Free Playing Keira by Jennifer Castle Page B

turn back to him now. The fact that he’s mentioned a girlfriend right off the bat can mean a few things. Either he wants to reassure me that he’s not flirting, but just being friendly. Or he wants to impress me that he’s capable of retaining a female who enjoys his romantic companionship. Or he’s just a dude who thinks his life is as fascinating to complete strangers as it is to him.
    I could give an icy, emphatic “uh-huh” and finish it off with a bitchy-air/window-gaze combo. But I realize that in talking to him, if you can even call it that, I’ve momentarily forgotten about the paralyzing anxiety of my situation. I’m stuck on this bus and next to this guy for another eighty minutes, at least. One of the things they say about me is that I know how to make situations work .
    “Go find the Shakespeare Garden,” I tell him. “It’s probably gorgeous this time of year.”
    “Oh yeah,” he says. “I’ve heard about it but I’ve never been. Mary-Kate will love that.”
    “She lives in the city?” This is another strategy I’ve found, to avoid talking about myself. Ask questions. Seem interested. People will be so happy for that interest, they won’t realize they’re in a one-way conversation.
    “In SoHo,” says Garrett. “She’s studying design at Parsons. We met last summer at a magazine internship.”
    “Are you a designer too?”
    “No, I’m a writer. Or at least, I want to be. Got another year and a half until my journalism degree at SUNY.”
    Of course, it had to be journalism. Which means there’s a good chance he’s had my dad as a professor for some English-department prerequisite course, or at least knows who my dad is, because in the microuniverse of the college, it’s hard not to know who my dad is. But he does not know my dad is my dad. He does not know anything about me. All he knows is Rayanne, who is not me. Suddenly, the possibilities are heady and I take a flying leap away from myself.
    “I think I’ve seen you on campus,” I say.
    “Yeah, you look familiar. You a junior?”
    “Sophomore.” This is true, in fact. I am a sophomore. At Mountain Ridge High School.
    “What are you studying?” he asks.
    “Mathematics.” Also true. Except of course, instead of a college-level course with a fancy name like Foundations of Analysis, I take Mrs. Modeski’s saggy, standard trigonometry. In fact, I’m the top student in that class. Some of the time.
    The other some of the time, I score a few points below a girl named Rory Gold. There are days when I am deeply annoyed with Rory Gold for that and don’t feel guilty about it. Other people have gotten in trouble for being shitty to Rory Gold, because she’s one of those autism-spectrum kids. But if I forced myself not to resent her because she has a disability, isn’t that prejudiced too? I actually see it as a kindness. Wouldn’t she rather I dislike her on her own merits, for who she is and not what she “has,” the same way I would with anyone else?
    Being first in that class—and by first, I mean first as calculated by a multifactor formula only I know and care about—is the one thing that seems to please my father about my math obsession. He doesn’t get it. He’s taught literature since a million years before I was born. He’s preoccupied with theory and interpretation, life in the abstract. For him, it’s all about the “bigger picture” and “reality as a whole,” but I don’t see it that way. I need to break life down into its smallest possible units, which is why math rocks my world.
    To me, math is how everything in life can be measured. I can understand it that way. And control it.
    Also, math is my mother.
    She was a professor of mathematics education, which means she taught future teachers how to teach math. I say was because I have no idea if she’s still doing that. So I can see my dad’s inner conflict: dismayed that I’m following my mother’s interests, but proud that at least I’m