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Smart Cookie
Abigail sat hunched over the napkin, scribbling with a black felt pen. Occasionally she'd look up at me as I talked and nod or frown or blink in that way that said I am listening, I'm just doing other things as well; she wasn't making this easy for me.
"I guess what I'm trying to say Bee is that... well, I think we work well together. I know all the cool cats and you're the smartest girl in the class. Since you got contacts and started wearing nicer clothes you're also like... well, one of the prettiest too."
She glanced up.
"No, the prettiest. Easily."
Her scrawls were indecipherable from where I sat but that wasn't uncommon, I rarely understood what she was up to when she jotted down her thoughts and equations. It was like trying to get it on with John Nash if John Nash had been a nineteen year old girl, which I'm pretty sure he never was. Abigail's pen caught and tore through one layer of the napkin. She lifted the tip, scraped the pulped paper and ink on an unused corner and continued. As did I.
"See, what I'm trying to say is that, we made all these changes and I know that it was because I asked you to, and now I can't help thinking..."
This part was a lie, it had to be a lie. I never thought, not in the way that Abigail thought. She quoted forgotten Pythagorean dictums and frequently conjured up her own mathematical symbols when she'd used up the entire Greek alphabet in one equation. She had a patent in for the square equivalent of pi, currently under review by the maths department at MIT. She might be the smartest cookie ever, but she was no good at understanding the human nature to lie.
"I can't help thinking that we're just not that good together anymore. Not the way we used to be."
She once needed me. I elevated her in social status and she elevated me by getting me good grades, explaining the simplest principles, correcting my mistakes, but always leaving me feeling small and worthless. That was the trade-off. And in return I did a whole geek-turned-prom-queen popularity thing I saw in a movie once. But now what?
Abigail's napkin had filled up fast and she seemed to be slowing down. She kept taking occasional sips from her Coke and frowning at the napkin. Was she coming to an end or had she realised that we were?
"Are you breaking up with me?"
"I guess that, well Bee... I mean... yeah."
She slid the napkin across the table towards me.
"This is the chemical formula for love."
In an instant I knew she was right. Even without being able to understand any of the higher euclidean algorithms or the portions where she had written in Magrathean the equation sang to me. It sang of all forms of love, brotherly love, infinite empathy, lust, desire, a deeper understanding of the planet and our place within the ecosystem, it burned past my eyes and grasped my heart like a vice.
We would be rich with this formula. We could add it to breakfast cereals and the world would start its day with boundless love. We could embed it in movies and people would love the movies. We could read it out at the United Nations and have them read it to their people and eventually everyone in the world would know love and there would be an end to war!
"And this is for making me care about you."
With that she knocked her glass of Coke over the napkin, soaking it through and destroying the equation, breaking my heart in two.
Oct.20.2005