"Hey, Jim. Who's that girl in our English class?" Josh
had been thinking about her all night. Or about what her name might
be. She liked his poetry. She had sought him out, after school.
"That girl? There are ten of them. You mean the
knock out?" Jim rolled his eyes. He wasn't going to make this easy.
"Yeah. No. No, the one with the brown braid,
wears glasses, reads those long poems."
"Oh, that one. Sits up front, sucks up to Parsons all
the time. Cindy. Cindy Carlson. Why? You interested? Maybe I
could fix you up." He gave Josh a conspiratorial look.
How could Jim be such a jerk? All Josh had asked for
was the girl's name. But Jim was ready to build an entire
relationship. Josh felt closed out, as if he were the only one in the entire
school who wasn't involved in this social scene. How could he talk his
way out of this?
"No need to. We have wild sex every Saturday night. I
just figured, after all these months, I should learn her name.
Thanks." Josh turned and pushed his way through the hall. He was
twenty feet away when he heard Jim scream after him.
"Hey. You and Cindy Carlson have wild sex every
Saturday night? Good work, Josh. Good going."
Now he'd done it. Why hadn't he simply told Jim the
truth? Or nothing? `Oh, no reason. I was just interested.' That would
have been better than wild sex. Although, as rumors go, he
supposed, this was not a bad one. But some of the people in the hall
knew him. He hoped none of them knew her. Did she have any
friends? How come he'd never noticed her before?
He was still reviewing his life over the last few
months, trying to figure out something about—Cindy—that's sort of an
S name, when his math teacher started writing last night's
homework on the board.
"This is a quadratic equation. It should be review. Who
can factor this? David?"
"Uh, three x plus three times three x minus three?"
"No, no, no." The teacher had written David's answer
on the board and was now whacking at it with her pointer stick.
"Josh, what is wrong with this answer?"
"Uh, it's. . . ." Josh looked at the scribbles of chalk.
His homework was still in his bag. But this was easy. "It is the
difference of two squares. David's right about that. But it's got
another factor in it. That three can come out, so it's nine times x plus
one times x minus one."
"That's right, Josh. Very good. And, class, what do we
call David's mistake?"
"Is it a mistake in factoring?" A girl in the back of the
class spoke without raising her hand. How come Josh didn't know
the names of any of these girls? Were they all new?
"Right. The first thing we learned in this class, almost
the first thing you learned in school, was to factor numbers.
Two threes, or a nine, as Josh so cleverly called them, can be pulled
right out of this equation. We will call this mistake a 'David.'
Congratulations, David. From this day hence, students will remember
you when they forget to factor a simple number out of their equation."
This teacher's a flake. Josh began scribbling on a piece
of paper. `The tree factors the sunlight into simple pieces. . . .'
A poem based on simplifying equations. Maybe something else.
`Each leaf, catching the sunlight, reflects your beauty. . . .' Better.
`Splits your beauty into a thousand rays. . . .' There's hope. He was
making a final draft when the bell rang. Had there been any math
homework? Oh, well.
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