Page 30 of Little Pieces of Light

Emery took off my glasses and brushed the hair off my brow. Her hand lingered on my temple, pressing my hair away, her nose inches from mine. Identical actions as those seven years ago when she first discovered the anomaly. I shifted in my chair as my groin tightened.

“Your right eye is a beautiful slate blue. Like the sky just after the sun drops out of sight. Your left eye is a rich brown, like gingerbread, with a wedge of that same blue as your right. If your eye was a clock, it’d be all brown but five to eight would be blue.”

“Technically, both my eyes are blue with the left having a segment of brown from eight to five,” I said, not missing that she used the word beautiful . “It’s called sectoral heterochromia.”

“I read about that,” Emery said, releasing me from her gentle touch. “I looked it up after you came back to Castle Hill. They say people with heterochromia possess special gifts or have a destiny that sets them apart from others. That definitely sounds like you.”

“Or it’s merely a genetic anomaly caused by variations in the amount and distribution of melanin in my iris.”

She rolled her eyes with a grin. “Don’t be boring. Too much science and not enough imagination isn’t good for the soul.”

Emery meant it as a tease, but I bristled. I didn’t want to be boring. Not for her. But I was all science and math, barricading myself behind its exactness. No surprises. My mother’s sudden absence had been surprise enough, and the discoloration of my left eye was a never-ending reminder of her.

I’d once read on some silly astrological website that nonhomogeneous eye color symbolized opposing forces within.

I’d dismissed it immediately, but maybe there was something to it.

With Emery, I felt a storm of conflicting feelings.

Impossibilities. We couldn’t be more different.

I was too rigid where she was fluid, too closed where she was open and brave.

She’s so much braver than me.

“Anyway, you should show your eyes off more,” Emery said, pulling me from my thoughts. “You could wear contacts and keep your hair off your face.” She laid her cheek in her hand with a sad smile. “I’d bet you’d get all the girls if you did that.”

I don’t want all the girls…

“We should get back to the math…”

“Are you going to the Halloween Festival?” she asked suddenly.

“I think so,” I said, glancing away. “I might ask Harper.”

“Oh. Oh!” Emery exclaimed, sitting up. “Yes, good! I was…um, I was going to suggest that, actually.”

“You were?”

“Yeah. She’s becoming a good friend. And you’re a good friend. So…perfect, right?”

Emery smiled the smile I’d come to recognize as the one she wore when she was trying to take whatever was in front of her and turn it into something good.

I rolled the pencil over my knuckles. “I guess you’re going with Tucker?”

“Yep,” she said and toyed with the edge of her textbook.

“How long have you two been together?” In all our talks, we’d never spoken about him. I’d never wanted to; it felt like willingly chugging gasoline.

“About six months,” she said. “His dad is a senator, and my dad is counting on him to be reelected in a few days. Senator Hill will pass some laws that allow Wallace Industries to keep making their textiles however they want without worrying about the environment. Pretty terrible, right?”

It was certainly terrible that her father was using her to further his own ends. I suddenly doubted that dating Tucker had been her idea. “What happens if Hill loses the election?”

Emery shrugged. “Not sure. But maybe…”

“Maybe…?”

Maybe she breaks up with Tucker and then what? She chooses you with your broken house and your broken father and your broken heart that’s too afraid of getting broken some more?

“Tucker’s not a bad guy,” she said. “And anyway, he and I make sense.”

“What does that mean, you make sense?”

“Well, we do,” she said uncertainly. “The Prom King and the Queen Bee—”

“That’s not all you are, Emery.” I gestured to her room. “Look around. You’re so talented. A real artist. And more than that you’re…”

“What?” she asked, leaning in ever so slightly.

My jaw worked but nothing came out, my mind warring with my heart, which wanted to tell her she was a luminous star shining in the vast darkness that wanted to swallow her up. A diamond clenched in the hand of her ruthless father, who didn’t realize how bright she could shine if he just let her go.

Emery mistook my hesitation. “Sorry, I don’t mean to put you on the spot. My parents don’t ask Jack or me how we are, or what we’re thinking or feeling…”

“I think you’re extraordinary,” I blurted.

Emery froze, her eyes wide. “What? No…”

“You are, and you should never reduce yourself to any one thing when you are multitudes.”

She let out a shaky little breath. “You’re too nice to me.

I can’t compare to you and your genius. You’re the extraordinary one, Xander.

” She smiled shyly. “I’m simple. I like pretty things.

You can calculate black hole singularities, while I can’t even get through high school math and—where are you going? ”

I jumped up and went to her wall of collages, searching until I found the perfect one for my purpose.

“Can I?”

Before she could answer, I carefully unpinned it from the wall and brought it to the desk.

The collage was all her own artistry in different mediums—sketches, watercolor, oil—and evoked a scene in winter: a cabin by a snowy lake; an icy waterfall—frozen—its water trapped in crystalline icicles; a grandfather clock with no numbers on its face, but a cold moon instead.

The entire collage spoke of a world instantly frozen in time.

What had once been green and vibrant, now icy and still.

I grabbed my pencil and a sheet of paper and wrote: y(x,t)=Asin(kx?ωt+Φ)

“Do you know what that is?”

Emery gave me a look. “What do you think?”

“When I think about the motion of a wave, this is what I see,” I said, tapping the equation. Then I pointed at her collage, where the lake’s small wave crashed on the icy shore. “This is what you see.”

Emery looked to the beauty of the wave, then to me, confused, but I was already scribbling.

T(t)=T s +(T 0 ?T s )e ?kt

“This is Newton’s Law of Cooling,” I said. “It’s what I see when I consider water turning to ice.” I indicated her collage’s frozen waterfall. “This is what you see. This is what you create. ”

“Xander…”

I wrote another equation. T=2π√ L / g

“This is a sinusoidal function for one swing of a pendulum.” I tapped my equation and then her grandfather clock. “This is yours.”

She looked to me, stunned to be hearing what someone should have been telling her her whole life.

“You have something I will never have, Emery,” I said.

“You have the ability to see through the building blocks of something—the matter and the particles and the unbending calculus of it all—to its heart.” I turned to her delicate rendering of the cherry blossom tree.

“I can model the branching structures of trees with fractal geometry, but I could never make one come alive on a plain white wall. There is nothing simple about you, Emery. Not one thing.”

I looked back to see her eyes were full. She swallowed, and the motion loosened a tear from her lash. It spilled down her cheek.

“Thank you, Xander,” she whispered.

For once in my life, I acted without thinking. I reached out my hand and cupped her cheek. It fit so easily there, as if I were made to hold her. My thumb swept across her soft, warm skin, taking the tear with it. Absorbing it into me, like I wanted to do with everything that hurt her.

Because we’re entangled.

Emery swallowed hard and pressed herself into my touch.

Her eyes, still shining, dropped to my mouth for the shortest of seconds and her own lips parted.

My heart pounded against my ribs, as if it were about to be set free, and for one short moment, I allowed myself to believe I could have this.

This beautiful, perfect girl I’d wanted since I was ten years old.

I inclined my head toward her, a gravitational pull I was helpless to resist. Emery’s chin tilted up ever so slightly, her breath warm and sweet on my lips…

“What are you doing?” came a voice from the door.

The words pelted us like bullets. Emery and I jumped up with comical sameness, and stepped apart from each other, our faces wearing identical flushes, our eyes wide with the same shock.

“Daddy…” Emery stammered, breathing hard. “You’re home early.”

A man stood in the doorway of her room—a door he’d opened without knocking.

I’d pictured Emery’s father as a golem—a giant, petrified statue of a man, with no blood in his veins.

Instead, Grayson Wallace was slight, shorter than me, and balding.

He wore slacks, a white button-down, and a cardigan.

Plain. Bland. In a crowd, my gaze would pass right over him.

But his eyes…his eyes were like chips of ice, and I suddenly felt as cold as the scene in Emery’s collage.

“Daddy, this is Xander,” Emery said with forced cheer. “My…um, tutor.”

“Nice to meet you, sir.”

Her father’s gaze sized me up and down, from my old shoes to the worn-out sweater I wore over my worn-out T-shirt. I was examined, analyzed, and rejected, all in an instant.

“Xander Ford,” he said. “Your father is Russell Ford.”

“Yes,” I said, muscles tensing all over my body.

“His father is a famous physicist,” Emery said. “In fact, he—”

“Hush up, Emery,” Grayson Wallace said calmly, not looking at her. “Russell Ford’s laboratory work paved the way for new methods of detecting pollutants in large bodies of water.”

I tilted my chin. “Yes, it did.”

“The ramifications of which cost me twenty million dollars in regulatory fines last year.”

“Daddy…”

“ Be silent , Emery.”

White-hot rage swept through me at how he spoke to her. He stared me down, but I stared back…and then he shrugged.

“I hear your father has suffered some health issues lately. Send him my best, will you?” He turned to Emery. “Get dressed. We have dinner tonight with the Hills.”

Emery’s gaze darted between us, distraught. Her father didn’t move from the door. I gathered my things and shouldered my backpack.

“I’ll walk you down, Xander,” she said.

“No need. I’ll see our guest out,” her father countered.

Emery shot me a fearful, apologetic look as I strode out. I followed Grayson Wallace through his house while he chatted with me conversationally the entire time.

“It’s not easy, running a multinational corporation and a household such as mine, as I’m sure you can imagine,” he said.

“No, sir.”

“There are so many moving parts,” Grayson said, ushering me to the side entrance by the garage. “Plates spinning, if you will. And I cannot let a single one fall. It could start a chain reaction, and before I know it, the whole thing is in shambles.”

He opened the door, and I stepped out into the cold while he stood inside his enormous white house, arms crossed.

“So, you see, Xander, if something were to try to disrupt the plates that I’ve spun into a fortune large enough to take care of my daughter for the rest of her life, I’d be very angry.

I did not work this hard for her to piss it away on something—or someone—so far beneath her.

After all, why would she choose a handful of pennies when I’m offering her a mountain of gold? ”

I clenched my teeth from spitting something back. Something that would only make things worse for Emery.

Grayson’s bland tone hardened slightly. “She’s impressionable, my daughter.

Easily led astray. With the wrong influences, she might make poor choices, and then I’d be forced to seek alternative methods of correction.

Permanent grounding, perhaps. No dance, no prom committee, and no charity cases who don’t belong anywhere near her or this house. ”

He turned his back on me before I could say a word, before I could catch the breath in my throat.

“Your tutoring services will no longer be needed. Good evening.”

Then he shut the door in my face.