Into My Heart Page 7

  ******

  Coefficient of Restitution

  By reciting basic integrals and integrals that involved logs and exponents and now, integrals that involved trigonometric functions, the horrendously familiar feeling of Katrinaphobia had mostly dissipated. My legs were still in the X Quadrant of 'slightly gelatinous' but I surmised that that had more to do with the lingering, Bromine-like odours of Connerphobia, which was now as tangible to me as a Equipotential Surfaces.

  I had done quite a bit of daydreaming on the bus ride home. In my imagination, I was this X-Men-esque superhero who told off Conner and Matt in wry, witty, cool way before kicking ten shades of shite into them. Then I went on to win the Nobel Prize for my extensive research in the field of Chemistry. Then a crotchety old man who smelled like prune juice and wet dogs sat next to me and complained bitterly about having to pay a twoonie to ride the bus. I told him that he should've just dumped in a handful of change because bus drivers never really check your change count unless you looked like a hoodlum. He then informed me that I ought to pull a seaweed pie out my arse. So I replied by saying, "Physics can be divided into four realms, classified as Classical Physics, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. The latter three make up Modern Physics."

  The old man burped at me.

  Across the street from my house, Mr. Shah, impeccably dressed in a charcoal grey wool suit and silky maroon tie, was crouched in the middle of his immaculate lawn, a metal ruler in one hand, Mrs. Shah's good sewing scissors in the other.

  I ditched my schoolbag and my sandals on my front steps and shuffled over. It was always a bit of a risk trying to talk to Mr. Shah while he was manually grooming his lawn...he felt that his lawn deserved the utmost of attention and didn't take well to mindless interruptions...but I hadn't spoken to him since the weekend so I was willing to chance it. "How's it going Pops?" I cried, calling him what Suril always called him.

  "There are some blades of grass that have done growing upwards of ten centimetres," Mr. Shah indignantly informed me in his thick, Gujarati accent. He pushed up his thin glasses with the orange handles of Mrs. Shah's scissors. "Disarray in our surroundings reflect disarray in our souls Jane dikra. This is why I do not like any kinds of the mess."

  "I can get my old Crayola safety scissors and a ruler and I can help too," I offered, stopping short of the Bromocresol Green grass. You needed both Mr. Shah's respect and permission before you were allowed to step onto his lush, luxurious lawn.

  "There are no worries Jane," he said, meticulously measuring those overgrown offenders against his ruler. "We mustn't rush this process into an inauspicious time with too many snippers, no matter how well the intentions."

  That made sense to me...you couldn't rush a Redox Titration now could you? "So how's Suril feeling today? I saw him this morning and I think his black eye isn't that black."

  Mr. Shah began snipping as his narrow chest swelled with pride. "Suril is a strong bamboo in the face of the winds of adversity. This he gets from my side of the family. We always did suffer greatly. I did not have any pair of shoes until I was nine years of age. There was a goat infestation in our village you see. Then my sister Dwipavati was forced to endure a most unfortunate parrot-like nose. My Mother, she always thought that my Father was too fond of watching the pretty college girls but really it was only his lazy eye."

  "Amblyopia you mean," I clarified, flopping down onto the driveway next to Mr. Shah's black Toyota Camry.

  "Oh bless you. And then of course my own Bhagirathi Auntie was cursed by the Black witch from Navsari. First Auntie would only eat tamarind and sing the Laxshmi Aarthi at all hours of the night. Then she took to running amuck in the village with her hairs unbound and no jewellery while wearing the butcher's champaals. Finally she tried to elope with a blind water buffalo named Kaniya. They still talk of it back home, much to the eternal shame of my family."

  I made teeth prints in the back of my hand and then erased them with my finger as good as I could. "How did you know the Black witch was really a witch and not just someone whose family had to endure a daughter that looked like a Black witch?"

  "We know the witch was a witch because she killed her own husband and ate his liver," Mr. Shah replied, crouch-walking to another spot of lawn that had more uneven glass blades...or so I guessed because I couldn't see any Significant Figures lurking about. "She cooked the liver korma style with coconut paste and mango chutney and cassia bark. This is how one becomes a witch you see. My own Mother wanted to become a witch at one time but when the Black witch from Chikli told Mother that she needed to eat the liver of a loved one, Mother thought she was being bamboozled by her debtors and beat the witch. She developed severe arthritis in her hands shortly afterwards."

  "How come you have to use a liver?" I asked, rubbing my running nose against my knee. "Why can't you use the small intestines or the pituitary gland?"

  "Who can know with these witches? Perhaps the liver is the best tasting organ when sautéed in ghee and cardamom." Mr. Shah looked over at me as he pushed up his glasses. "So Mummy has told me that you have told her that you have hired an Italian chap to make chat masala out of this Conner Bonner rascal. This is the excellent work of a true friend, you know this? Mummy and me thank you very truly and deeply."

  I sat up straight and beamed with pride. Even Mr. Shah knew Rafe was a chap, hee hee hoh. "Well I couldn't do it myself, Conner's too big for me and I've got arms like baklava." The bruises starkly standing out on my arm attested to that. "But I knew I had to do something because Suril's my best friend ever and so I asked around at school and Rafe came recommended to me."

  Mr. Shah beamed back at me as he took out his wallet. "How much is this Race fellow asking exactly? Does he take Visa? Post-dated cheques? Have you see any of his prior beatings? What is his signature style?"

  "Well Rafe's older brother is a Corrections Officer and he's the size of a three bedroom bungalow," I told Mr. Shah. "And Rafe says he doesn't want any money, he just wants me to tutor him so that he can graduate with honours for his Mom."

  "A hired hoodlum with a heart of gold biscuit," Mr. Shah declared, putting away his wallet. He returned to snipping. "It is like an Amithab Bachaan Hindi filmi no?"

  "The Analytical Method of vector addition and subtraction uses vector components," I reminded Mr. Shah. "Ax equals A cos theta and Ay equals A sin theta, if you recollect."

  Oh how we did chortle.

  When I went back home, I found Grandma in the living room with Dripper Ferguson, playing WWE Smackdown on PS2. Dripper was twelve years old and his real name was Fernando but as he had a lot of bad allergies that mostly disturbed his proboscis region...well even his Mom and Dad called him Dripper.

  Grandma and Dripper were battling it out in a Cage Match and Grandma was kicking tush, as per usual.

  "Mexican surfboard!" she hollered as her man Triple H, put Dripper's man Batista, into said devastating move. "Ooooh yeah and now a camel clutch! You're going down to China town loser!"

  There was a steely look of intense concentration on Dripper's flushed face as his thumbs worked furiously. Both of his nostrils were dripping profusely but he had no time to wipe as Grandma was now using her Super move.

  I headed into the kitchen amidst the sounds and stamps of Grandma doing her victory dance and Dripper saying words that his parents wouldn't've been too chuffed to hear. There was nothing for me to see that I hadn't seen a thousand times before. Word had gotten around among the neighbourhood boys that Grandma was a video game genius and now kids from all over came by to challenge her. So far, Grandma's remained the undisputed champion of everything from Tekken to Mortal Kombat to all versions of X-Men and Spiderman games. Even I couldn't beat her and I'd tried once when she'd been messed up after winning a Pumpkin Pie Eating contest. She had eaten eleven pie and then barfed brown slime for about twenty minutes. I had gotten most of the action on film and the pictures now proudly hung in the downstairs bathroom for some good eye cand
y while dumping.

  I poured a bunch of mini, double chocolate chip cookies into a saucepan, since all the good bowls appeared to be lazing about the sink, and then doused the whole pan with un-pulpy, un-ricey, un-pinky, pure Homogenized milk. I got a spatula (there also seemed to be a spoon mutiny) and dug in as best as I could. I opened up my Physics text book and got through my homework sheet in exactly seven minutes flat. Then I picked a chapter at random, Electromagnetic Induction and Power Generation, and did a bunch of problems for fun. It was a good way to pass time though obviously not very edifying as I'd gone through this textbook when I'd been thirteen or so.

  Mostly I was just doing what I liked so that I didn't have to do what I didn't like, namely my stupid English assignment on stupid The Edible Woman. I hated The Edible Woman as much as I loved Atomic Physics. I wanted to give the stupid book to Guido to eat for dinner, as it was such an environmental waste. Who cared if some brainless woman couldn't eat food because she didn't like her fiancé or had low self-esteem or whatever the point of the book was? Why would anyone think that was worth analysing?

  Grandma bounced in a while later. She was wearing her yellow Sketchers and a velour J Lo-style tracksuit that matched her purple hair. "Dripper left with his nose running at sixty kph again," she announced, taking out a chocolate silk pie from the fridge. She rummaged around the cutlery drawer and came up with a ladle. "I beat him at a Hardcore match, a Cage match, a Ladder match and three Handicap matches. Since I got no qualms about saying bad things about kids, I'm thinking that Dripper's a real dumbarse shithead."

  I tipped my chair backwards so that I could dump my pan onto the pile of dishes festering in the sink. "Grandma, it's getting to the End Point of the Titration again."

  Grandma huffed an enormous sigh as she sat down next to me and stuck the pie between us. "I was hoping to put it off for as long as I could," she admitted, polishing her ladle on her sleeve.

  I wiped cookie milk off of my spatula and onto my jeans. "If we wanna get rid of those funny smells coming out the sink then we gotta. It's the only way."

  "I'll phone our favourite old crow Edith then," Grandma relented. "Who knows, maybe this time she'll have shaved off that flourishing moustache."

  We looked at each other and started giggling helplessly as we dug into the chocolate pie. Grandma might not've have been too great with this cleaning business but when it came to making desserts, she really knew how to predict relative solubilities.

  "So you do any drugs today?"

  I dragged my spatula along the tip of my tongue. "Noh."

  "Skip any classes?"

  "No."

  Grandma waggled her eyebrows at me. "Kiss any boys?"

  "No."

  "No?" Grandma accidentally dropped her ladle and got brown, gushy pie innards all over the table. "What's the point of going all the way to school then, if you weren't gonna kiss that Rafe character?"

  "I've never kissed him, he always kisses me," I corrected, taking a swig of milk out of the milk bag.

  "Player, man-slut, it's all the same lumpy shite no matter how you boil the turnip," Grandma scoffed, getting chocolate on her nose as she ate out of her ladle.

  "It's a lot harder to kiss around when you're in school and Katrinas lurk about the lockers." I shuddered, my insides shrivelling. "She wasn't too thrilled when Rafe called me 'Janie' either. I blurted out some facts about the Tyndall effect, which luckily she found hilarious and then I booked it a la the Book Mobile."

  Grandma levelled a knowing gaze on me. "So he calls you 'Janie' eh? No one calls you that except me."

  I pushed my spatula through the pie some more. "Does that mean something?"

  Grandma shrugged. "I dunno but it seems worth mentioning. So is Rafe still making you go to that party to smooch him?"

  "Yes," I lied, squirming guilty in my chair. While I still wanted to go to Conner's party about as much as I wanted to reread The Edible Woman, I could no longer say that Rafe was making me go because he'd given me the option to back out. I didn't want to let Grandma know what had changed between us because that meant telling her what Conner had done to me and I knew she'd go ballistic...not to mention that Dorothy Urone's husband owned a hunting rifle and I didn't want to see Grandma in jail for first degree murder. I didn't dare attempt to socialize with Edith Duggin on my alone.

  Grandma didn't notice anything amiss, probably because I'd never lied to her before. "I don't think this is such a bad thing, you going to a party. You may as well go to one high school party...you can take lots of pictures of people doing stupid things because they're plastered and then blackmail 'em. Plus, I think Rafe should swing round here and pick you up Saturday night. Meera agrees with me too; she wants to personally thank him for agreeing to rough up Suril's attacker. And then you know, we can scope him out and see if he's worthy enough for you."

  "Rafe's already coming to pick me up." I took another guzzle of milk that spilled down my chin. "He thinks we should go a bit late so that Conner will be inebriated by the time we get there. Hopefully Katrina will be too."

  "I just wanna see the guy who gave my granddaughter her first smacker. I'd like to toast him...at the rate you were going I didn't think anything other than grub was gonna get past that blabbing science mouth of yours."

  "It's not five eighths bad, this kissing stuff," I mused, sucking milk out of my hoodie. "I mean I liked it as much as I like finding the centres, vertices, foci, and asymptotes of various hyperbolic graphs. I guess I can see why so much people like to do it."

  Grandma patted my cheek with her ladle. "Well welcome to the planet Earth, Janie."

  I bounced in my seat as I tried to lick chocolate off my cheek. "The Earth has a known mass of 5.98 x 10 to the 24 kg. The Earth has mean radius of 6.37-"

  "How much homework you got today?" Grandma interrupted, rolling her eyes. She'd always maintained that excessive talks of science made her bowels itch.

  "A fair bit, since I barely got anything done last night." Here I paused to give Grandma a dirty look. She shoved a chocolate curl into my mouth. It was hard to be irritated with her when chocolate was melting inside my mouth. "I was gonna start reviewing for my-"

  "Tough shitsticks, you can catch up on all that boring crud later." Grandma took a gulp of milk from the milk bag. "I was thinking we oughta go downtown and visit that Lucan friend of yours."

  My heart skittered in such a way that I was forcibly reminded of Galileo's observations on the four moons that orbited Jupiter which eventually led to the conclusion that simple harmonic motion is the projection of uniform circular motion on a diameter of the circle in which the latter motion occurs. "You want Lucan to do your tattoo?"

  "It wouldn't hurt to see his work and hear what he's got to say." Grandma waggled her sparse eyebrows. "Plus I wanna check out this studly brain soulmate of yours."

  "He's a TA Grandma," I gushed, sighing. "Of Advanced Calculus and Partial Differential Equations!"

  "Yeah yeah I know, you've only told me that a billion to the ten times," Grandma complained, snorting loudly.

  I rolled my eyes back. Grandma may have been the most electromagnetic Grandma this side of the Ozone Layer but she sure didn't know too much about Scientific Notation. "Base 10 with an exponent...that's Scientific Notation. What you've said isn't correct."

  Grandma stuck her finger in the pie and then in my ear.

  Grandma got out her good cigars and invited Edith Duggin over while I strategically retreated to my chambers. Or 'hid' as Grandma liked to call it. I farted around on my computer for a bit, looking up things other people had written about The Edible Woman to get some ideas for my assignment. It was all way too boring to read so I didn't bother. Instead, I found a story about a boy masturbating into a banana peel and I sent it to Suril to cheer him up. I labelled the e-mail 'Trig. Assignment A-4' which was our codename for 'Smuts Inside, Do Not Open In Presence Of Parental Units'. That was a good system, I thought.

  Then I took off my little, black hoodie
and green t-shirt and hunted around for a good science something to wear that would make Lucan laugh. I settled on a small, brown t-shirt Grandma had gotten off E-bay for me. In sparkly purple letters it read 'KNiFe'. Beneath that, in smaller purple letters, it said, 'The only weapon that can be made from Potassium, Nickel and Iron'. I chortled so hard that my nose ran a tributary wild enough to rival Dripper. I put KNiFe on over a ratty, orange long-sleeve top to hide my bruises from Grandma and sat down to get some boring Global History reading out of the way.

  Grandma came up to my room a long while later. I had ditched Global History ages ago and was happily immersed in the world of 'Applied Vector Analysis'. "Edith finally decided to bugger off," Grandma announced. She smelled like her peaches and cream cigars. "She spent a hundred years blabbing on about her son's prostate check-up and the big fight Doris and Lester Cavendish has last night and then she got in a fucking funk with me because apparently she seen you wearing no shoes while you were out talking to Naran today "

  "I believe in the freedom of the foots," I announced, sticking my foots out of my blankies to examine at them. Surely enough, they seemed quite liberated. "Anyhow Pops didn't care that I had no shoes on, he was too busy doing touch-ups to the lawn with scissors again."

  "That Edith just likes to stick her moustache into other people's business," Grandma said, scowling. "So what if you weren't wearing shoes? It's not like you took a leak on her clematis trellis like I did that time I was drunk on Heineken."

  "Least she cleaned our kitchen up. I heard her doing dishes for a Woolly Mammoth's age."

  "Yeah, you know how I get when I'm baking." Grandma sat down on the edge of the bed. "How about we go out to eat after this tattooing business? That way we don't gotta wash any dishes." She nudged my foot, all sly. "Maybe we can even invite this Lucan fellow along, eh?"

  "He never did get to show me his course syllabuses," I said dreamily. I didn't think I could ever look at the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics the same way again.

  Grandma reapplied her frosted violet lipstick and matching opaque eyeshadow and we were off. It took us about a half an hour to get downtown to the waterfront because of all the six o'clock traffic. Grandma was listening to one of her favourite metal band CDs and yelling at all the 'slowass yuppie shit' drivers. So far she'd given the middle finger to about fourteen different drivers. I just read 'Molecular Modeling in Heavy Hydrocarbon Conversions' and tuned out the screechings of System of a Down and the screechings of Grandma.

  Grandma found a great handicapped parking spot and parallel-parked in about two seconds. She wasn't what anyone would call handicapped but that hadn't stopped her from coercing Dr. Polanski into giving her a handicapped parking hanger for the car. Thusly, we had access to all the best spots. I always felt a bit guilty at using up prime parking spots but Grandma maintained that paying taxes all her life and not spitting (that much) on Cop cars enabled her a few perks now that she was in the prime of her later years.

  We watched the ferry and a cargo ship and a couple of recreational yachts pass by as we walked through the evening crowds that littered the waterfront.

  "This is fucking exciting," Grandma told me as we skirted around a group of chatting Mommies and their strollers. "I've wanted a tattoo for years. I could do a tribute to you, the best thing in my life, and get the Quotient Formula tattooed on an arse cheek."

  I burst into giggles at that image. "Quadratic Formula Grandma!"

  Kismet, the tattoo parlour Lucan worked at, was located in between Pro-Skate, a shop for skateboarders and a Thai restaurant called House of Spice. A distinguished looking old guy wearing pleated, tweed trousers and a button-down shirt the colour of Grandma's hair was going into Kismet the same time as we were.

  "After you two beautiful ladies," he proclaimed gallantly, holding the door open for us. He was eyeing Grandma in a way that made me think that he thought she was as cooltastic as the Multiplication of Vectors in Coordinate Form with Scalars.

  "Thanks a crapload man," Grandma replied, eyeing him back. I could tell that she liked his full head of white hair and wino-rosy cheeks.

  I guessed Grandma couldn't wait around for Mr. Yakama forever...not as long as he was unwilling to exorcise the ghost of his dead wife from his vegetable crisper.

  Kismet was an electromagnetic kind of place. The glossy floor tiles were huge black and forest green squares. The black painted stone walls were covered with hundreds of tattoo designs that were all framed and mounted behind panes of glass. Most of the main room was taken up by a cosy seating area situated on a raised platform that was made up of a tattered sofa, a bunch of comfy looking arm chairs and an enormous chrome coffee table that was covered with tattoo magazines and books. Nearby was a bulky looking computer, on which two biker fellows were currently surfing.

  To our right was a large, glass front counter. An Asian girl was sitting behind it, reading and slurping at a blue slushie. Her bottom lip had three silver rings poking out of it and her nose, one glittering stud. Her long, black hair was dyed fuchsia at the tips and was streaked with blond. Her arms were covered in tattoos. She was wearing dark green lipstick and frosted silver and coral eyeshadow.

  "Hey guys," she said, setting down her book. She'd been reading a cheesy Harlequin romance that featured a blond, shirtless Viking man and a half-clothed redhead who seemed to be revealing quite a lot of leg on the cover. The book was called 'Heated Hearts in Heat'. "Kickin' eyeshadow Grandma."

  "Yeah same," Grandma responded, avidly glancing around. "That a good read?"

  The girl shrugged. "I'm reading it for the funny sex scenes. This Viking buddy just pierced Scottish chick's 'dew-lined secret' with his 'velvet-sheathed lance of pleasure'."

  We all had a good snigger at that.

  "Motions along perpendicular axes are independent," I guffawed, smacking my thigh.

  "Holy Noah's Ark," the distinguished old guy suddenly blurted out. He was looking torn between being amused and being appalled. "Er...maybe I should come back."

  "I didn't see you back there Myron," the Asian girl said, leaning forward to shake his hand. "Pierce is just in the back getting ready for your second sitting. You can take a seat if you'd like, he'll be out in a couple." She winked at him. "You can borrow my book – I'll point out all the juicy parts."

  "Reiko...err...that's unnecessary." Myron flushed a fetching shade of dusky rose.

  "So what're you getting done?" Grandma asked Myron, sniggering.

  "A portrait of my daughter," Myron replied proudly, his face still resembling an iced cupcake. He unbuttoned his shirt and showed us the outline of a woman's determined face over his heart. "She beat breast cancer this summer."

  "That's some coolass shit," Grandma approved, leaning in for a closer look.

  Myron blushed again.

  Reiko glanced between Grandma and me. "So which one of you guys is looking to get done up today?"

  "It's me," Grandma declared, straightening importantly. "I want something that involves a tarantula in memory of the one that bit me on my honeymoon in Rio. And a lot a blood if you can manage it. Preferably in puddles."

  "You got it Grandma," Reiko said, giving her a thumbs up.

  "There's a tarantula design over there," Myron told Grandma, pointing to the wall.

  Grandma hastened over excitedly, Myron hot on her heels.

  "If I was going to get anything, I'd get derivatives like Lucan did," I told Reiko, twisting some of my hair around my finger and chewing it. "Is Lucan here today? I'd like to see him because he's my brain soulmate after Suril, who's my best friend."

  "He's in the back, cleaning up his station before he takes off for the night." Reiko leaned across the desk to peer at me. "Say, you aren't Jane are you?"

  My hair fell out of my mouth in surprise. "I am in as much as overlapping waves algebraically add to produce a resultant wave."

  "Lucan told me all about you!" Reiko took a big slurp of her slushie. "He said he met the cutest, smartest girl last night who wa
s all into his nerdy tats."

  I beamed at that description of me. A cool TA with tattoos thought I was the cutest, smartest girl! That was like the French Physicist Charles Coulomb telling me that F equals k (q1q2/r squared). "I never heard about anyone getting mathematical tattoos before but I sure like the idea of it!"

  "Lemme tell you, Lucan's probably the only guy in Canada who's got Math tattoos," Reiko replied, laughing.

  "And that's as much of a tragedy as messing up a Hess's Law question, I say." I watched Grandma get excited over one design and Myron flash his dentures at her. I leaned across the counter and said confidentially to Reiko, "I think that Myron likes my Grandma."

  "I was kinda getting that vibe too." The phone rang so Reiko gestured to a bunch of big binders sitting on the far side of the counter. "The last binder's all Lucan's work if you wanna check it out."

  I flipped through it while Reiko took the call and Grandma and Myron got into a conversation with the two biker dudes. I didn't know a whole lot about art but even I could see that Lucan was extremely talented. He'd done everything from black and white portraits to graffiti-style images to religious and tribal artwork. I was studying an intricate tattoo of the Last Supper, feeling as in awe as whenever I used the Conservation of Momentum Principal, when I heard Lucan say my name.

  He was coming out of the back rooms wearing a very tight, black sleeveless t-shirt that showed off his muscular arms and tattoos and low-slung, lanky jeans. His messy hair was falling into his eyes and he had a day's worth of scruff around his thin sideburn-to-sideburn goatee.

  I set down his binder, beaming. "Hi Lucan!"

  I got a good surprise because he strode over to me and enveloped me a very huge kind of hug. He was warm and strong and smelled like a freshly photocopied sheet of Transcendental Functions I once had. "Hey cutie."

  "All the tattoos you've done are as integral as that Math Limerick you showed me," I declared fervently, gazing up at him with wide eyes. "You're really, really 10 to the nineteen really good!"

  "Thanks Jane." Lucan leaned against the counter next to me, grinning. "You really loved that Math limerick didn't you?"

  "It was as beautiful as your Calculus tattoos," I answered breathlessly. "Next time we have to do one of those dumb 'bring in a poem to analyse' assignments in English, I'm bringing in the Math limerick!"

  "I could tattoo it across your stomach," Lucan drawled out, winking at me. "It'd give your English teacher a shock and me an excuse to see you topless."

  I laughed so hard that my whole face dripped like Reiko's slushie.

  Grandma saw me hooting and left Myron and the two bikers to inspect Lucan.

  "This is my Grandma." I hiccupped a bit as I wiped my nose on a hair tie I found in my pocket.

  "So you're the infamous teacher of Calculus with the cool tattoos that Janie hasn't shut up about," Grandma announced, looking Lucan up and down like he was an Inertial Coordinate System that needed analysing.

  "Advanced Calculus Grandma," I corrected, digging my fingers into my eye corners to scoop out water.

  "So you're the infamous Grandma who's more hip than Laplace's Equation." Lucan shook her hand, smiling. "I'm actually going off shift now but if you'd like to come back tomorrow after four, I'll be here all night and I can start a design for you." He gestured to the binder filled with his work. "You check out my work and see what you think. If you're not into it, you can look through the other binders; we've got five other artists working here. Reiko and Pierce are here now and Carter should be here soon if you're into their work at all."

  "Lucan's artwork is as brilliant as Torricelli's Theorem," I told Grandma, doing a bit of the 'I-have-to-pee' dance in excitement.

  "I can't say I've ever had my artwork compared to a Physics equation," Lucan remarked, chuckling.

  "Hell, that sounds like a good way of thinking," Grandma informed Lucan, as though I hadn't said anything. "I'll look through your portfolio to make sure it's not complete shit but if Janie says that it ain't half bad then I'll believe that. Plus that Myron back there said I could stick around to watch him get done up so that I'd have a good idea of how all this tattooing hoopla works."

  "Myron's probably got about four or five hours of work left on his portrait," Lucan said. "Most likely he'll only get through an hour tops today – the chest is one of the most painful places to get tattooed. It's all nerves and shit. But if he doesn't mind you watching, than I'd recommend it. Pierce is an excellent artist and he'd be happy to answer any questions you might have."

  "Well fuck, no wonder Janie likes you so much," Grandma exclaimed, blinking purple eyeshadow at Lucan. "You're chock full of fortified information and you're as cute as a ladybug to boot."

  "Coleoptera Coccinellidae," I mumbled around a mouthful of my knuckles, blushing a little. Originally I hadn't given a thought to whether Lucan was cute or not cute or otherwise but somehow, between him being a TA of Advanced Calculus and Partial Differential Equations and liking my t-shirt and knowing who Max Planck was and his Calculus tattoos and the way he'd quoted the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics to me, I realized that I thought Lucan was a bit cute indeed.

  Though obviously not in a cheek-pinching, forehead-kissing manner like Rafe was.

  Laughing, Lucan said, "I'm actually heading off to get some coffee before I have to meet with a couple of my students. You wanna come with me Jane?" He put his arm around me in a friendly manner and looked at Grandma. "If that's okay with you Ma'am."

  "Call me Grandma, everyone else does." Grandma was staring as Lucan's arm draped around my shoulder like it was the Ptolemaic model of the Universe. "You sure you don't wanna watch Myron with me Janie?"

  I spit my wrist out of my mouth. "I'd much rather like to have a civilized conversation about Mathematics, thanks."

  Lucan squeezed my shoulder. "I'll have her back here safe and sound and enriched with knowledge."

  Grandma snorted and made stern eyes at Lucan. "I'm gonna tell you one thing pal so you better listen up good."

  Reiko popped over, her phone call finished. "Give it to the cradle robber Grandma!" she whooped as she flicked her slushie straw at Lucan.

  Lucan, without turning around, smacked his free hand backwards into Reiko's forehead and shoved her away. "Shut it."

  "If you wanna get fancy with my granddaughter than you damn well better use a fucking condom."

  I reddened in abject embarrassment at Grandma's obvious ignorance. "Grandma," I whined, squirming uncomfortably in Lucan's grip. "Don't you know by now that a condom is only one hundred percent effective when coupled with birth control pills, a female condom, a sock and abstinence?"

  Grandma ignored me. "And don't forget that a girl's body ain't no fucking bicycle neither."

  Lucan and Reiko burst into laughter. I didn't know what they were laughing at but I loved to laugh so I joined in for shits (literal) and giggles (figurative).

  "The half-life of Promethium is 17.7 years," I guffawed, sagging against the counter.

  "Laugh all you want but I don't know where you've been and with what skanks," Grandma told Lucan. "You might have one of them weird Jungle diseases like Lassa fever or the Clap."

  "I promise you that I have no strange diseases and that I won't dishonour your granddaughter on the way to Grabba Jabba," Lucan gasped, struggling to stop laughing. "All I'd like is the Mathematical pleasure of Jane's company."

  "The sum of two functions with limit zero has limit zero," I announced, happily beaming up at Lucan.

  "The product of a bonded function and a function with limit zero has limit zero," Lucan answered back, hugging me with his arm.

  "Well that's more like it," Grandma commented. She punched Lucan in the shoulder. "I like you just fine kiddo so you better make sure I stay that way otherwise you'll be pissing blood for days."

  "You're the fucking shits Grandma," Reiko proclaimed and gave Grandma a high five.

  Before Lucan and I left, I got to meet Pierce, the other tattoo artist who was wo
rking with Reiko that night. Pierce was a tall, beefy redhead with long, braided hair and a braided beard to match. He was covered in tattoos and even had some kind of a Celtic design tattooed on the left side of his face, though most of it was obstructed by bushy, orange facial hair. Myron was eager to show Grandma his tolerance against pain so they headed off to the back rooms with Pierce discussing safety procedures with Grandma. Reiko, who was now sketching a sexy Greek maiden for one of the biker guys, waved as we left and told Lucan to be gentle with me.

  "Like you can be gentle when it comes to Math," I scoffed as we started walking through the crowds. It was now dark out. "Are Triple Integrals in Cylindrical Coordinates for those faint of aorta I ask you?"

  Lucan gave me a sidelong glance. He was looking amused for some reason. "Did I mention that your shirt owns? It's as good as the one you were wearing yesterday."

  "It's measuring the acceleration of gravity with a pendulum level genius isn't it?" I peered down at my KNiFe-embossed chest, twisting my head so that I could reread the message. I burst into uproarious laughter. "It's so funny because you can't make a commonplace weapon out of Potassium! Potassium oxidizes at a rapid rate in air to give off flammable gas and it catches fire spontaneously when exposed to water!"

  "Maybe that's why it should be made into a weapon," Lucan suggested, arching an eyebrow.

  "Well it's also an extremely soft metal that you could easily cut through with a knife. Lithium is the only metal lighter than Potassium."

  "Don't you mean a KNiFe?" Lucan asked, lightly tugging on the shoulder seam of my t-shirt.

  I chortled so hard that I stumbled into a Pomeranian and would've fallen over the yipping little footstool if Lucan hadn't grabbed my hand. He had to apologize to the irate owners because I was hooting too hard to.

  "You have a hickey on your neck," Lucan suddenly said, watching me as I mopped my drooling eyes with my sleeve. He was still holding my hand with long, warm fingers.

  "It was a Nitric Acid spill type of accident," I admitted, rubbing off liquid from around my nose. "Rafe got carried away when we were practising. Maybe he forgot I was me and thought I was familiar old Katrina instead. It could easily happen you know, I was forgetting Specific Heat Capacity formulas when he was kissing me. It was bedlam I say, bedlam."

  Lucan stopped. We were standing on a pier which docked an enormous luxury yacht. "What do you mean 'practising'? Is that some kinda shit line Rafe fed you?"

  "No, we were practicing for the party." Since Lucan appeared blanker than Conner's last Academic Math test (he was obviously too stupid to take Pre. Calculus, the idiot lunkhead) I had to enlarge my Magnetic Field Strength at the Center of a Circular Loop. "You know, that dumb party we have to go to on Saturday where Rafe is gonna get Katrina to dump him."

  Lucan let go of my hand and sat down on a thick, wooden stump that chained the yacht to the dock. "By hooking up with you."

  "No no, not hardly, what with my Katrinaphobia being denser than Molybdenum and all." My teeth chattered at the thought of Katrina seeing me willingly kiss her boyfriend. "Rafe is gonna pretend to be in a highly inebriated state and then he'll force some kissing drama on me but I'll struggle like Katrina used to in Math class and then she won't try to hit me because she'll feel badly that her boyfriend kissed me against my will. Or at least I hope she will anyway."

  "Christ Jane, that's the stupidest scheme I've ever heard of." Lucan shook his head in disgust, his dark bangs dipping into his eyes. "Rafe is such a little shithead. Why the hell would someone as brilliant as you agree to be his guinea pig?"

  "Cavia Porcellus you mean." It didn't seem that Lucan had a very good memory, though I could understand that. Why would you want to waste time remembering trivial crap when you could immerse yourself in Calculus and Differential Equations of the Advanced and Partial persuasions? "I hired Rafe on Tuesday, remember? Getting Katrina to dump him was his price. And tutoring, which I like a lot more that having to kiss him in front of Katrina. But I'm just crossing my nose hairs that she won't make yakisoba out of my facial bone structure."

  Lucan was frowning. "What do you mean you hired Rafe?"

  I chewed my wrist thoughtfully. Perhaps Rafe hadn't spilled the 100mL Volumetric flasks to Lucan. "If you didn't know about Suril then how come you told me last night to phone you if things didn't work out with Rafe?"

  He ignored my question. "Who's Suril?"

  I straightened up, wiped my moist wrist on my jeans and met Lucan's gaze dead on. His eyes seemed very black against the dim nightlights that lined the boardwalk. "I don't think there's anything wrong with being gay, do you?"

  "I'm not a homophobe if that's what you're asking," he replied after a slight pause.

  "Suril's my best friend in the whole observable universe-"

  "Which we know to be 10 to the twenty-six metres away," Lucan interrupted, his lips quirking. "Or so I've been told on excellent authority."

  "And he's gay." I was rattling eagerly where I stood. Lucan thought I was an 'excellent authority'! "But over this weekend Conner McGregor, a very nasty boy from school saw Suril kissing Paulo and he bashed Suril really, really badly. I wanted to do something because I love Suril so much but I'm not very strong and I don't like violence and I'm non-confrontational too so I decided to hire someone to bash up Conner for me. Pseudo punk and Lord of the Rings girl from my English class said I should hire Rafe so I did. The party this weekend is at Conner's house and we're gonna go late so that he'll be good and inebriated and then Rafe is gonna break both his legs so he can't play football for the rest of the season."

  Lucan looked at me for a while. "Now that's a scheme."

  "It is isn't it!" I smiled shyly and munched on the side of my lip. "I thought of it all by myself. I had to take karma into my own hands if you know what I mean."

  "Well Rafe's still a little shit in my opinion but even he can beat the piss out of some drunk punkass." Lucan's eyes narrowed as he looked up at me. "And if he can't then you call me and I'll trash this Conner asshole and I'll tattoo 'cock-sucker' on his forehead. He won't be bashing anyone after that."

  I thought of the way Conner had made me feel, both yesterday when he'd threatened me and every time I looked at Suril's bruised face. "You're a very nice person," I uttered, feeling a bit of a lump inside my throat. "And not just because you remembered how far the edge of the observable universe is."

  Lucan tugged me closer to him. "Jane, I told you yesterday to call me if things didn't work out with Rafe because I'm interested in you."

  My eyes enlarged as my heart started to Race, as Mr. Shah called Rafe. "Like interested in me helping you with your classes? I can help you mark tests and assignments and things, for real! I may be only in grade twelve but I have an excellent grasp of Calculus fundamentals. I'm not lying, really, it's non-fiction."

  Lucan tweaked my nose. "Interested as in I might like to date you."

  I scrunched my face up, perplexed. That didn't make much sense even if Lucan was interested in Archaeology. "What like Carbon-14 dating? Or do you mean Half-Life and Rates of Decay problems?"

  He burst out laughing. "Sweetheart, what I mean is dating, as in what two people do when they like each other. As in I think you're cute because you have such a passion for Math and you have the brilliance of any Professor I've ever met and I'd like to hang out with you a lot more. If we ever did hook up then I can honestly say that you'd be like none of my other girlfriends...and that's pretty fucking wicked."

  "a plus bi plus cj plus dk is Hamilton's Quaternions," I blurted out, blushing the dark red of my 'Engineering Mechanics - Dynamics' textbook cover. "You really think I have the brilliance of a University Professor?"

  "You know a helluva lot more than most of the students I teach."

  More blood flooded my features. I recalled Suril telling me this morning that Lucan might want to kiss me because I was smart and sweet and funny and cute. That was quite the insightful prophecy on his behalf. "No one ever wanted to date me before
," I confessed, clutching handfuls of hair for something to do.

  "Well I got the impression last night that Rafe might want to, once he's finished with Katrina."

  I made earmuffs out of my hair. "Rafe says nice things to me and he makes me feel nice and he's my friend now but I don't think he'd like to 'hang out with me a lot more' as you call it. That doesn't exactly seem very cotangent, if you know what I mean."

  Lucan chuckled as he stood up. "How about once this party drama is over and if Rafe doesn't wanna date you, you call me?" He took my hand and tangled his fingers with mine. "That way Rafe won't get his panties in a big jealous bunch."

  I burst into giggles.

  Lucan held my hand the whole walk to Grabba Jabba, which was situated at the other end of the boardwalk, near the Ferry Terminal, and didn't seem to care that he was a super cool dude with tattoos and I was a nerd with stupid hair who'd never walked anywhere holding a boy's hand before. Then Lucan told me what he had done in his Advanced Calculus tutorial today and the homework that had been assigned and I forgot all about everything else until he mentioned the equation B equals T x N.

  "The T and the N are called the osculating plane," Lucan remarked, his voice deepening. "And that literally means the 'kissing' plane."

  "I know that," I murmured, heating up as my molecules shifted in the endothermic direction. "I read it in 'Applied Vector Analysis'."

  Lucan held the door to Grabba Jabba open for me. "At least now I have an excuse to study the osculating plane with you. We wouldn't want Katrina to catch on because you don't have enough practice kissing now would we?"

  My face boiled in hot blood. I felt much more shy than I had with Rafe because Rafe and I had just been practicing kissing while Lucan was talking about kissing me because he liked the Mathematical pleasure of my company. Plus Lucan was much older than I was and knew loads of wonderful things and he wanted to 'date' me.

  Over my protests, Lucan bought me a Blackberry Italian Soda and a haystack brownie. I supposed it was good that he'd paid because I only had a loonie and a dime in my pocket. He sat next to me in the booth and drank his black coffee while I talked about the density of a Lamina and the Maclaurin Series and the Area of a Surface of a Revolution and Simpson's Rule. He knew exactly what I was talking about and we had proper Calculus discussions and every now and then he'd touched my hair with coffee-cup warm fingers.

  "You're my brain soulmate after Suril," I uttered breathlessly. "I mean you're no Dummy Variable, that's a birefringent crystal clear."

  "Yeah, I've never been what you'd call a 'variable of integration' kinda guy," Lucan replied and laughed a kiss onto my cheek.

  It felt like he had tattooed me with his mouth because I could feel his heat through about four layers of skin.