Just Fooling Around(15)

She was going to do all of that, and she was going to be fine, dammit, because the whole idea of a family curse was just silly. Life had order and reason and mathematical certainties. Nature was about symmetry and patterns, not about random happenstance and curses, and none of her doom-and-gloom siblings were going to change that.

So why aren’t you dialing the phone? Why are you sending a text?

She scowled at the little voice in her head—a voice that sounded remarkably like herself. And she answered herself firmly. Because it’s early. He’s probably still asleep.

It’s tricky lying to oneself, the problem being that she knew, even as she was saying it, that it was a lie. Cam was Mr. Early-Riser. Mr. Meet-and-Greet-the-Day. Especially this day, one he met in grave defiance annually. And, she had to reluctantly admit, one he usually met with injury.

It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, she told herself firmly, reaching down to hook her purse strap over her arm as the garbled voice over the loudspeaker announced the imminent arrival of the train at the station. Cam’s history of nasty April first E.R. visits was the direct result of her brother being a complete and total idiot about that particular day. If you go out and put yourself in harm’s way, harm would find you. Cam’s spate of bad luck wasn’t the product of a curse so much as the product of poor planning and carelessness. Considering how he always went out of his way to defy fate, it was a statistical certainty that his defiance would terminate with injury. He never saw it that way, though. She’d argued, diagrammed and even scrawled long, complex mathematical formulas, knowing her older brother couldn’t make heads nor tails of the symbols, but still hoping to impress him with the seriousness of her conclusions. Trust me, I’m a mathematician.

Hadn’t ever worked. Not with Cam or Reg or Devon.

It was, she thought, the reason she’d decided to study mathematics in the first place—because of the purity of numbers. They didn’t change because it was October 12 or March 16 or April 1. Numbers knew their place; numbers knew the rules. And numbers were the key to the universe—everything in the world could be reduced to simple mathematics. Even humans were the product of a near-infinite division of cells.

Superstitions and curses had no place in such an orderly universe, and because Darcy knew that—even if her siblings didn’t—she’d decided to study what she already knew was true.

Reason and order, those were her mottoes.

But no matter how hard she tried to explain to her siblings that the curse was nothing more than a statistical anomaly skewed because of familial expectations, her brothers and sister still only saw a curse. At first, Darcy thought they blew her off because she was the youngest, in the way that big sisters and brothers do. But she was twenty-six now, and had been living on her own in Massachusetts attending MIT for the last seven years, through undergrad and now into her doctorate program. Even her siblings could no longer look at her as a kid.

Well, that wasn’t true. She was still a kid to them, and always would be. But they trusted her intellect. They trusted what she knew about numbers and reason.

But they didn’t trust her about the curse, even though she knew she was right. She had to be right, because if a curse could exist in a world organized by numbers and reason, then that meant that there was no order or reason. And where did that leave her? Where did that leave every other scientist and mathematician, for that matter?

She tried to explain all of that to her siblings, to absolutely no avail. They saw only what they wanted, and because of that, they fell victim, blaming every bad thing that happened to them on April first on some mythical curse thrust upon the family in days gone by.

Honestly.

A lanky guy in desperate need of deodorant flopped into the seat beside her, then grinned, his teeth a bilious yellow. She forced herself not to crinkle her nose, then focused hard on her phone. It still showed two bars of signal, and she pressed Send before she could talk herself out of it. Less than a minute later, the phone started to ring. She waited, and the signal bars faded. Voice mail had picked up.

She told herself it wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to her brother—it was just that she didn’t want to talk to him about the Franklin Curse. Or, at least, she didn’t want to talk to him about it without the fortification of bagels and coffee.

For that matter, maybe she should rethink the whole bagel thing. If she went by his apartment, would he let her out again?

The truth was, she’d come into New York City today in one more attempt to prove her point: that April Fools’ Day was perfectly safe. And so she had to see him. Because otherwise, why come, other than to see her best friend and go shopping and then to a show? But those were all the incidental perks. The real point of being here today was to walk through the city, physically proving her ultimate theorem that there was no curse.