campus housing,” hecontinues, and I wish certain people could read the room to know when a conversation has run its course.
I could have stayed on campus, but I can afford to pay for my own place in the city.
Something nobody needs to know. No one would believe a professor’s salary covers that apartment, and they’d be right.
“Perfectly settled. Thank you, Rodolfo, but I have a class to get to.”
I don’t, but I know he won’t stop otherwise. And even if he’s well aware I have two free hours, he won’t push back because he can’t afford to lose a professor who turned down MIT and Imperial College London to be here.
I imagine he still crosses himself sometimes, wondering how I ended up choosing Mexico City over either of those.
Here, I don’t have to orbit politicians and self-satisfied men who think my value is being articulate enough to stroke their egos. Because that’s what I would have been doing at those institutions. Event after event, working the room for the people who hold the purse strings and fund every university program that matters.
Over the last five years, I’ve made more money than I’ll ever spend, and it’s precisely the way those people prefer to display that wealth that gets under my skin.
