The Best Possible Answer(9)

“Will do,” Sammie says, and he disappears.

I put my textbooks down on the counter. “I thought he was in charge?”

“He’s in charge of the Bennett Village maintenance, but Virgo is the pool manager.”

Virgo, who’s placing towels on a shelf, hears his name and comes over. “Got yourself an accomplice this year, Sammie?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Virgo, this is Viviana Rabinovich-Lowe.”

“Viviana, you say?” He rolls the r’s and accents the a’s perfectly. “Ciao, bella! Are you, by chance, Italian?”

“No,” I say. “My mom is Jewish, born in Russia, but she spent time in central Italy.” I briefly explain the history of my mom’s journey around the world. “They were only there for a few months when she was young, but she still gave my sister and me Italian names, she loved it there so much.”

“Do you speak?”

I shake my head. My mom knows Russian, Hebrew, some Yiddish, and even a little Italian, and yet she never speaks any of the languages to us. My dad tried to convince her to speak to me (“Stanford loves multilingual students!”), but she refused. She never really does anything cultural or religious with us. Except for telling us her story, she says she wanted to leave those worlds behind.

“Poverino! Viviana!” Virgo, who has to be at least six feet tall, starts to sing my name in a gorgeous operatic voice. My name reverberates over the empty pool and into the sky. “The most beautiful operas in the world are Italian.”

“Don’t listen to him. He’s Colombian but thinks he’s from Rome.”

“Actually, I’m from Irving Park, born and raised. But yes, my full name—Virgilio—is Italian, and so I am Italian in my soul,” Virgo says, pressing his hand on his heart.

“He also thinks he’s in charge,” Sammie says. “But he’s not the one signing your paycheck.”

“I am very much in charge.” Virgo puts his hands over my ears. “Ignore her. Listen to me. Listen to everything I say, Signorina Viviana. I know everything about everything.”

“He doesn’t know anything.” A tall girl in a red sweatshirt and matching red shorts, with a sleek black ponytail that hangs all the way down her back, is sweeping the entrance.

“You can listen to her.” Sammie gives her a hug. “Vanessa’s pretty trustworthy.”

I give a wave. “Nice to meet you, too.”

Virgo calls a few of the other guards over to meet me: Vanessa’s a junior, like Sammie and me, and Marquis is a senior who’s just about to graduate. There are a few other guards who aren’t here today, but I’ll meet them tomorrow. I also find out that Virgo’s home after his first year in college, and that he’s studying music, of course.

Thankfully, everyone here is from a private school, and it’s a relief to be surrounded by people who don’t know me, who don’t know about what happened after the physics exam, and, best of all, who don’t know about Dean and me.

It’s a relief to be anonymous.

I wave hello, and they all smile. They all seem nice. And sun-kissed. And shiny.

While it’s nice to be anonymous, I’m also suddenly self-conscious, aware of how pasty I am after spending the last three years holed up in a library or a lab.

“And who is this?” a new voice asks behind me.

I turn to the guy who’s just made his way through the front gate, and oh no—

I know him.

Or at least I knew him once—as a younger, seventh-grade version of myself kissing a younger, ninth-grade version of him. Evan something or another—I can’t remember his last name. But I do remember Seven Minutes in Heaven at Anne Boyd’s birthday party. It was dark, and I was a little tipsy from the one and only beer I’ve ever dared to taste, and there were all these strange new boys from the private school up the road. I was overjoyed when Evan and I got paired together. I’d never kissed a boy before. And I thought there was no way he would want to kiss me. We sat in the dark on the edge of the tub, and finally, at six minutes forty-five seconds, I leaned in, and he leaned back. I tasted Bud Light and peppermint gum and his cold, chapped lips.

It was fifteen seconds of heaven. And then I never saw him again.

Until now.

I remember his short dark hair. Those ridiculous dimples and sharp brown eyes. And now he’s tall, with broad shoulders. Naturally lean but also muscular. And yeah, his shirt is off, so there’s that. Four years have been good to him.

“I’m Evan.” He puts out his hand to take mine.

He doesn’t remember me.

There are four forces in nature that act upon us. Gravity, of course, binds us to the earth. Electromagnetism binds our atoms together. The strong force binds the nucleus, and the weak force governs subatomic decay. Unless you’ve spent the past eight months obsessing over the AP physics exam and the past two years thinking about the design of physical structures and the risk of collapse, you don’t normally think about these forces. You can’t see them, and you certainly can’t control them. They just happen. All you can do is observe.

When Evan puts his hand in mine, I’m inclined to believe there’s a fifth force. It can’t be defined or calculated or memorized, but it pulls me toward him. It’s pulled me toward him before.