“The Trip” by Jiaqi Kang was selected by the editors at Joyland magazine as a finalist in the 2022 Open Border Fiction Prize.
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“[…] it feels exciting and makes you feel good and hopeful and happy and right.”
— ‘Am I a lesbian?’ Google Doc
“London,” he was saying. “Can you be there?”
I looked up from my notebook and at an elbow. It was slightly ashy, even paler than the rest of the arm and a little red. In one direction, it disappeared into a grey T-shirt, and in the other, it became a hairy forearm with a hand on it. That hand wielded a pen with a chewed cap, one of those supermarket ones that were sold in packs of five for two francs. Hovering somewhere above the elbow was a face, green eyes pointed back towards mine.
“Sure,” I said.
His eyebrows stiffened. “Because Mrs. T asked me to tell you the deadline passed, but she’s willing to make an exception for you if you can get the permission slip back by tomorrow.”
When he spoke in that low tone it was hard for me to hear him. I could never tell if the reason he sounded this way was because we mostly spoke in class during quiet working time, or because he didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he was speaking to me, or because that was just how his voice was. It took me a few more seconds to parse and process what he’d told me, to register that this was important because it contained actual information and not just because it was coming out of his mouth, and then I nodded.
He made to turn back around in his chair: the water leaking out of vases of various volumes wasn’t going to calculate its own rates of change. Soon I was going to be looking at the back of his neck again. But I remembered something crucial, and said, “Wait.”
His eyes fixed themselves upon me again. “Yeah,” he said, his voice flat even though he was asking a question.
“Are you going?” I asked.
Someone near us snickered.
“I am,” he said. And he smiled.
It couldn’t be helped; I smiled too, giddy, with all my teeth.
When I looked down at my page again, I saw that I’d been pressing my pen hard against the paper and there was now a small black stain blooming onto the equation I’d been copying out. Wet and smelling of ink. When I tried to move the pen away it made a tear on that part of the page, which didn’t ultimately hinder my ability to do the question, but which annoyed me. I folded the page and made a crease near the spine, running along it with my nail so it was sharp and flat. Then, carefully, I tore the page out, leaving just a slim strip of paper sticking out of the binding on its own, its edge fuzzy. I tried to be quiet while doing this but attracted the teacher’s attention anyway. He noticed the stain and eyed me. Even though our final exams would have to be taken in pen, he started every academic year with a lecture on the importance of being able to make our mistakes.
But I liked the smoothness of a gel-ink pen and how easily it made a mark. I liked to press hard and take up reams of space with each line in a problem, filling up two or more pages for a ten-mark question. Ballpoint pens wouldn’t do it for me –– they forced my hand into a claw shape and the numbers came out oily and thick –– let alone HBs with their frail leads that always needed to be sharpened just when I got to the good part. So I always used a gel-ink pen. Jake, I observed, always used supermarket pens. We were the only ones. The teacher didn’t tell us off because our grades were too good, just like how I had already fallen asleep twice in Econ this year but when the teacher took me aside it was to tell me I was working too hard and to be easy on myself when in fact I never worked hard and didn’t need to, because I got good grades anyway.
The only difficulty I ever had was here.
I took out my phone and found Mrs. T’s email from two months ago and forwarded it to Maman’s work inbox, adding URGENT! in the subject line. Then I looked at the clock and saw that there were only fifteen minutes left until the end of this period, which I could spend either doing calculus or using highlighters to fill in alternate squares on my notebook page to create a heart shape in a checkerboard pattern. Ordinarily I would opt for the latter because using my brain a quarter of an hour before I had to pack my bag and go to lunch was tedious, but I remembered that I’d just committed to represent my school at an international math competition and I was not actually very good at math. I’d finally told Maman about the competition, so she would soon be printing out past papers and Googling trigonometry terms in Chinese to learn and translate back for me. It was worth putting in some effort during these now fourteen final minutes. I hunched my shoulders and got to work.
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I’d been on a couple of these things before. The school subsidised chaperones’ travel fees and Mrs. T in the math department was particularly keen on sending her kids to competitions. In my year, there were only about five or six students that she really trusted both to actually be a match for the other schools’ contestants and not get into trouble while under her care. She’d cherry-picked us back in the first year of high school, when Math classes had been divided by homeroom and not by level. A month before a competition, she’d take us out of classes two times per week and give us interesting stuff to learn and practice, which sometimes involved construction paper and YouTube videos, things that not only sharpened our minds but were meant to build teamwork. Me and this girl I knew called Aditi, and some kids I would become friendly with out of convenience, and Jake.
I quickly found, in those sessions, that I often had nothing to say, and so I insisted on speaking more. I asked about the applications of a concept even though I hated applied math, and provided answers I knew weren’t correct just to fill the frequent extended and awkward silences. All of this was to make up for the fact that, when it came down to the actual labor of a question, I was always the slowest among us to throw down my pen and look up from the page. Perhaps it was annoying for the others in the special class, but it was a way of learning that worked for me.
And I wasn’t faking anything — I certainly didn’t know how. I was honest when I truly didn’t understand something, which was often; I practiced a method until I couldn’t help but do it idly in my head while waiting for Maman to pull up the car in the mornings, the numbers fluttering in my mind’s eye, equals signs straight and sharp as pins. Because there were only six students in that class, over the years, I sometimes found myself sitting right next to Jake or even across from him, sharing a worksheet with him, close enough that I could sometimes feel his breath against my skin.
One time last year, Mrs. T drove us in a minivan to one of those exclusive boarding schools in the mountains, the kind of former sanatorium glass-and-Gothic-brick chateau compounds that only hosted students for half the year, the winters being spent at some ski resort in the German-speaking part of the country. The name of this school wasn’t even well-known, which probably meant that it was far more elite. They had uniforms consisting of light-blue polos and the cafeteria terrace overlooked the Jura in all its splendor on a sunny spring afternoon, faraway peaks streaked with snow and the hill on which the school rested flush with new green foliage. The girl who’d been assigned to greet us (she wouldn’t let us out of her sight the whole day) said she was from Mexico and on a gap year before university.
“So you came here for more high school?” Aditi asked.
“Yeah,” she said with a small frown, as though she couldn’t fathom why we’d ask her that.
Because she wasn’t enrolled in the IB, she got to take whatever classes she wanted. She said she didn’t even do math; mostly just literature. She was in the middle of organizing a poetry recital competition. We could come if we wanted.
Our school’s team got third place in the junior division, which seemed to be much better than Mrs. T had expected because she treated us all to pizza the following week at our special class. Later that term, I returned for the poetry competition, but the girl from Mexico wasn’t there. I was disqualified because we were not meant to recite our own work; apparently, there had been a recommendation list compiled by world-famous alumni of the school and circulated to participants beforehand. My English teacher said she was sorry.
In order to attend the poetry competition I’d skipped a Tuesday at school, and the next day, in Biology, which was one of the three classes I shared with Jake, he passed by my desk on his way to his own and did a kind of double take. It was a subtle gesture, the way his gaze skidded across me and towards the window — beyond which the trees were being rustled by the unforgiving spring gale that people in our city called la bise, the kiss –– and then back to me. Frisson.
He said, “Where were you yesterday?”
We had English together so I couldn’t imagine that he did not know about the poetry competition. The implications of his question were many. I became nervous; I laced my fingers together and squeezed.
“Why?” I demanded.
He shrugged, looked down at my hands, the battered textbook next to them with the picture of the sperm and egg on the cover. “Just wondering.” Then, “Have you studied for the test?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.” How I ached to add, Do you want to…? Together?
“Me neither,” he said. “But I think it’ll be chill.”
Not only had Jake and I had a full conversation, but he’d been the one to initiate it. I hoarded moments like these, when Jake would choose to contact me of his own accord, even though their rarity saddened me. The next time this happened would be the following year, to invite me to London. Of course I said yes. “Yes,” I said, “yes.”
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Mrs. T happened to cut in front of me in the cafeteria queue. As she flashed her teacher ID in front of the scanner, she said to me, “I am so glad you changed your mind about London,” even though I’d never said no, I’d just been putting it off, “because it’s so heart-warming to see girls be interested in, and pursue, and excel in, mathematics. As a young woman in STEM at your age, I didn’t have any role models the way you do now.”
The suggestion, it seemed, was that she, Mrs. T, was my role model. Even though I did not plan to become a woman in STEM, I supposed there were things to admire about her. Like the fact that she was having a salad for lunch, raw spinach with sweetcorn and tuna, and that she cycled to work even though she lived across the border in France.
“I’ll see you at four,” she said, “for practice!”
“Bye,” I replied, but she had already squeezed her way out of the crowd, limber, perhaps, thanks to her healthy lifestyle.
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To prepare for London, Mrs. T made us pair up and drill each other on trigonometric identities, even though these were always provided on a reference sheet. To our protests, she retorted that speed was crucial. Could we imagine life without our times tables? Counting out six times five? She reminded us that Mathematics Paper II, which we’d be taking next year, was worth a mark a minute. Did we want any of those minutes to go to waste? When it came to such things, she continued, rote repetition was the best method, because it brought information to our long-term memory. Our long-term memory was built up through habit of thought. Habit of thought was formed when the same synapses in the brain were fired over and over again, which was only possible if we thought the necessary thoughts over and over again. Some of us might go on to study math in university — she looked at Jake and then, chillingly, at me — but high school math was about knowing what kinds of thoughts the question-writers wanted us to demonstrate. Over time and with enough training, we would become unable to distinguish our own ideas from what we had taught ourselves to know. The latter would feel even more natural.
Sometimes, Mrs. T admitted, she felt overwhelmed. She had two teenagers, as we knew. One was a violinist. When the house got too noisy, she would recite the fundamental rules of trigonometry to herself. Math had applications beyond the classroom. Practice was key.
So when Jake said, “Sine pi equals zero,” I had to say, “Because sine x plus y equals sine x cos y plus cos x sine y.”
When Jake said, “What is SOHCAHTOA?” I said, “Sine equals opposite over hypotenuse, cosine equals adjacent over hypotenuse, tan equals opposite over adjacent.”
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Aditi began her text with Hey girlie, which was a sort of friendly nickname, even though I did not consider us close. She asked what kind of clothes I was going to pack, seeing as it might rain even if it wasn’t on the forecast, and asked me if I thought the London school was going to have cute guys, and told me that she was leaving room in her bag for Cadbury’s, which, for some reason, her parents sorely missed and felt was better than Swiss brands. I couldn’t decide what to say in reply and accidentally left her on read for a whole day, which made me feel guilty.
Unlike her, I had never been to England before. It was odd to imagine a place where English was everyone’s first language, was what was on signs in shops. We spoke English every day at our international school, but the language was a sectioned-off room in my brain and its lights I kept mostly turned off when I went out into the world to buy a coffee, for instance, although the barista would always kick the door open again by addressing me automatically in English because someone with a face like mine could only be one of the hordes of tourists that took photos in front of the United Nations before bussing off for Paris or Milan. Here and elsewhere, international schools made money because they taught the lingua franca, English, and not the local language, which in this case was French; for people like my parents, who were accountants at the UN, English was the key to doing well in life, and French an exotic ornament acquired circumstantially, like the flowers carved out of carrots that some Chinese-food chefs liked to put on the side of a sweet and sour pork.
Jake was one of the handful of people in this school, this city, who spoke only one language. He was American, and although he had been born here he had somehow been shielded from having had to pick up French as a langue maternelle.
When our school made us learn a new language, Jake chose Mandarin ab initio, a class in which I could certainly not join him, even though some of the kids in my Spanish class were from Spain and there for an easy grade. Pretending not to know a language was impossible for me, just as I was terrible at Drama, always bursting into giggles at the awkwardness of being on a stage. Besides, examiners were far stricter about grammar when grading second-language exams. Native speakers wore grammar the way some children’s parents pierced their ears in infancy, so that they’d grow up never having to feel the pain of that first puncture again. I didn’t know what the subjunctive was, nor did I need to. My parents had sent me to learn English early enough to ensure that.
Why, then, did Londoners need international schools? Was there still somehow prestige attached to the vaguely American-sounding English that such schools produced, in contrast to the ordinary English of ordinary schools? These were things I was curious to discover during our three-day trip, as well as the hallowed place that was Waterstones, where English books were not subject to import fees and were thus far cheaper than they were back home. Maman had given me an envelope of cash to exchange for pounds to use on the trip and, inspired by Aditi, I decided to leave my hiking pack half empty. I wanted new novels, and products from shops that didn’t exist in my country, like MUJI, which sold my favorite type of gel ink pen, where I could buy enough refills to last me til my final exams. I wanted, also, to be sat next to Jake on the plane or one of the buses or even at one of the mealtimes; and the afternoon before our departure, when Maman, upon coming home from work and seeing that I was on my phone instead of doing practice questions, sighed and asked, “Do you even want to win?” I said, “Yes, more than anything, I want to win.”
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I didn’t end up near Jake on the plane or on the bus, and chickened out of taking the seat across from his at the kebab shop that was one of the only places near our youth hostel still open by the time our group finished checking in. it was raining hard outside, part of the same storm that had delayed our flight. In the street there had been potholes full of murky water, and fallen leaves floated within them, though it was unclear if they’d been beaten down by the wind or if they’d already been on the ground and had gotten swept up by the stream.
I ended up sitting between Aditi and Mrs. T, who started telling us about Canada. As she spoke, about the mountains and lakes there that were similar to where we were from, yet different, because they were where she was from, I picked at my gravy chips and tried to spy on Jake using my peripheral vision and also not to fall asleep, because the UK was an hour behind us and so it was past midnight. Suddenly, I felt a keen and urgent sense of mortification well up inside me and rush to the borders of my skin, threatening to ooze out of my pores. I shut my eyes and made myself step away from my thoughts until I was aware only of the layered conversations taking place around me, Mrs. T saying one thing and then the gravelly voice of Jake on the other end of the table saying another thing, the squeaking shoes of the newcomers and the clanging shut of the door, the radio beneath it all like a damp carpet. Soon, I realised that Mrs. T and Jake were now part of the same conversation, the cadences of their voices matched and the sounds of the others drawing back to make room.
“And do you take private lessons, or are you with the conservatory?” Mrs. T was asking; they were talking about the violin.
“The conservatory,” Jake replied, and I registered how easily his words seemed to flow. “The teaching there is so accessible.”
I’d taken piano lessons at the conservatory up until last year, when I quit to focus on the IB. I didn’t know Jake was there too. Perhaps we’d once been in the same building together, separated only by a soundproofed wall. I wanted to say something to him about it, to Mrs. T, to the others who’d joined in, but they were now talking about pieces, favorite and current, and I had nothing to contribute. I had been a mediocre musician: I couldn’t play until I’d learned the notes slowly and painfully, but once I did, I only relied on muscle memory, the bad habits I’d acquired while laboring over the score on the out-of-tune upright piano in my house. By the time I quit, my teacher had learned to focus on having me create moods rather than perfect technique. This, I’d ended up excelling in. For my last exam, I opened the recital with a Gnossienne that made my teacher cry; “I had no idea you could play like that,” she told me afterwards. I was shocked: I’d put no effort into that piece.
Next to me, Aditi had pushed the remnants of her meal to the side and taken out one of the past papers. She was hovering a pencil over the page and twirling it between her fingers, head in her hand. Soon she was murmuring to herself, writing down a number and then erasing it. I didn’t know how she could possibly do any work after dinner.
In the end, I found the opportunity to add to the conversation by saying, “Some people put on classical music in the background when they’re studying, but I get distracted. I get too into it,” and everyone around the table nodded, sagely, like they agreed.
Later that evening, as Mrs. T came into our dorms for final check-in, she handed out T-shirts, pale grey with the competition logo on the front and a list of participating schools at the back. Mine was oversized, the way I liked it; I pulled it on over my long-sleeved shirt and tucked it into my jeans. At the bathroom mirror, I looked at myself from the side and was satisfied.
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For the two days of the competition, the school that was hosting us would send a minivan to pick us up from the hostel at dawn so as to beat rush-hour traffic. We would be deposited into an almost empty gym with nothing to entertain us except for a table of breakfast foods. The first morning, there were croissants and pains au chocolat, with little bottles of orange and apple juice and a thermos of hot water that I kept returning to throughout the time we were stuck there, re-steeping a single anonymous bag of black tea until all its taste was wrung out. We were supposed to be getting to know the other teams in this period, the Vienna and Barcelonas hinted at by the list of schools on our shirts, but without any directed icebreaker we all kept to ourselves, which, for my team’s case, meant that we fanned out across the gym in ones and twos, looking like plainclothes cops, our elbows jutting out and our feet pointing in odd directions.
At one point, Aditi came up to me and gave me a piece of gum. “Isn’t it crazy how, two years from now, we might be living in this city?”
She meant for university, which was not something I could imagine actually happening to me, my vision being too obscured by the terror of the admissions process.
“You’re going to be trying Oxbridge, right?” Aditi asked. I nodded and shrugged at the same time. “I heard that someone once lost their virginity at admissions interviews,” she said, and gave me a look.
“That sounds really stressful,” I replied.
Aditi did that thing where she nodded and shrugged at the same time as well. “I think it’s cool, because you never have to see the guy again, so you can be as awkward as you want.” She stretched her neck out and panned her eyes across the gym, assessing her options. I excused myself and went to the bathroom, as I had had too much tea.
When I returned, there was some tension in the crowd. It became apparent that some authority figure had entered the hall to give a welcome speech.
Things became smoother after format was imposed. The day from then on became a predictable stream of calculations interspersed with coffee breaks and a lunch of hard gluten-free baguettes eaten in the school canteen, where the uniformed students stared at us and whispered. I noticed that most of the students at this school were white, unlike back home, which shouldn’t have been surprising, but once I’d registered it, was. It was a relief when we were finally ushered away by student volunteers wearing the same T-shirts as us beneath their navy blazers, back into the hushed safety of the empty gym where more papers awaited us, fresh from the photocopier, every thought we were expected to have lined up in numerical order on the page. Each team its own table, evenly spaced out across the hall so that we could whisper without being overheard. Sharpened pencils, sturdy erasers. Mrs. T holding a paper cup from Pret and standing in the corner with the other eagle-eyed teachers. Calculators’ exam modes checked once more. As soon as the timer buzzed, we got back to work.
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Aditi hated the T-shirts. When we got back to the hostel, she cursorily turned to the wall, grabbed the bottom edge of her shirt, and tore it off with a delighted shriek. Holding on to an edge, she spun it around over her head like a lasso, then flung it across the room at my head.
“Oh my god, sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know it was going to hit you.” She seemed genuinely concerned that I may have been injured by her shirt. But that, I had realized on this trip, was just the way she experienced the world. Every situation was potentially highly dramatic, and anything could happen, like losing her virginity to a boy from one of the other teams, tonight, even though it was just the two of us in this hostel room and already 11pm.
“Goodnight,” I said, thirty minutes later when we were both in our bunks and I had my hand on the light switch next to the bed. Unsurprisingly, no boys had materialised in the meantime, though Aditi didn’t seem disappointed by this, either.
“Yeah,” she said, and rustled her sheets.
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The second morning, the breakfast pastries were wrapped in cling-film. No one dared to be the one to take it off, so we all stood as far away from the table as possible, as though getting to near it would incriminate us somehow. The atmosphere that day was even tenser than the first, but with a different quality: whereas we’d initially been wary of each other and nervous, today there was a desperate edge to the way we pretended to ignore each other.
Yesterday’s questions had been harder than we’d expected. Many of them were set up as tricks, with the conventional approach to solving them leading to dead ends. That morning, waiting for the bus, Mrs. T had paced around the hostel lobby before throwing up her arms and saying, “Don’t you guys know how to think out of the box?” But she’d been right, back when we’d been training: all I could remember, now, was the trigonometric identities she’d made us repeat back and forth –– a radian is the angle subtended from the center of a circle where the arc on the circle’s edge was equal in length to the circle’s radius, and three hundred and sixty degrees equals two pi radians. “You know what,” Mrs. T had sighed, “it’s too late. Just try to put down an answer, any answer, for each question.” We did, and got slightly better results.
After lunch, we were all released for the afternoon while the judge calculated our scores. One of the teams, the one from Vienna, were being taken to Madame Tussaud’s, but Mrs. T just waved us off and told us to be back by four.
I walked to the nearest MUJI, half an hour away. It was on a high street, a narrow shopfront squeezed between Zara and Zara Home-type places, and so unlike the spread-out mall spaces MUJIs occupied in East Asia—Beijing even had a MUJI hotel, with an enormous lobby at which one of Maman’s university friends took me to loiter one summer evening, thumbing Japanese minimalist magazines and jealously eyeing the elevators that led up to the rooms. Appraising the shop in London I’d arrived at, I felt awkward with my tote bag that made my frame just a little wider and the aisles much harder to maneuver. Still, I had made my pilgrimage, so I stepped in, and felt the anxiety that had accompanied my solo trip through town lift a little.
Décor-wise, nothing about this MUJI differed from any of the others I’d visited. Everything inside was white, beige, or a deep, rich brown, and I could see a set of stairs leading down to a basement level, where surely the bed linens and pyjamas and other more expensive items were located. The cashier was tucked in a corner, at the far back, as though the shop didn’t particularly care to entice you to spend any money; as though simply spending some time here involved some priceless encounter with that clean, efficient lifestyle the products promised. It was quiet at this time of day, with only soothing music being played overhead and the low hiss the sample humidifiers made as they released opaque mist into the face of one of the only other customers here.
That customer turned toward me and I squawked, because it was Jake.
“Hey,” he said quietly, and I worried that I looked unhappy to see him, because his face lifted for a moment, then fell. He walked over to me, two steps, three. Neither of us had changed out of our pale grey competition T-shirts. He was holding a single highlighter, the special MUJI design with a transparent nib so people would know where to stop and thus avoid over-highlighting. It was a very useful tool.
“How did you get here?” I said, trying not to sound accusatory. I could feel my heart pounding in my neck; it was unbearable.
Jake shrugged. “I took the Tube.” Then, when I was unable to find anything to say in response, he added, “They take contactless.”
I did not own a bank card and the bus fares in our city were ridiculously easy to skip out on, so the added comment meant nothing to me. Nevertheless, I nodded and said, “I’m here to buy pens. I didn’t know this place was your kind of thing.” I used a teasing, open-ended tone that gave him room to say something equally light-hearted in return. I desperately wanted him to stay next to me, to invite me to tour the shop with him and make judgments upon the items that we were thinking of purchasing, for one thing to lead to another and, before long, for us to be running out of time and having to take one of those black cabs back to the school, side by side in the backseat, talking, finally, about honest things. It would be like how one of my friends had asked, upon hearing about the trip, if we’d kiss. I’d replied that Jake would never sacrifice his grades for a fling, probably, and so in this scenario, in the taxi, he’d come close to confessing something important to me, knee almost touching mine, before pulling back and looking out the window in deep thought, thereby wordlessly cementing our precarious almost-friendship as something charged.
But instead, Jake said, “I have to call my sister. She asked me to get her something, but I don’t know which one it is.” He lifted a hand and for a moment I had no idea what he was planning to do with it and drew in a panicked breath. He pointed over my shoulder. “The stationery’s there.”
I looked back; so it was. Right behind me, so close due to the narrow aisles that my tote bag was brushing against the shelf. Plastic crate after plastic crate of hexagonally-shaped mechanical pencils; little square of white paper covered in scribbles.
Beside me, there was the rustle of Jake moving away from me again, and I forced myself not to pay attention to it. I looked at the array of red pens, blue pens, orange pens, green pens, turquoise and purple and black, in designs that were either capped or retractable, ball-point or felt-tip. I tapped each of them, feeling the matte surfaces of the plastic material against my fingertips, the mechanical pencils and highlighters too, until on the very far left I found the gel-ink pens I’d been looking for. I counted out ten of the black ones, then pulled out the little plastic tray where the refills were kept and grabbed a handful in black and in red. I had gotten what I’d come here for, but I wanted to stay a little longer, so I uncapped one of the pens and pressed it down onto the testing pad.
I found myself writing the Greek letter lambda, one of my favorites. Its simplicity and elegance made studying vectors bearable. It had been awkward when the teacher had been trying to use real-life things to teach us about three-dimensionality, like if three of our fingers made up the x, y, and z axes, or else the entire classroom was a Cartesian grid with axes running along the ground and one axis shooting up to the ceiling. The first class had made me want to cry, the way I’d once cried when everyone else had figured out the answer to a trig question and gotten to go home early except me. Vectors only started making sense once we opened our textbooks and started writing things down. A point in space had three coordinates: x, y, z. A vector was a line that went in a certain way, an arrow that took one point toward another. The vector equation of a line could be calculated using any two known points on that line, r equals a plus lambda b. A represented one point’s coordinates and b represented the direction it had to travel. Lambda meant nothing. It was one of those inherent-unknowns assigned to an arbitrary letter that was included in equations to demonstrate to us the infinity of what we were working with: the idea that when we confronted one math problem on one page in one textbook we weren’t just facing that one question but also touching on some kind of broader, deeper, more sacred secret of math, all of the problems at once, going in all the directions. Lambda was lambda. It was not to be solved. It was just there. It had taken me weeks to wrap my head around that.
It was painful, for some reason, to remember the version of me from only two or three months ago who’d wanted to cry over vectors. Were they really that difficult? Had I really been about to spill tears and snot in the classroom in front of people who’d known me since I’d worn braces? Here I was, tracing over the lambda I’d written onto the scratchpad until it was thick and heavy-limbed, the paper wet and smelly. My hands were shaking form having gripped the pen so hard, and maybe I’d used too much ink from it; I thought I should put it back and pick out a new one to take home. The MUJI’s walls were closing in on me, the plastic folders and empty home storage containers on the shelves sitting, it suddenly felt, far too close to the edge, threatening to topple over. I peeled myself away from the stationery desk, walked to the other side of it. Notebooks of all sizes, with cardboard covers in black and brown; yearly diaries with each day outlined in faint grey lines. My tote bag was digging into my shoulder, suddenly so heavy with an umbrella and a book and my wallet and water bottle and an empty crisps bag. I tossed the pens and refills into it. Tried the moisturizer samples, a shelf over: they were too watery and too cool to the touch, made me shudder, but I applied a second layer anyway and brought it up to my nose, trying to detect a hint of one of the two or three scents I knew, like rose, or lavender, or laundry, but finding nothing I understood. It was a good afternoon, the weather bright and crisp, a shaft of sunlight rare for England, apparently, cutting in from the window and making the shop glitter, highlighting the signature burgundy logo stamped onto all the products and signs. Jake crossed into my field of vision, his hand giving a wave; he left. The warmth of the yellow sun buzzing against my skin; I could feel it on the inside of my teeth where they brushed against my tongue, and in the acidity in my jaw, and the ache in my ankles. In the numb stinging at the back of my eyes. Behind me, piles of towels in dark and light blue, and dark and light grey. They were so expensive. I fingered the towels, felt how soft the cilia were, the way the palm of my hand just sank into them. The top one of each pile was light and fluffy, but it felt even better to shove into the middle of the pile, let the weight come down from all sides and crush my knuckles. A good kind of squeezing. Next to the towels there were bathrobes and it was unhygienic to try them on but I tucked my hands into the pockets where they were warm, and then ran them along the fabric, touching and smelling, touching and smelling.
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Our team was much more subdued on the way back to Geneva late that night. We were tired; it had been a rush to get to the airport on time after the prize ceremony, and only right before getting onto the plane did Mrs. T have the chance to gather us around her and tell us that there was no shame in being losers, only pride in participation. I sat next to Aditi again. She got the window and I got the aisle, and we were too tired to gossip. I read my book. The ninety minutes passed so quickly that I jolted when I felt the plane begin its descent, dipping into the clouds, the air pressure around us getting tighter and squirming into our eardrums.
Even though I flew often, to visit family in China and for vacations, I feared landings because planes always made horrible wheezing sounds, the sides of it rattling and shaking, the back of it creaking. Occasionally a baby would start crying in this moment, frustrated by the turbulence and sensing the anxious ways the passengers were exhaling and curling their fingers around their seat rests. Too embarrassed to bend forward and take the Brace! Brace! position illustrated by the security pamphlets and unable to scream. I always felt a terror rise up within me and was certain that I would need, in those minutes before the wheels hit the tarmac, to make peace with what might never come. We were sitting behind the wing and over Aditi’s shoulder, through the window, I could see that the wingtips were upright and flapping so violently in the wind they might tear off any second. The seatbelts were only there to keep our bodies from flying too far from the wreck. I knew things would be alright as they always were, that we would be on the ground in the next ten seconds, but what if, just this time, they wouldn’t be? As the lights dimmed and the stewards disappeared, I did what I always did when I felt this way: I shut my eyes and waited for it to be over.