ME, CINDERELLA?(19)

Yes. Her note. He dug into his pocket and brought out the crumpled paper, running his fingertips over the lines. He stopped in his tracks and turned around, his eyes lifting back up to Patterson’s door. The department chair had stepped out into the hall and walked down the other corridor, away from Eliot.

Eliot stole a quick glance down the hallway, pretending to study the student research posters on the walls. When Patterson turned the far corner, he snuck back to the office and slipped into the doorway, crossing over to where Patterson had been sitting. He picked up the pile of homework sitting on the corner of the desk marked “juniors.”

He would find Valentina in here, if she existed.





Eliot hurried up the stairs of the library, looking for a corner to sit in peace. There was not enough time to go home from campus, and he hated driving in inclement weather anyway. He had to get this done before Patterson declared a winner. The department chair might have been bluffing, but Eliot didn’t want to chance it.

Outside the wind whipped tree branches against the large windows, the leaves slapping the glass panes as though trying to get inside from the cold. He found a long oak table to sit at and spread the papers out in front of him. Valentina’s note he took from his pocket and smoothed before putting it aside for reference.

Where to start? His first inclination was simply to dig through the pages as quickly as possible, but after turning through a few dozen assignments he realized that he was going too fast, possibly missing the right paper. And if he missed it the first time, he would have to go back through all of the pages. He sat back in his chair, his heart beating fast. There were hundreds and hundreds of papers in the pile, and most of the writing was numeric. The task seemed impossible.

No, he thought. Not impossible.

He took a deep breath and slowed himself down. He picked up Valentina’s note and studied the lettering. A slight slant to the right, a flourish on the letter y. The period and the dot over the i were not actually dots but tiny circles instead, as though she were trying to spite the mathematical description of a point. He ran his fingers across the paper.

Why am I doing this? Even as he asked himself the question, he felt the curl of desire rise in him. Quickly he tamped it down, ignoring the voice inside that screamed to him that she was a danger, that she had already edged into his heart. She was a capable mathematician. That was all he needed to know.

He reshuffled the papers together into one pile. How to begin logically? Of course. He began to sift through the papers, setting aside any obviously male names. That should narrow the pile down by half or so. More, even. The math department always slanted heavily male.

Minutes passed quickly as he went though the papers, the wind whistling outside of the window. It seemed that ambiguous names had come back into fashion, to his utmost irritation. Cayden, Laurie, Jax. He caught himself putting a Sam into the male pile and then reconsidered—what if it were a nickname? Slowly, carefully, he winnowed down the papers and was about to start in on selecting by handwriting type.

The lights went out. Instantly the emergency lighting system turned on, the red glow of the exit lights pointing a way toward the stairs of the library. Eliot tensed, clutching a pile of papers in one hand. He didn’t have time for this distraction.

Electric candles flickered over the tabletops of the library, and Eliot gathered a few of them to put in a circle around his papers. It would have to do. Sitting back down to his work, he began to sort through the pile again, this time separating by handwriting that slanted to the left and handwriting that slanted to the right. His eyes blurred from lack of sleep and the poor lighting, but his mind was sharply focused on the task at hand.

The pile in front of him grew smaller and smaller as he worked, and finally only one paper remained. Eliot checked and rechecked it twice, but it had to be this student. The slanting letters, the wide curves of the vowels, the slight flourishes, and the numbering he recognized from her work on the screen that morning. There was even a small circle over the i in her name. He held it up in front of him, the candles flickering light onto the pages.

Brynn Tomlin.

Eliot gathered the papers up quickly and raced down the steps of the library, almost tripping on the carpet in the darkness. He ran across the lawn and pulled open the door of the math department. The hallways here, too, glowed eerily with the emergency lighting system. Breathing heavily, he got to Patterson’s door and tried the handle before he saw the note taped to the department chair’s placard.

“Eliot,” the note read, “Electricity went off. Going home, will notify the Joseph boy about the Prize.”