Begin Again

I have every intention of calling my dad that night, except the entire dorm descends on us when we get back. Apparently getting four small stitches at the crown of your head is all it takes to become a Blue Ridge celebrity. Shay makes us tea and knocks on Harriet’s door to commandeer enough cash to pull all the dusty Cheetos and Reese’s out of the vending machine, and Shay and Milo and I sit on the floor in a pile of pillows Shay fashioned by her bookshelf.

Milo sniffs at his own mug—the one covered in chickens that I now recognize as the chickens in his mom’s coop—and takes a tiny sip. “I will admit this isn’t the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”

I snort. “It only took a tree almost killing you.”

Shay raises her eyebrows at us, not for the first time since we got back. “I’m never going outside again, huh.”

“We angered the weather gods,” says Milo grimly. “Should we call Valeria? She might get—” Milo squints at the label on the tea box—“herbal coconut macadamia FOMO.”

Shay sighs. “Well.”

And that is how she ends up telling Milo about the whole mess with the literary magazine and the crush and the very unfortunate tension between her and Val, in that frank, resigned manner of someone who has gotten over the initial shock of something and doesn’t know what to do next. Milo lets out several sympathetic hisses between his teeth and a “See, this is why love is a scam. Run, Shay. Run.”

Shay rolls her eyes, and then meets mine. “I need a plan B. I’m assuming you already have them through Z, though.”

“I could, in fact, offer the alphabet,” I say. “If you do want my help.”

Shay puts a hand on mine like she’s one of Connor’s soccer coaches and says, “I’m tapping you in.”This is from NôvelDrama.Org.

I take a sip of my tea and spend the rest of the night scheming.

Well, most of it, at least. I can’t help checking if the next yellow-ribbon event is still on for the next day, but even before I see that it is, I make a choice. A choice to commit to something that seems truly disrespectful to the institution of Saturday: math.

Only when I show up to the TA’s office hours, there is no TA waiting for me. Instead there is Professor Hutchison, sitting on the swivel chair in front of her desk, her steel eyes catching mine like a trap before I even walk through the door.

“Oh,” I say, unconsciously taking a step back. “I must have gotten the time wrong.”

“Christine’s home for the weekend. I’m running office hours.” She hardly moves a muscle, but speaks with enough authority to run a small country when she says, “Sit.”

I swallow so hard that I’m half expecting a gulp sound effect to echo through the hall. She’s already pulled up my midterm score on her giant monitor before I manage to get to the chair. Turns out the only thing worse than seeing a “D” is seeing it four times larger on someone else’s screen.

Without another word, Professor Hutchison leans down and pulls out a stack of papers, thumbing through them until she finds the exam pages where I made all my notes. She passes them to me from across the desk and then, to my horror, stands up and positions herself directly behind me.

“Try that first problem again. Talk me through what you’re doing.”

Somehow I manage to bleat out an explanation under her intimidating shadow. She doesn’t once interrupt me, not even when I’ve concluded by getting the same wrong answer as before. In fact, she asks me to do it with the second problem I got wrong, and then the third.

Abruptly, her shadow lifts from behind me, and she’s moving back to her seat.

“You’re too focused on the math,” she informs me.

I splutter, trying not to laugh. She raises her eyebrows at me.

“Sorry, it’s just—those were words I never thought anybody would actually say to me.”

“Why’s that?” she asks sharply.

“Because I’m terrible at math.”

She shakes her head with the impatience of a person who has heard that excuse too many times to accept it. “More likely you were taught to come at it from an angle that doesn’t work for you.” She thrusts my own notes from the test back at me. “Here. Read the scenario. Actually read it in its practical sense, and what it’s trying to achieve.”

I glance down at the problem I absolutely skewered—a longitudinal study examining couples’ self-reported happiness over time. We were asked to isolate different groups within the study to pull more specific findings out of it. All I’d found, it seemed, was a failing grade.

But now that I’m actually looking at not just the data, but the context of it—the weight of all the years that went by during the study, and the implications of that raw data—my thinking starts to shift.

“Does the number you came up with seem to fit the scenario?”

“No,” I realize. It doesn’t necessarily help me figure out how to solve it, but once I look at it within the context of what I’ve been given, it’s enough to recognize there’s a problem in my reasoning.

“You’ve been trying to separate the math from the psychology. It’s common for students who aren’t confident in statistics to try to stick to the black and white of the original formulas and separate their feelings from it. But that’s how you let yourself miss other variables. The math and the psychology behind them—they go together.”

I bite down a smile. “Math has feelings, too?”

Professor Hutchison comes just short of rolling her eyes. “If it did, it would be disappointed in your trajectory this semester,” she says mildly.

I turn my attention back to the page. “I’ve been going to a tutor,” I tell her.

She taps her fingernail on the desk between us, snapping my attention back up to her. Her steel eyes lock me in place again, drilling each word into me: “An hour with a tutor every week doesn’t replace practice. And it certainly doesn’t come close to the best kind of practice—learning from your mistakes.”

My ears burn. It feels like I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

“I know you haven’t been to these office hours,” she continues. “It’s a shame. Most of the students who were struggling were able to get a better foundation once they grasped the problems they got wrong.”

“I’ve been . . . busy,” I hedge.

But Professor Hutchison bulldozes. “At those weekend ribbon events, I presume.”

My sheepish expression is answer enough for us both.

Professor Hutchison leans forward. “Tell me. What do you want out of this experience?”

I straighten up. “I want to get good grades. I want to be able to apply to a competitive graduate school.”

“No, I mean this experience. Not what you get out of it.” She gestures out the window, toward the view of melting snow on the quad gleaming in the early morning sunlight. “What do you want to remember about this place after you leave?”

The words puncture deeper than I anticipated. But when my smile falters and the pencil poised in my hand finally eases onto the page, it’s clear that the words struck just where she intended.

The answers are poised on the tip of my tongue, but thick in my chest. I want to remember laughing with my friends. Passing nachos around on trivia night. Setting my ribbons down next to my mom’s. Quiet walks in the arboretum. Taking the mic from Milo on Friday mornings and feeling a hum of potential in the airwaves.

“You kids are all so focused on doing too much. So much of everything all the time. What you need is balance. Priorities.” She makes sure I’m looking at her when she says, “You need to decide what’s important to you, or then nothing is important. You understand?”

I duck my head, feeling the truth of it. The way I’ve been throwing myself into so many things that I can’t quite give my whole self anywhere. Not to the things that matter most. Not just the things that matter while I’m here, but during whatever comes next.

“But what you also need is to show up to these study sessions,” she says sternly. “That is, if you want to pass my class.”

“You don’t think it’s too late?” I ask.

“I think that’s for you to decide,” says Hutchison. “Now walk me through your logic on that first problem again so we can talk about where you went wrong.”

The next hour is equal parts illuminating and excruciating. Professor Hutchison might have insights that Valeria had, but she has none of her gentleness. When I’m wrong I can practically feel it radiating off her before she opens her mouth. But I leave with my exam newly marked up in my own handwriting with correct answers this time, plus an old version of the exam from last year so I can try my hand at similar problems. I leave with a sense that I’m not just skimming the surface of learning this, but digging in deep.

It’s only as I’m walking past the quad, thinking over her words—what do you want out of this experience?—that when I put myself on the spot, I didn’t think of Connor at all.