It wasn't as if he hadn't tried. Hours he'd spent with his nose stuck in the heavy book, but the numbers and arcane little symbols only sank to the bottom of his brain like silt in a murky pond.
He was going to flunk and his financial aid would be canceled and then he wouldn't graduate and he'd spend the rest of his life flipping burgers or mopping floors.
He slammed the book shut and pounded his head against the cover once, twice, three times.
"You're not going to learn it that way." He spun around in his chair.
She was standing next to his bed, one pink-slippered foot poised atop his backpack. She was wearing something frothy and tiered like a wedding cake. She had one of those things in her hair that beauty queens wear, and it sparkled in the light from his desk lamp. She held a slender wand in one delicate hand. "Need some help?" she trilled.
"Who the hell are you?"
Her laughed tinkled musically. "Why, the Math Fairy, of course!" She waved her wand in a little parallelogram.
"Math Fairy?" Maybe he'd had too much Mountain Dew.
She skipped over to him, effortlessly avoiding the piles of dirty laundry and empty Domino's boxes. "I'm here to help you with your test. Like this." She thunked him on the head with her wand, surprisingly hard.
"Ow!" he protested, ducking. And then he froze with his arms still over his head. "Oh. OH!" Suddenly it all made sense. That's how you figured the area under a curve. And of course that's how you'd solve for x. He jumped up, which made her step back a little. "This is incredible!" he shouted.
She smiled at him, showing her toothpaste commercial teeth. Then she frowned a little. "Now, Teddy," she said. Nobody except his Mom and his Grandma called him that. "This isn't forever. It will wear off at midnight tomorrow."
"Sure, sure," he said, not really listening. He probably would've sold his soul to pass this class. Well, rented it, anyway.
The Math Fairy shook her head a little. Why would they never listen? She pointed her wand at his computer, and it upgraded itself to a Pentium II with an 8 gig hard drive and Windows 98. She knew it would revert to a 486 soon enough, but she couldn't help herself. Then she disappeared in a puff of pink smoke.
"Remember!" her voice tinkled
after her. "Midnight!"
The professor scowled at him when he handed the test back only ten minutes after class began. "Giving up so soon?" He said it loud enough that the people in the front row all looked up from their papers.
Ted smirked back. "Not at all, Dr. Fazian. You'll find I got them all right. And I shortened your proof in problem five. Oh-- and you've got chalk all over your back." He let the door slam behind him as he left.
He thought he might go to the game room and shoot a few celebratory rounds of pool. Simple geometry. But that seemed like a waste of his gift. Then he had an idea: why not take care of all his math troubles today, while he still could?
He marched across the quad to the math department. He found the chair in her office, half-hidden by several tottering piles of paper. He asked her if he could take a challenge exam for his remaining required math class.
"Sure," she said. "Next Tuesday at three. Bring a number two pencil."
He tried to explain, but she wasn't listening. So he walked over to her desk and, with a few pen strokes, solved the problem she was working on. She looked at the paper, and then at him. She adjusted her glasses. Then she scribbled something on a Post-It. "Give this to the girl in the main office."
The girl in the main office was short with curly black hair and dimples. "Wow!" she exclaimed when he handed her the yellow piece of paper. "She never waives that requirement. You must be a math whiz."
"I have my moments," he replied modestly and not completely untruthfully.
She clicked away at her keyboard for a few seconds. She was wearing green fingernail polish that matched her eyes. "Okay. You're all cleared."
They grinned at each other awkwardly. He thought, I don't suppose---
"Hey, I was wondering..." She fluttered her eyelashes shyly at him. "Could you maybe give me a hand with my Stats homework? I'm kind of stuck. If you're not too busy or anything," she added quickly.
He dismissed the thought that she was kidding him. "Um, tonight at eight?" he ventured.
Her smile was radiant. Her lips looked very soft. "Great! I'll meet you at the library entrance."
He was humming to himself as
he left. Then he realized he only had 428.3 seconds to make it to his work-study
job at the bookstore. He calculated that he could just barely make it if
he jogged through the cafeteria.
He was in front of the door at eight sharp, but she was already there waiting for him. She was wearing a wonderfully furry red scarf, which dripped slightly with moisture condensed from the fog. He had to stuff his hands in his pockets to keep from touching it. Gallantly, he offered to carry her backpack, but he was secretly happy when she declined. It was a really girly green vinyl thing.
She led him to a study carrel in an empty corner of the library, over in the physics section. She dragged out her notebooks, and for a long, happy time he patiently guided her through her assignments. Every time he leaned toward her, he smelled her subtle perfume, which was like spiced rose petals. If she noticed him inhaling a little deeply, she pretended not to notice.
As they completed one particularly grueling problem, she leaned back in her chair and stretched. "Study break!" she groaned. She bent down to her backpack for a moment and pulled out a foil-wrapped package. She shot a look around the deserted stacks surrounding them, then, her eyes twinkling conspiratorially, she unwrapped a paper plate heaped with cookies. She whispered, "Toll House." Magic words.
"These are great," he told her, brushing the crumbs off of his t-shirt.
"Thanks. They're the only thing I can cook except macaroni and cheese." He really liked those dimples. "Hey, you have some chocolate right here." Softly, she touched the corner of his mouth.
His face turned a little pink as he wiped at his lips. "So, what's your major?" Now, that's an inane question, he thought.
But she didn't seem to mind. "Sociology. I was going to major in philosophy, but what can you do with a degree in philosophy? So I switched. But now I'm thinking about changing again to Poli Sci."
"Pre-law?" he asked.
"Yeah," she laughed. "How'd you guess?"
"I'm pre-law too."
Her eyebrows drew together. "Really? I figured you were in engineering or something."
He had to think fast. "No, umm...no. The math is just, er, a hobby, I guess. Speaking of which, we've got more work to do tonight."
They turned back to the equations. After a while, he rested his arm nonchalantly on the back of her chair. He could just barely feel the wool of her sweater brush against his forearm. Bravely, he even managed to touch her hand a few times.
They were deeply buried in a complicated word problem when he heard the bells in the quad ringing. Wasn't there something...? He looked down at the paper and saw only a snarl of meaningless numbers and squiggles. It was midnight.
He dropped the pencil as if it were on fire and leapt out of the chair. "Hey! I have to go!" He started scrambling into his jacket.
She stood too. "What's the matter? The library doesn't close for an hour."
He was already walking towards the stairs. "I'm really sorry, but I have to go," he called back at her. She trailed after him, confused.
"Wait!" she yelled at him from the top of the stairs. He paused and looked back at her over his shoulder. "You haven't even asked my name. I'm Regina. Reggie."
"Bye, Reggie." He dashed away.
He felt a little strange in the morning, as if he had a slight hangover. His first rational thought as he stood in the lukewarm shower was a happy one: no more math! But it was followed immediately by an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. Reggie. He couldn't face her now that his talent was gone. He groaned aloud.
For the next several days he
tried to throw himself into his studies. After all, finals were upon him.
But every time he opened a book he'd imagine he smelled roses. He couldn't
concentrate on anything but her. He wondered if she was thinking about
him. Occasionally, he'd worry that he was going to fail his exams. Well,
at least he didn't have to worry about Dr. Fazian's class.
Reggie was confused, of course. What was his problem? Had she done something wrong?
At first, she was going to forget about him. But she couldn't. If nothing else, she had to know why he ran off like that. She decided to track him down.
It wasn't easy. She knew his first name, but not his last. Every time she tried to find him in the math department computer, the department secretary would appear to stare suspiciously over her shoulder. Twice she tried to ask the chair, but she only peered at Reggie through her thick lenses and handed her things to type.
She had to try a different tactic. She hung around the Poli Sci department, hoping to catch sight of him. She never did. So she began grabbing friends and acquaintances, even strangers in the hallway. "Do you know a guy named Ted?" she'd ask. "Short brown hair, pre-law, math genius?" Nobody had ever heard of him.
It was as if he'd never existed.
Finals were almost over, and a lot of people had already left for Christmas break. She wandered sadly into the library one afternoon to return some overdue books and, on a whim, took a detour through the physics section.
She saw him first, but he looked up just a split second later. "Reggie!" he exclaimed.
She decided to play it cool. She asked archly, "Come here often?"
He sped over to her before he could think about it and grabbed her hand, as if to keep her from leaving. "Look, there's something I've got to tell you."
She frowned, but she didn't pull away. He swallowed. How could he do this?
"The thing is, I really like you---"
"That's why you ran away from me?" she interrupted. She feigned an interest in a nearby book. Quantum Mechanics. Fascinating.
He took a deep breath. "Reggie, I'm not really good at math." She raised a single eyebrow at him. He wished he could do that. "It was a, uh, a spell. A magic spell. Just for the day. So I could pass Fazian's class."
He let go of her hand. She would probably stomp away now. Maybe even slap him first.
But she didn't. She laughed. She laughed so hard that she had to lean against a bookshelf for support, and soon he was laughing helplessly, too. A librarian appeared to glare at them and put her finger to her lips. Ted decided the only way to quiet them both was to kiss her. So he did. And she kissed back.
And they lived happily ever after.