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“Is it because as a woman you were worried you wouldn’t be taken seriously?” she asks.
“Yes.” I nod, slowly. “That’s very perceptive of you.”
Then she asks: “Have you some supporting documentation, anything we can upload to the website to accompany your article, and that isn’t in the journal’s paper? Something you held back from Forrester.”
I cock my head at her. “Supporting documentation?”
“You know, your notebooks, work in progress, scribbles, doodles, anything you have that would be good visual material for the project. Visuals are great for this sort of thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s messy. The messier the better!”
I rub a finger on my forehead. “Okay, let me think. Um…I don’t actually have much.”
She chuckles. “But you must have notes. You didn’t publish a pre-print, right?”
“A pre-print. No.” It’s unusual to publish a proof directly like I did. Normally you’d have a draft version made freely available for others to provide feedback on. I don’t have a pre-print. Obviously. I didn’t need one.
“I…I threw a lot of things away when I moved office. You know how it is. I might have thrown my notes, too.”
She waits for me to say more, a cloud of confusion in her eyes. “But you submitted them to the Forrester Foundation.”
Something tugs at the edge of my brain when she says that. “What do you mean?”
She tilts her head at me. “It’s part of the rules. You know that, right? The Forrester Foundation will only award the prize if you submitallthe notebooks. You have to show how you came to the solution.”
“Oh, right!” I blink, breathe a sigh of relief. For a moment I thought she meant…I don’t know what I thought. All I know is, I’ve already done that. I did that when I submitted the paper. “It’s all in the published paper.”
“Well, not really. Without supporting documentation, notebooks, workings, all that, they won’t give you the prize. I mean, these are the rules, you know that, right?”
I wish she’d stop asking me that. I laugh. “Of course I know that!” I raise my hand. “You know what, it doesn’t matter. I’ll dig up any relevant notebooks I have and bring them along.”
But I remember now. An email that came shortly after the Foundation confirmed my solution was accepted, something about sending them documentation. I ignored it, I don’t know why. I thought it was for their records or something. Now I wait until she’s gone to pore over the fine print on the Foundation’s website. And there it is.The submission must include the preliminary work that led to the discovery.Then a paragraph detailing what’s acceptable in terms of documentation.
I sit back. Push the palm of my hand between my eyes. I have a vague memory of knowing about this requirement, but I didn’t think it wascompulsory. Did Alex and I ever discuss this? Of course one requirement was that a paper be published about the solution in a reputable journal, and I’ve done that, and that’s enough, surely. Who cares how I got there?
It was stupid of me to destroy the notebooks. I should have copied them first, so I’d have the workings in my own handwriting. I could have added rings from overflowing coffee cups, spilled red wine. Make it look like I’d been working late at night.
I wasn’t thinking straight back then. Never mind. It will be fine. Of course it will be. They wouldn’t have said I’d won the Pentti-Stone otherwise. I’m sure this so-called requirement is not absolute. I mean, I solved it, didn’t I? The whole world knows I solved it. They could hardlynotgive me the prize! And if they ask, I’ll just say… something. I’ll think of something. It’ll be fine.
The tapas bar isn’t very far and June and I decide to walk. We’re almost there when the weather changes abruptly and we wrap our coats tighter, raise our collars and squint against the icy wind. I take her hand to hurry her along and we almost fall into the restaurant, laughing, our cheeks red and our coats sparkling with melting crystals.
It’s early enough to score a good table near the window. We drop ourselves on the hard wooden bench, rub our hands together and immediately order margaritas with lime juice and dry orange Curaçao. They arrive in jam jars while we scan the menu. Conversation flows, we find ourselves on a new level of friendship. I’ve asked her before about her personal life but she’s always been cagey. “I’m not in relationship, not anymore anyway,” she said. “Trevor. That’s his name. We were together for years, and eighteen months ago I found out he was seeing my best friend behind my back. That’s why I moved away and ended up here. New beginnings and all that. And the rent is cheap here.”
“I’m sorry, June. That really sucks.”
“Yeah, I’m getting over it. Tell me about your mother.” She rests her elbows on the table, hands knotted together.
I cock my head at her. “You want to know about my mother?” I rub my eye, unwind the scarf I’m still wearing around my neck and fold it on the bench beside me. “Okay, I’ll tell you about her.” I cross my arms on the table. “The best way to explain my mother is to tell you about my friend Hope.”
I take a sip of my drink. “I grew up in Youngstown and it was there, in middle school, that Hope arrived one morning, in the middle of term. As soon as I saw her sitting at her desk that day, I wanted to get to know her. It was like, friendship at first sight. She looked sweet, kind, with curly blonde hair, almost red, and she had chipped pink nail polish.
“Our teacher, Mrs. Johnson, asked for a volunteer to look after our new classmate, show her around, that sort of thing. I couldn’t raise my hand fast enough. I’d do it, absolutely. ‘You can count on me Mrs. Johnson,’ I said.
“I’d never had a real friend until Hope. Her parents were hippies who made clothes out of ethically grown cotton and sold them at markets and in local stores. I loved to hang out at her house, so much so that I was there all the time. It was warm and comfortable and even the furniture was welcoming, with its soft shapes you could sink into and its bright, happy colors. My parents didn’t care about making a home, let alone a welcoming one. They were too busy, and probably in some weird way thought it was beneath them, anyway. They worked, like, all the time. Even when they weren’t working, they were working. As a result, my house was spartan and neglected. Sometimes when they went out I would pull out the vacuum cleaner from under the stairs and clean the living room to within an inch of its life. I’d squeeze lemons into a cup of water and dip my fingers in, flicking droplets over the carpet so that my house would smell like Hope’s house—which it never did. I even made cushions once, with some fabric Hope’s mother gave me, red with big blue and green flowers. My parents didn’t notice. When I pointed this out to them, my parents looked around mildly bewildered and muttered something like, ‘very nice’.
“At Hope’s house, we’d sit on bean bags in her room and listen to Michael Jackson. She showed me her parents’ stash of pot once. ‘Smell that,’ she said. I thought it smelt like rotting mushrooms, which possibly wasn’t far from the truth. We’d talk about what we would do when we grew up, kind of like what Luis and I would do years later in college.
“But there was my mother. She disapproved, obviously, eventually, once she took the time to notice. Sometimes I think she simply didn’t like seeing me happy. That it went against her grain. I should be studying instead, or something.
“‘It’s okay, you’re rebelling. It’s what most girls your age do,’ she’d said. And I remember thinking,I’m thirteen years old. I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mother.”
