Chapter XII : Solution by Diagonalization

I had the second slow dance of my life with pseudo-punk from my English class. He smelled like the marijuana, with a liquor overlay emanating from his oral mucosa and whacktastic spike-do. He bumbled into me on the patio in a y equals a cos (bx plus theta) sort of manner...that is to say with some visual interest (in the form of his scrawny gluteus maximus shaking inside falling-off, baggy black pants) but mostly in a straightforward and fairly easy manner. He demanded I dance with him 'For the sake of Fallout Boy,' which was a divergence that I was unable to physically interpret.

During our tactile demonstration of 'The Triangle Inequality', as I had dubbed it...in my imagination, my bangs somehow managed to get caught in the many piercings lining pseudo-punk’s eyebrow. It was to be expected, I reflected as I dipped pseudo punk in a role reversal kind of dancing, for did not the use of The Triangle Inequality result in a sum of nonnegative terms? Afterall, I was not the sort of craniumless, calculusless chumpathon who named all the hairs on her head that she could and then held little 'Hairs today drains tomorrow' ceremonies every time one of said hairs came out as hairs are wont to do...or at least I hadn’t ever since I ran out of derivatives/integral combinations to call all my hairs long gone.

And anyway, sometimes scraggly, frizzy locks o’ linguini just couldn’t be made to appear unique and thriving in their own individual, oily way...a thing that was nothing like Hubble’s Law, which was an ever-changing notion and especially at an astronomical rate.

"At a rate greater than science!" I hollered, floundering around town like I had hordes of spores in my cords.

"Dance dance, we’re falling apart to half-time," pseudo-punk screeched into my inner ear, which I was more than happy to oblige because when it came to dancing, I didn’t think there should be any bogus rules, half-time or falling anywheres or what.

A squat, squatting squatter bumped into my popliteals, her faded, pink hair frazzling rapidly around her head’s circumference like alpha particles bouncing backwards from a strip of gold foil, reminiscent of Ernest Rutherford’s legendary experiment in which he discovered the nucleus of an atom. An immense, sinusoidal wave of surfactant-viscous jealousy combusted over me as I watched squatter head-bang herself into contracting COPD.

How I wished I’d discovered the nucleus so bad, Tad.

I shared my aortic-arch crushing sentiments with pseudo-punk. "How I wish I discovered the nucleus so bad, Tad!"

Pseudo-punk gave me the highly offended look of one whose calculator dared tell suggest that the log of pi wasn’t .-197. "It’s not Tad, it’s Ted!" he yodelled, my headless bangs tickling his retinas as his multiple eyebrow rings twitched angrily. "You’d think that after everything we’ve been through, you’d at least know my name by now Joan!"

And then he shoved me aside like I was an essay on Chaucer or some such other equally as bowel diseasesque spinner of yarns and The Miller’s Tale,and moved on to pretend-spank squatter’s healthy behind.

Well, no one ever said that life was a Hyperbolic Trigonometric integer called int dx/x (1 – x2)1/2 -arcsech x C now had they?

I carried on with my loopings and twirlings, flitting through the dense crowds like an airborne virus, and caught sight of Rafe striding through the galumphing, gallivanting, guzzling gathering. His eyes were on me, a smile tugging at his adorably freckled zygomatic bones.

He was now someone in my life who could truly understand how I’d feel if I’d been the one to discover the nucleus, I reflected with great fondness. A femtosecond later I was forced to hastily disabused my facial bone structure of such perilous emoting, instead arranging my phizog into an expression of ln y(t) equals kt plus c,in case Katrina decided to weep around, saw my fondness and demanded its origin of me.

For I simply couldn’t tell her that her boyfriend had the fanfabutastic ability to liquefy my bones with just one look from his wide, contusion-fresh eyes and spotted, clotted Irish cream complexion.

"Bet you can’t solve me, guys, bet you can’t solve me," I told a stoner of wildly headbanging, scraggly-haired metalheads. In ritualistic times such as these, even an experienced ethnographer would not be able to discern the headbanging male headbanger from the headbanging female headbanger...it was all very r2 equals –9 sin 2theta, were I to graph it.

And because I no longer had a dance partner, I sat down on my heels like I had to move my bowels into a hole in Calcutta, saliva-ed my index digit and drew one of the most beautiful, fragile, symmetrical r2 equals –9 sin 2thetas of recent memory...until a foots of gargantuan proportions scuffed up my r2 equals –9 sin 2theta and squashed flat of few of my phalanges too.

"Whoa little girl, out the way!" a 'Common Ancestor' type of fellow bellowed at the top of his pleural lining, grabbing me up by the shoulders and shaking me around like he’d just finished voiding and I was the incessant droplets of urine defacing his foreskin.

"Indulge in micturition elsewhere my friend!" I cried, squirming out of his grasp. I left him behind to rootle around his ear with a twig or whatever it was that he and his fellow primates liked to indulge in.

"I don’t think I’d’ve made a very good common ancestor," I informed no one in particular as I headed towards the house to immerse myself in a different pace of selected transcendental functions; I’d had enough of l’Hopital’s Rule and wanted a smattering of differentiation of inverse functions to really glean my Calculus of a Single Variable palate. "How could I survive just by gathering whilst the males in my life did huntings? My existence is futile if I am unable to use established formulas in order to determine the Maclaurin series of any given function. Ditto Taylor series."

A girl in tweed pants-shorts and wooden high-heeled sandals turned around from where she was standing in the doorway leading back into the kitchen. "Yeah?"

"P equals dw/dt?"

"You said my name," tweed slowly enunciated, as through I was some kind of an uncultured buffoon who didn’t know that the Dulong-Petit Law stated that the molar heat capacity is approximately equal to three times the Ideal Gas Constant.

My bowel movement eyes enlarged to softly-formed stools. "Maclaurin?"

She rolled her heavily-lined eyes at me. "No Taylor."

"Of the nth Taylor polynomial?" I gasped around a mouthful of my knuckles. "You lucky effloresce you, I would ban myself to only ever reading Dynamics of Surfactant Self Assemblies: Micelles, Microemulsions, Vesicles, and Lyotropic Phases if it meant that I had a series and a formula named after the ME.

"Man it’s just so not worth it, doin’ smack." Tweed patted my arm with her bottle of Corona. "You got your whole life in front of you kid. Stick to weed, it’ll take you way farer."

I hadn’t known that 'farer' was a word – to me it had all the pomp and pumpernickel of a titled Turkish nobleman, whose luxurious moustache could be twirled at both ends and who wore shoes that curled at the toes (but which sported no bells, as the great Farer was not a common fourteenth century jester) – but what more could I expect from the strudel stupide who thought wearing a string of plastic beige pearls down to her symphysis pubis was a stellar idea?

"Tweed on strumpet, tweed on," I intoned in my best High Farer of Constantinople voice while twisting an imaginary ‘stache. "Me must need anoint me mous-ta-chee whereby only the finest of fig oils will do."

I walked like an Egyptian past Tweed, of the ornamented kind, and pharaohed myself into the kitchen, which was still an impossibly crowded, hot and loud pulsar. The frenzied dance competitions of yesteryear were a thing of, indeed, yesteryear, much like Democritus of Abdera’s theories about the atom, which were based on no experimental evidence. Shame all over his toga I say. There was still a drinking contest going on but not with Conner and Thug-ola ’99; this one featured two Korean guys who seemed to think that it was the height of hilarity to make noises like a misogynist undergoing a colonoscopy every time they downed a shot of whiskey.

Another contest was simultaneously occurring on top of the kitchen table, this one involving two suburbian slices of jock white bread and a three small bottles of fiery hot sauce. I tsked with much sforzando...apparently those red-faced, runny-nosed, guffawing baboons didn’t realize that what burned going in also burned going out.

"Dibs on the can!" I shouted and a fellow with a fro thrust a can of Molsen Canadian at me. "Wrong can," I told him and stuffed it into the hoodie of a boy who seemed to be performing an oral assessment on an oranged-haired frizz ‘do. Lucky lips didn’t notice. Passion was already weighing him down, I thought.

I shook my elbows in my face in time to the 'fresh beats'...or a few black guys talking in sync to synthesized music as I liked to call it...and no one seemed to mind when I smacked them a few times or so on route out of the kitchen. The hallways had more going on then coloured tracks recording the movement of subatomic particles through a bubble chamber. I had to really galumph my way through that old hygroscope, what with all the kissings and dancings and tossing about of expensive silverware. I took one piece as a friend for the now because I was all alone...it was a spoon that had fork tines on it. I called him Foon and I vowed to love him for forever. I figured it was only fair that I befriended Conner’s cutlery. Then, come the next time he decided to lounge around to eat...whatever it was one ate with a half spoon, half fork hybrid...he would realize that his repast was tainted afoul with the rancid flavour of his treachery most rank.

Because that was what karma was all about...being prodded constantly with the fruits of your actions, like a kind of moral enema that flushed out more than just your anal tract.

I wandered through the dining room and into the living room but neither Rafe nor Conner nor Austin or even Katrina wandered into my periph. They were keeping a 'low profile' as they called it in the world of espionage. As I went along, I’d catch sight of some of the people that Austin had introduced me to earlier and they nodded or waved to me and I did the same and somehow, in this great den of drunken socializing, I was accepted by my peers.

Shrugging, I danced with Foon until my urination-coloured t-shirt was sweating uptown, downtown and all-around-in-town. Only the absorbent work of Always super long with wings could’ve soaked up that sop. I made some dancing friends too, after a while. They were two blond girls and they taught me all kinds of fancy dancing moves that mostly involved shaking your arse and watching it shake over your shoulder. It was funny to do. One of the blond girls was wearing beige cords under a dress and looked like she ate a lot of granola in bowls that she made herself at her own pottery wheel. The other girl had on a sombrero over her long, blond braid and wore two different sneakers (one was a white Reebok and the other was a brown and mauve Vans).

Me and Foon had a lot of fun times 'boogying to the fresh funks' with those two girls, especially when blond braid actually let me wear her sombrero. I decided then that if I ever had to bind myself to some specimen of man in holy matrimony then I would do so in the comfort and timeless elegance of a sombrero. It was my second favourite hat ever to wear, the first being my Liquid Crystal Hat, which was a visor on which I’d attached the layered arrangement of rod-shaped molecules that make up cholesteric crystals.

A group Austin’s university friends danced with me and the two blond girls and they shouted, 'Hey!' over the thumping music and I shouted 'Nay!' and laughed so hard that I danced into one of the guy’s belly and he had a lot of belly to dance into. Belly then taught me how to waltz to a song about Hips lying. My hips had never lied to me, mostly because I didn’t really have any, but sometimes my adrenal glands got grumpy, because they got tired of sitting on top of my kidneys all day.

I thought that it was hard to believe that I could have so much fun without the Dynamics of Rotational Motion: Rotational Inertia being involved. Or at least Rafe’s Irish-Italian mouth making hyperboles on my just Canadian, mostly chapped one.

I flushed like a saline solution irrigating a Nasogastric tube at the thought of Rafe and his mouth and especially his mouth kissing my mouth...and hopped on one foot at a much more accelerated rate a la average a equals v2 – v1/t2 – t1. Belly copied me and he was good at it, for such a hefty guy. I liked him a lot.

Eventually, when my internal temperature blasted through my cerebrum at what felt to be a steady 38.6 Celsius, I had to take leave of Belly and his friends and the two blond girls and Sombrero, whom I named Permittivity of Free Space. I tipped an imaginary sombrero coolly to those I kinda, sorta knew before ploughing my way through the living room cum dance floor and out the front door, which was still wide open with people trickling in and out.

I pulled off my dung-hued sweater and hurled myself face down next to a large Japanese Yew. The grass was as cool and soft as it had been when me and the Optimus Prime called Austin had frequented it. That felt like ten to the six years ago...me and Austin sharing a doughnut and 'mingling' with his friends. I had never mingled before. I mean, I didn’t even smoke the malignant tubes as to that fact.

This week was certainly a Week of Firsts.

I was deep in recalling the first time I had tutored Rafe in Chemistry, which I remembered like it had only occurred last year, when a tiny, flailing body dropped to their knees beside me and vomited spectacularly into the poor Yew.

I raised my face off the grass and peered over. It was that Su Ling person, the unfortunate chesterfield who was Conner’s girlfriend.

"Would you care for an anti-emesis type of medication?" I inquired politely, watching as she moaned and ralphed again. Rafe had certainly done an astrophysical job of making sure that she ended up good and inebriated.

I turned my attention to her vomitus, which was an entirely thermodynamic upchuck of beauty and grace. Variables of corn and exponents of leafy greens and a few percents of pasta pieces liberally be-barfed the oozing puddle of gastric juices and HCL. The splattery had splattered like a splatteria all against the cedar mulch in the exact shape it be?

I leaned closer, stuffing my bangs into my mouth for safekeeping as I examined. "By Egorovs’ Theorem," I gurgled hairily. "You’ve up-tossed your repast in the exact shape of an ethyne molecule! It’s a veritable chemical miracle! Men and women of science from all the provinces and territories shall wish to pilgrimage to this most auspicious scientific site. Why, it is a positively uncanny recreation...I mean look there’s the sigma bonds and those corns could be-"

Su Ling hurled again, this round smelling strongly of alcohol and looking quite a bit like murky water, and just like that, the ethyne molecule was gone the way of the sabre-tooth tiger.

"Oh," I said, deflating. My fantasies of shellacking Su Ling’s vomit crumpled like the many pieces of paper I’d discarded while attempting to write an essay on 'MacBeth' in grade ten...or 'MacBarf' as I’d taken to calling it.

"I’m fucking dyin’," Su Ling gasped, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. She stuck her face in mine and blinked blearily. "You that nerdy girl who hangs out with...wuzzisface...Moretti."

"There is something in what you say," I replied, angling my head away from the throw up fumes emanating from Su Ling’s gum line. I was forced to cower behind Foon. I didn’t feel too badly for the little guy though, being as he had both a piercing and scooping mechanism with which he could defend against such oral odours.

"I ain’t never drinkin’ again," she groaned and started gagging for a change of pace.

I watched her for a few picoseconds before my larynx decided to fart out some verbal flatus. "You have not got what anyone would call a very nice boyfriend."

Su Ling jerked her head up and gave me a look dirtier then bloody fecal matter. "Wha’, you jealous ‘cause you’ll never get a hot boyfriend?"

"Yes, that is vrai as the Quebecois would say," I uttered in deep tones as I licked grass dew off my inner elbow. "How did you gather that cruelty, discrimination and violence are all qualities that I look for in a potential mate?"

"Conner’s none of that noise," Su Ling snapped as she clumsily tied her long hair back into a messy ponytail. It took her a few tries to get her red hair tie off her bony wrist. "So you better shut your ass ‘fore I tell Katrina you’re after her man. She gets jealous for real easy; she’ll beat the crap outta you for even lookin’ at...wuzzisface."

"I know she will," I blurted out, gulping before my central nervous system could administer a laxative to my loose larynx. I wiped sweat off my forehead with my carpal bones and tried not to think of Katrina’s fist making sweet hate to my face (especially in and around the nose area).

"Vrai that bitchcakes," Su Ling breathed (all over Foon fortunately) as she attempted to stand. She was wearing very high, pointy black boots and watching her trying to stand was like watching a new born baby calf attempt to walk for the first time. Her legs were bony and bent inwards at the knees. "I’m getting’ another fuckin’ cooler and there’s nothin’ you can do about it."

"I thought you were never drinking again," I reminded her, observing as she braced her hands on the ground, her fingers dipping into her own vomitus, and pushed upwards with her skinny arse in the air.

"I never asked you to talk," she snarled and tottered off, before stumbling into two black girls smoking and falling down.

I couldn’t argue with that logic. I counted myself fortunate that she hadn’t asked why a nerd like me was at Conner’s party in the first place if I disliked him so intently…but her brain was too busy soaking in a puddle of sugary, alcoholic beverages to make any type of rational observations.

I passed some time trying to find something of interest in Su Ling’s finger-smeared upchuck but there was nothing to be had there, other then some stupid vector that vaguely looked like Kim Campbell, Canada’s first (and so far only) female Prime Minister.

"Waste of time," I mumbled into the cool, carefully manicured lawn. I thought it was unfortunate that Conner’s Mom and Dad had spend what would appear to be a small fortunate on landscaping their immense property only to have their efforts destroyed as a great pack of rowdy, self-obsessed, drunken teenagers did their best to ensure that come morning, the lawn would bear distinct resemblance to a post-Apocalyptic wasteland. Though I supposed to some individuals well beyond their adolescent years, the aftermath of a party filled with drunken fornication and property damage would be equivalent to times post-Apocalyptic, especially to whoever was assigned cleaning duty.

I shrugged to myself as I stood up and flapped my bangs in the breeze to dry the saliva out of them. If Conner’s Mom and Dad still hadn’t figured out what kind of a shitetastic idiot they’d sired then perhaps they deserved to have their garden festooned with vomit and beer cans and used condoms...for those smart enough not to just jizz on a girl’s thigh and/or stomach region.

I wandered the lawns for a while before finally breaking down...I had to solve an equation or graph something...this just wasn’t natural, not doing something I loved for so many long hours. Dancing and 'socializing' with my peers was a fine unit of atomic mass and all but for how long could I carry on with such an...abnormality of my personality?

"I may as well just start conversing in couplets," I told no one in particular, scrunching up my lips into my nasal area. I was not enamoured of the poetry as it were; it always made my guts greasy and then...cue the green-tinged diarrhoea.

"That’s because I’m a vegetarian," I told some arty-farty cool university students who were smoking weed in the well-trimmed hedges and conversing about an old muskrat called 'existentialism' and a 'Heidegger'.

They then tried to wisdomize me to their Liberal Arts ways by telling me some boring thing that some boring guy said from some boring time ago but I quickly reflected such convoluted hooliganism with a swift, "De Morgan’s Law states that the negation of an and statement is logically equivalent to the or statement in which each component is negated," which was enough to sprout multiple expressions of warthog-like dumbfoundedness.

One of the girls gave me two pieces of notebook paper and a crusty bottle of nail polish the colour of a gallbladder to make me go away.

Taking this highly valued loot, I shoehorned myself back into the house and to the first fairly quiet area I could find, which was in the hallway upstairs. I plopped down next to a large bougainvillea that sat in a corner near the room I had kissed Rafe and comforted Katrina in. As I propped Foon up beside me...I thought that an introduction into the stimulating world of mathematics would be exhilarating for the little coefficient...I found myself smiling down at my dung cords. I didn’t think it was possible for me to calculate what percent of me was happy because I could finally do some Calculus Analysis with Foon and what percent of me was happy because I had kissed and danced with a boy that I liked.

A boy who liked me back and actually wanted to be my boyfriend, by Loki’s luminous lunulas.

The music wasn’t nearly as loud in the upstairs as it was in the downstairs and the occasional muffled moans and groans of teenaged copulation bothered me not once I was immersed in farting around with the Catastrophe Theory. A euphoric feeling of exponentional giddiness swept over me as my heart rapidly pumped blood out of my arteries and into my veins...I surmised that my blood pressure had to be at least 140/90 mmHg because I certainly didn’t feel tachycardic but without a proper blood pressure cuff who could say for certain?

I didn’t feel much like taking my apical pulse anyway.

With pungent gallbladder nail polish fumes permeating my nares, I began working on a system that looked to minimize a function whereby only 7 different local forms of catastrophe could typically occur for 4 or few variables. It was just such an irrotationally liberating activity, much in the same integer as having a graciously relaxing innards dump after eating sautéed tindora and prune soufflé.

Cue green-tinged diarrhoea round deux, as a Pierre in La Somewhere, Quebec would say.

"There you are."

"Predicate in x," I gasped and sneezed pink bougainvilleas in my shock. "Oh browsing bison, bless me."

"I’ve been looking all over for you," Rafe said, grinning down at me. He caught hold of my phalanges in his hot, firm grippage and hauled me to my pedal phalanges, as it were. I yanked Foon with me and stuffed him in my pocket. He was still a little shy like that. I left the gallbladder nail polish behind though; I was much more a kidney (especially of the renal tubules) type of girl anyhow. "Come on, let’s go talk in private. I thieved McGregor’s keys while he was trying to break-dance on his head. Then I accidentally hoofed him in the nuts. Clumsy me, eh?"

I erupted into a matrix of giggles and ended up swerving after Rafe. I decided to the tera that the next time I saw pseudo punk, I’d offer to do some of his homework for him (though not of the English/Global History/Religious Studies/ Political Science skillets, natch) because without him, I never would have met Rafe, not ever. "You are a very funny samosa old boy," I stated, sliding my hand from his with (great)4 reluctance.

Doing the right equation was not always easy, I reflected as I stroked an imaginary beardo. Especially when one tried to divide with an unknown variable such as Katrina. Such roots did not make for a neat Rafe plus Janie with no remainders type of equation. If anything, such factoring would result in outcomes of my nasular red blood cells making scatter plots upon Katrina’s fist.

Rafe looked highly amused. His normally spiky hair was damp from the heat and clinging to his forehead. He was lovely to the nth degree of pi, even if he did smell like a puddle of beer. "As are you, old girl."

I beamed the gleam of enamel off of all thirty-two tooths at him. "I am intermingling with you at a social 'scene' as they call it," I told him.

He bumped his shoulder against mine and did a tooths backflash to me. "Yeah, it’s totally 'thermonuclear' as you call it."

I realized then that all the gooey things I felt for Rafe surpassed all the gooey things I felt for second-order linear homogenous recurrence relations with constant coefficients and that was a surprise as thermonuclear, as I called it, as Rafe giving me a copy of 'Fluid Dynamics and Dynamos in Astrophysics and Geophysics' for a present.

Rafe stopped in front of the very last door in the hallway. It had a red paisley-print bandana hanging off the knob. "McGregor’ll be up in a bit. Him and Su Ling are banging in the basement, sloshed out of their mind. I gave one of McGregor’s toady friends a gram to make sure he gets his drunk ass up here."

"How do you know said toady friend won’t take off?" I entered Conner’s parents room first and flipped on the light switch.

Conner’s parents’ room, much like the rest of the house, was a large, expensively furnished room. Unlike the rest of the house, it was free of debris...both the biodegradable as well as the human kind. It was the sort of room that had a little sitting area in the front, complete with a bar and a grand piano that was white. A large archway led into the bedroom, which was done up in tones of grey and maroon and dark cream. The enormous bed was bamboozled with about a few hundred pillows of all shapes and sizes.

I really wanted to hurl myself headfirst into all those pillows and drag Rafe with me and then make a study fort where we could indulge in any and all kinds of Chemistry and if that included Acid and Base theory or kissing then I was 'hip' to that kind of 'jive', for real O’Neil.

Rafe smirked at me, like he knew what I was thinking, which was impossible because he wasn’t a telepath...at least not as far as I knew. Mostly, he just looked like a young English lad about to steal a steak and kidney pie because he hadn’t enough pence to buy one. "I got a bad rep around here. Toady knows better than to run off on me. My rep’s what attracted you to me in the first place, remember?"

"Along with your freckled cheeks and Irish complexion," I added, chortling on the x-axis while Rafe subtracted the smirk.

Rafe moved towards me. His eyes were glittering as though the blue index of refraction through quartz, fused, was 1.462 degrees. "You want me to start a rumour around school saying that you don’t know the...uh...ninth digit of pi?"

I gasped so hard I hiccupped. "It’s 3 Rafe, the ninth digit of pi is 3," I cried, yanking Foon out of my pocket and snuffling into the old boy. "Only a common barbarian wouldn’t know that! If the universities hear rumours like that then I won’t get any scholarships! You wouldn’t be so cruel a bobcat would you?"

Rafe was goggling. His own threat must have shocked him, now that I’d presented the reality of such slander to him. "Janie...are you, uh blowing your nose in a spoon?"

Oh components of acceleration, really. "He’s not a spoon Rafe, he’s Foon. He’s half a fork and half a spoon and he’s my friend. I liberated him from the drunken antics of Conner’s 'footy mates' as they call it in the Land of Eng."

"He’s a spork not a foon," Rafe corrected me, his lips twitching. "And footy refers to soccer, not football." Rafe paused for a moment and frowned. "Shit, did I just correct you twice?"

I rolled my eyeballs and stuck Foon back into my pocket. "Well you can be J.W. Gibbs and I can be O. Heaviside but the end result of our individual research is still similar contributions to modern day vector analysis."

Rafe gave me a solemn look. Now he was a pious, innocent-faced alter boy. "One of these days, I swear I’m gonna finally understand what the fuck you’re always talking about."

"I’d kiss your mouth right now if I could," I blurted out breathlessly as I bit down on my wrist. My heart was clenching and relaxing fast enough that it could’ve popped out of my chest and thumped along with the heavy music booming downstairs. Rafe wanted to know what I was talking about, even though he didn’t like Pre. Calculus or Chemistry or Physics!

A self-satisfied expression crossed Rafe’s face. Grinning, he tugged my hand out of my mouth. "If you didn’t always have your mouth full, maybe we could make out more. I’m thinking I gotta find you something better to put in your mouth."

My eyes widened...it was all very a la the concepts of flux and circulation. "Are you referring to...the fellatio?"

Rafe choked on his own O2. "I was thinking more along the lines of gum," he sputtered, his freckles darkening with extra blood. "Like Hubba Bubba."

I knocked on his back in the secret code of raps and waps that Suril and I had devised as our secret door-knock-shake. "Hubba Bubba gets sticky in my bangs and makes great gumular webs of goo and then I have to cut my hairs off and they get shorter and shorter and shorter until I can’t chew on them anymore and having the short bangs is nothing I like."

"Oh." Rafe’s face was still the colour of a fading chrysanthemum. He skimmed his warm fingers down my mandible jaw and made my vertebral column shiver, somehow. "You know I’d never make you do anything that you weren’t ready for, right?"

I nodded earnestly, protectively tugging at my chin-length bangs. I decided that Rafe was very sweet looking when he was an inference embarrassed. I half expected him to start shuffling his feet and hold his tweed chappie hat against his chest. "But I bet I could pick up some real good tips from Suril’s porn stash, anyhow."

Rafe wrinkled his nose, cutely of course, looking as though he’d been told that quasars become more energetic over billions of years. While thoughts of quasars usually were enough to make me burp in excitement and ponder how black holes radiated, I instead found myself thinking about nothing but what it would be like to lick Rafe’s nose, which was as random as the thermal motion of a molecule in a fluid in time t. For afterall, what was a nose but a hairy snot container?

"Janie, as much as I’m into you, I really don’t wanna hear you talk about gay porn. That’s just nasty."

I fiddled with my eyelashes and peered onto Rafe’s carotid artery instead. "It isn’t as bad as all that...I mean it’s good general knowledge to have and to hold, in sickness and in health. Did you know some fellows will take these things called 'poppers' because they relax your anal muscles and then you can take a great big-"

Rafe clamped a hand over my mouth and leaned close to me. Now his 'briny ocean deep' eyes were all that I could see. "I’m gonna remove my hand and you’re not gonna finish that sentence, okay? And you’re not gonna follow it up with anymore general knowledge shit and instead we’re gonna talk about how your night’s been so far, got it?"

I licked his life lines and watched his eyes darken. "Fuck me," he muttered, his thumb stroking the tip of my nose. He must not’ve minded that nose really just equalled 'hairy snot container', much in the manner that (d/dx) csch x really just equalled csch x coth x. "If you really wanna go through Shah’s shit for tips then I can’t stop you can I?"

"Nay my good man, you shan’t," I proclaimed regally in my third best British accent, rather missing Rafe’s touch on me.

Rafe sank down onto a loveseat and breathed for a while. I sat down next to him and said, "I’ve been having some great fun, fooligating around and did you know Austin introduced to me some of his friends and later when I’d saw them socializing, they didn’t pretend that they didn’t know me? They said 'hi' to me and I answered in the affirmative and I think I was making small talk. I danced my second slow dance ever with pseudo punk until he went off with a squatter who had a pink hair-do and then I made new dancing friends and one of them was wearing a sombrero and she let me wear it too and I learned many fabcellent new 'moves' and one of Austin’s friends had a great huge belly and he taught me to waltz and when I decided to meander outside because it was too hot, that Su Ling girlfriend upchucked beside me in the exact shape of an ethyne molecule but then she upchucked again and that only just looked like Kim Campbell and I don’t what 'existentialism' means but it sounds more boring than the 'Edible Woman' and when I couldn’t take this fancy 'partying' lifestyle anymore, I came upstairs to do some Calculus Analysis, even if it was with gallbladder nail polish and two pieces of Five Star notebook papier, as Madam Belangier used to call it, how could I help it?"

Rafe blinked a few times at me. "What the fuck does gallbladder nail polish look like, exactly?"

Clearly, the boy was working with only half a unit circle. "Like a gallbladder," I said slowly, signing it also for extra back-up. I would’ve continued on with my French theme but I didn’t feel that 'a la une gallbladder' really counted. "Hence the name. What else would it look like, the jejunum?"

"Uh...what?"

"The jejunum, it’s the middle third portion of the small intestine," I clarified patiently as I tried to make a spiral out of my bottom lip...as what could be graphed by the equation r equals theta / pi, where theta is less than or equal to 0.

"Stop that," Rafe muttered, tugging my fingers away from my face. He seemed to be quite intent on my mouth, ogling my external oral membranes like I was a copy of Water Waves: Relating Modern Theory with Advanced Engineering Applications. "You’re reminding me of how much I wanna kiss you."

My eyes flew to his and we stared at each other for a bit.

"I wouldn’t mind that," I admitted shyly. "Kissing you has become as favourable to me as quantum gravity...both of which are similar because quantum gravity is only in its infancy, mostly because no one knows how to get started on a theory of gravitons and unification of forces, and we’re in our infancy too, if you know what I mean."

"I can’t believe your science crap is turning me on," Rafe said in a husky kind of voice. It was very cornucopia of him. He cupped my cheek in the palm of his hand and just looked at me, as though I was special like Yukawa’s idea of virtual particle exchange.

I would’ve gone on to explain that Yukawa’s idea was a blend of particles, forces, relativity, and quantum mechanics that was applicable to all forces but the door was suddenly wrenched open. I Michael Bolton-ed off the loveseat, banged my left popliteal on the mahogany and glass coffee, (which was all very w equals mg where g is the acceleration of gravity) and half fell backwards onto Rafe’s lap.

But it wasn’t Conner who stumbled into the room, it was Katrina.

"Oh 1 eV equals 1.60 x 10 to the –19 J," I blubbered, squirming out of Rafe’s arms, as he muttered vehement curses in Italian.

Katrina’s face was still pale and splotchy but free of all that smeared eye make-up. She looked like she was drunk out of her hypothalamus, judging by the way she seemed to be bracing herself on her skinny thighs, but incredulous anger was rapidly overtaking her drunken stupor.

"You!" she hollered, flinging up her arm to point dramatically at me only to lose her balance. She clung to the door, her long legs wobbling. "You was lapping on his sit!"

Rafe hastily shoved me aside. "Katrina, don’t start with her, I brought her up here."

"You’s making up with her again!" Furious tears welled up in Katrina’s bright green eyes, making them appear glassy and huge. "What’s she suck this time, your face?"

"Ididn’tdon’thurtmycraniumIwon’tgetascholarshipit’sallIgotpleaseI’msosorry..." I whimpered and stuffed as much of my fingers into my mouth that I could. I was petrified and wanted to hide in Conner’s mom and dad’s bed. Bad things couldn’t get you if you were hidden under the blankies; this was as common knowledge as the internal energy of an ideal gas is independent of its volume and pressure, depending only on temperature was common knowledge.

Rafe started towards her, his tone soft and placating. "We’re gonna talk about this but not tonight. Both of us have had too much-"

But Katrina did not wish to partake of that old gravy junk. "You brung her up here ‘stead of trying to find yours girlfriend!" she screamed and for one so glaringly drunk, she was still able to seize an ornamental Grecian vase and viciously hurl it at Rafe with amazing accuracy. It missed his head by about 6.345 cm and smashed against a gilded mirror.

"int dx/x equals ln x plus C," I gasped, flinging myself behind an azure coloured wingchair as a cordless phone whizzed over my head seconds later.

"Christ Katrina, stop that!" Rafe shouted, shaking shards of mirror from his hair. "This isn’t your house, you can’t just-"

"I love you!" Katrina’s chest heaved as tears splashed down her cheeks. "And I hate that I love you! You hurting me and I never thought yous would!"

Rafe stopped and didn’t say anything. I peered out from my hiding spot and could practically feel how guilty he was feeling.

Katrina stumbled towards Rafe, more lurching then walking. She had a metal figurine in her trembling hand. "Why didn’t you never tell me that you didn’t wanna have a kid and some marriages? Why’d you gotta kiss that freako? Why come I aren’t good enough for you anymore? You always liked me how I am!"

For the first time in thirteen years, I could see that Katrina and I had something in common (besides obvious things like we were both girls and had fully functional lungs and so on) and it was that it meant the world plus life on Mars to both of us that Rafe liked us just the way we were. It might not have been a too big feat to like Katrina like how she was because she was beautiful and popular and had big boobage but even I knew that it took a special teenaged boy to like me in a fornicating kind of way, especially since I’d sneezed on Rafe twice and kept wanting to pinch his cheekies.

Rafe’s voice was heavy with regret. He took Katrina by the shoulders to keep her from falling on her face. "Katrina..."

He never got to finish because heavy footsteps and a muffled voice sounded from the hallway right before Conner came lumbering into the room. I jerked back into my hiding spot, my heart throbbing high in my jugular. I carefully manoeuvred so that only my eyes were visible, hopefully. Conner was wearing a pair of maroon boxer shorts and one Nike flip flop. His neck and chest was covered in lipstick and his face was bright red.

"Wuzzis?" he demanded fuzzily. "Breakin’ shit, my ‘rents room’s offa limis! Stupid bitch, who you is-"

"I am not a stupid bitch!" Katrina shrieked and snapped the figurine into Conner’s face with surprising accuracy.

I gasped as a dazed expression came over Conner’s face and he crumbled into a heap of dirty laundry, of the bigoted variety.

"Murder! Murder most foul!" I blurted out before I could help myself; it was one of those things that I’d always wanted to say, along with standing on top of a table in the food court and shouting, "Order! Order in the Court!" My gavel would be a big turkey drumstick, even though I was a vegetarian. I didn’t feel that a cauliflower would have the same effect. I scrambled out from behind the wingchair and approached Conner’s prone body. He was drooling, his forehead a nasty red. "Ought we not to check his radial pulse?"

Rafe rolled his eyes. "For Christ sakes Janie," he muttered exasperatedly. "What the hell are we here for?"

"No one calls her Jamie, jus’ you do," Katrina cried, clinging to Rafe. "You cheated on her with me!"

"Constipated people don’t give a shit," was all I could think to say, mostly because my bowels felt all tight and clenched and I didn’t think I could’ve even let out some seeping stool, which was as airy fairy as a fart, all things considering.

"Yous pretended to be nice but you don’t care for two seconds! I fucking hate you, freakshow!" And she swung her hand into my nose hard enough that I saw Ampere’s Law in triplicate.

I stumbled, shocked and dazed, and my legs just bent, like Suril covertly watching boys change in the locker room during grade seven gym class. I thudded to the carpet with a graceless foomp and sat there shaking.

Crying all over the place and hiccupping a little bit too, Katrina wobbled out of the room and slammed the door shut behind her.

"Fuck fuck fuck," Rafe spat and launched into a stream of angry Italian. He grabbed hold of Conner’s leg and yanked it like Mr. Weagle had yanked the paint can that had gotten stuck to my foot. Conner’s tibia cracked audibly and when Rafe let it flop back down, the bone jutted out at a horrible angle.

My jaw unhinged as my tongue fluttered uselessly against my hard palate. No words seemed to want to come out of my larynx but churning gastric juices were quick to take their place. I flattened by hand against my mouth and tried not to burp; I didn’t want more than just air to come out.

"I’ll find Katrina, you wait for me at my car okay?" And then Rafe was gone too.

I didn’t know how I was expected make it back to Rafe’s car when my legs were nothing more than puddles of pudding. Black pudding as it were, only this kind was made with my blood, type B- and not the blood of an ox.

Rafe came stalking into the room roughly 5.371 second later. He was putting on the brass knuckles Ma had procured for him as he went. "Touch my girl again and I’ll fucking murder you, ceffo," he spat to Conner before smashing his fist into his unconscious face. And then he did it again and kicked him in the ribs too.

I clamped my other hand to my eyes and felt like the exchange of O2 and CO2 wasn’t occurring properly inside my alveolar sacs.

"He deserves it," Rafe bit out, tearing my hands from my face. He grabbed my chin roughly and kissed me hard, his lips rubbing at mine in a furious kind of way. It felt like a kiss of contusion and some far away part of me was relieved that I didn’t upchuck on Rafe. "Remember that princess."

And this time he left for real.

"You should’t’ve been nasty to my best friend," I whispered to Conner’s dreadfully prone, broken and soon to be bruised body. Then I burst into sloppy tears. "Oh I equals V/Xc," I blubbered and wiped my nose on the cordless phone.

Sorry this chapter has taken so long to write...hopefully it didn’t disappoint. Back in January I went back to school to do nursing so I really had no time to write, hence the lengthy delay. So if you’ve noticed an insurgence with all the medical terms and procedures, now you know why!

I want to thank you guys for reading and reviewing this story, it’s gotten a response that has surpassed all my expectations. I also want to thank whomever it was who nominated me for the SKOW awards and to everyone who voted...'Hiring a Hooligan' won Best Humorous Incomplete and Judges Pick, which came as a complete surprise to me. You guys are absolutely wonderful!

My goal is to have this puppy finished by the time I head back to school in September because I am excellent at starting stories and not so hot with finishing them. And then who knows, maybe a sequel for Lucan or for Katrina...or Grandma. Will she choose Mr. Yakama whose wife is haunting the vegetable crisper or Myron, the old bean from the tattoo parlour? Only time will tell.