This story was first published in The Montserrat Review, Issue #1, Spring 1998.
I only remember being happy once in high school. It was the day that Steve Johnson kissed me out by the baseball diamond. I went all tingly. I honestly felt like I could float. Into math class I walked; even though I hated math, every thing, every sound, glistened pristine and bright. The scrape of chairs rang clear as violins. The equations on the blackboard rose out from the green field in which they stood and glowed, crystal and pure. Math, I suddenly realized, was the exact distillation of everything that was right. No longer mysterious, the letters and numbers hummed with truth. My gaze fell upon the poster of Albert Einstein that hung near the door. In his eyes, I saw and understood genius.
“Are you high?” my best friend whispered with concern as she sat down in the chair next to me. I simply gazed at her and smiled.
That night, Steve Johnson told me over the phone that he loved me. I almost missed it.
“I-love-you-Sarah-goodbye,” he blurted out.
“What?”
“I-love-you-Sarah-goodbye.”
I believed him, even though we’d only been out once.
A week later, I dumped Steve Johnson, though I could never figure out why he had ceased to interest me.
Math class also stands out in my mind as the place where I remember being the unhappiest, but not because of math. It had to do with a boy, a boy I’d made out with the night before, drunk on beer after a cast party. On my way to class, I saw him coming down the hall, and I began to smile. His eyes moved over me, blank. He grunted at me and slipped by, sideways, as if to avoid touching me. That feeling, that feeling that I was to have so often, swept over me. My face stung and the noise in the hallway screamed in my ears. The hall became a dark tunnel, and math class, when I walked into it, looked uglier and more bare than anything I had ever see, because everything about it told me that everything about me was wrong.
