The Girl Who Speaks With Algebra

7: Blowout

Improvising dinner wasn't that hard, but I was still kicking myself about the pork chops an hour later, when Seiko arrived. I mean, I'd bought them on sale, with this whole vision of having them with apple slices and an apple juice based sauce, I'd even bought the apples, and now here we were with as much of a tuna casserole as I could make without an oven. Not much fancier than Hamburger Helper, really.

Seiko looked upset. "Rose, why?" was the first thing she said to me.

"I forgot to defrost them," I apologized.

She stared at me. "What?"

Oh no, I was doing this again, with someone else. "What?"

Seiko didn't respond immediately, instead going to put her things in her bedroom, and in fact closing her door. I took the hotplate off the 'warm' setting, and plated our dinners. Her door re-opened a minute later. "Rose, you didn't trust me?"

I shook my head. "I trust you. Why wouldn't I trust you?"

"You were in the math society office today."

Oh, that. "You saw me?"

"No, but Calvin provided a pretty accurate description."

"Gotcha. Um, does Calvin often provide you with the descriptions of the women who visit the office?" Maybe he would have been able to direct me to Paige after all.

"No Rose, but we were the only two people who walked in asking about Hilbert today." She bit down on her lip. "You didn't trust me to do the research?"

Huh, that was a very random conclusion. "Seiko, I totally trusted you. I said I'd look into it myself too, right? Out of curiosity, did Calvin direct you to the library as well?"

She ignored the question. "Rose, come on, seriously, why would you go all the way to the math building? You've never been there before, have you?"

Oh, you know. Just looking for the girlfriend I don't even have yet. "I happened to be wandering by and thought I'd check it out," is what I said aloud. "I'm sorry, Seiko, I didn't think it would be a big deal."

"It... I guess it isn't." She sort of wrapped her arms around herself. "I'm sorry. It's just, it felt like within two days of starting our math chats, you were already looking for someone who was better at the subject than I was."

"Not true," I assured her. "You're the first person I'd look to for help with screwed triangles or fractional dimensions."

She half smiled, but was quickly biting her lip again. "Fractional dimensions? When did those come up?"

"When I was looking up the Hilbert stuff. For instance, there's the Koch Curve. Dimension 4 ln 3 or something. You know it, right?"

Her half smile began to transform into a look of horror. "No. Koch what?"

I guess they don't cover that sort of thing after all. "Oh well. I'm sure it's not important."

"You don't know that!" She hugged herself tighter. "So I don't know what you're talking about, but I researched Hilbert for two hours today. Two hours, and yet I don't know what you're talking about!"

She was taking this way too hard. "Seiko, calm down..."

If anything, she became more agitated. "No, no, this means my music roommate has started discovering more about math in forty eight hours than I have in my entire life!" She started to shake. "Oh God, why am I even here?!"

"Seiko...!" I stepped towards her, only to have her step back and slam her bedroom door in my face.

"No!" she shrieked from inside.