Chapter Eight: The Day They Met
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(A/N): WARNING - This is not canon. I have always believed there is no place or time in which Jeffrey Tifton and Skye Penderwick wouldn't have met. If it hadn't been Arundel it would have been somewhere else. But where? And how? Here is another way that this beautiful partnership might have begun.
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"Stupid. Stupid. I am stupid. I'm a colossal moron, a horrid idiot, and a blundering fool."
The chemistry textbook lay open on the faintly greasy tabletop, its pages a hectic swirl of digits and symbols and equations that suddenly made no sense. Skye slammed her mug of peppermint tea down with such force that the salt and pepper shakers rattled violently, and the napkin dispenser nearly slid over the table's edge.
A neighboring group of teenagers shot her a dubious look. She ignored them, clutching her head with white-knuckled fingers.
"Think," she hissed. "Just think. The reactants in the chemical reaction are methane and oxygen. If the products are carbon dioxide and water—" She broke off.
Nothing.
She was as stymied as before. It was as if someone had accessed her brain's on/off switch and flicked it off, leaving her in a terrifying state of mental paralysis. Coupled with the fact that she was in college, recovering from a relationship with a boy who had come to hate her for being an "unfeeling automaton," and cruelly deprived of sleep, she was feeling very wretched indeed.
Skye closed her her textbook, experiencing a knife-edge of horror as she remembered that she had an exam the following day.
She was going to fail.
She pictured herself receiving her graded test with a loathsome F in the top right corner. She was going to be a disappointment in academics, as well as everything else. It was inexorable, inevitable, irreversible.
"Stupid," she repeated. "Infinitely stupid."
Skye fiddled numbly with her mechanical pencil; pressed the lead into the vein shot underside of her wrist. It bit into her flesh in an oddly satisfying way, and she gave it a slight twist, grimacing when it punctured her skin.
Flashes of memories she would rather forget swirled to the forefront of her mind. Moments of pain, letdown, and loss; moments when she'd fought a losing battle against her temper, moments when her control had ruptured and resulted in her hurting the people she cared about most, moments when everything had gone terribly, shockingly wrong.
Skye had never been ordinary, so it only seemed fitting that her moments of failure ran deeper that of the average person. If most people's failures were bad, hers were catastrophic. And they were always, always her fault.
Gritting her teeth, Skye jabbed the lead hard into her wrist and watched as blood began to pool around its tip.
She dropped the pencil when a waiter neared her table, making his hourly rounds with the decaf coffee. She forced a smile and was instantly disgusted with her ability to feign happiness. Jane had once read her a quote about something like that, something about pretend happiness being the worst kind of sadness in the world.
"Do you need something for that?"
Skye turned her head and looked into a pair of incandescent green eyes. They were cut grass and dragonfly's wings. Beautiful.
"Sorry?"
"You're bleeding."
She looked down at her wrist, nonplussed. "I'm aware. Thanks anyway."
"Pencils are for writing," said the young man, staring at Skye from the next table over. He gave her a look with one eyebrow raised, a stern little gaze that ignited an odd duet of mortification and gratitude. "You might want to rethink your current usage. That's a writing implement, not a dagger."
He curtailed his comment with a brief nod and lowered his eyes to his newspaper.
"Are you always this interfering?"
He glanced up, slightly taken aback. "I was only being neighborly."
"You were trying to get me to stop cutting my arm."
"Well, I'm sorry for my inability to stand by and watch a fellow café-goer hemorrhage to death. Do excuse my folly."
There it was. The recognition that Skye Penderwick was a callous, impolite buffoon with no regard for others. He was offended, that much was obvious, and would ignore her from that point on.
Except…
He was not ignoring her. He was gazing right at her—with warmth, not Arctic apathy.
"Exam stress?" he asked. "I recognize the signs. I once ate my own eraser in an advanced calculus final."
Skye frowned. "You're a student?"
"At music school, yes. But I take other classes on the side."
"I'm a physics major."
"Ah."
"I convinced myself to take an organic chemistry course on top of everything else."
"Do you regret it?"
"Fiercely."
He laughed. "Take heart. The semester ends soon and then you won't have to grapple with organic chemistry for the rest of your existence."
"Hmm. That's an oddly cheering thought."
"I'm glad."
They smiled at each other. A beat passed.
"I'm Jeffrey," said the boy.
"I'm Skye."
"It's good to meet you."
…
Over the course of the next four hours, Jeffrey bought them both sandwiches. Then Skye bought a large fudge brownie to share. Then Jeffrey bought them tea.
They talked. They played with paper straw wrappers, twisting them into ridiculous shapes. They laughed.
It ended after dark, with empty mugs and the conversation being cut short by a dark haired barista standing over them, turning the closing sign over and over in her hands.
"Sorry, but you'll have to take it somewhere else."
So they did. They took it to the streets. But the streets were dreary and November was cold. So they took it to Johnny's One-Stop Market.
But riding a shopping cart down the aisle while Skye's hair streamed behind her as she fought back roaring laughter was apparently "very inappropriate," and "get out of here or I'll call the cops!"
So they took it to the roof.
She and Jeffrey sat cross legged on the chilly cement, facing each other under a night sky pocked with stars.
They ate cold mushroom pizza and talked about the possibility of life on other planets and forgot about textbooks for a while.
And it was wonderful.
"Thank you," Skye said suddenly, looking out over the darkened street. "For listening to my problems and taking my mind off them. I needed the distraction."
"I pride myself in my ability to distract stubborn women with blue eyes from the more stressful aspects of higher education." Jeffrey said the words with a smile, but there was an odd, bitter edge to his voice that seemed out of place in the mellow darkness.
Skye's stomach dropped a little as she realized what he was thinking.
"No, hang on. I should have worded that differently. You saw me and somehow knew how bad things were and you didn't look the other way. Which is more than most people ever do. I'm not a pleasant person," said Skye. "People frustrate me, life frustrates me, chemistry frustrates me. I frustrate myself. And right when all that frustration was about to burst, you intruded and it was—good. More than a distraction."
She swallowed and fell silent.
Jeffrey stared at her, his eyes wide and lips slightly parted. Then, to her utter astonishment, he blushed and glanced away. But before he could manage anything more than a fumbling effort at articulating himself, his cellphone rang. The sound was a sharp, unwelcome cry.
"It's my mother," he muttered and stumbled to his feet.
Jeffrey's mother was interfering as well, thought Skye, but not in the good way. She could hear a piercing, nasal voice asking about delayed trains and heavy traffic and did Jeffrey need picking up and did he have a jacket with him and why hadn't he called and why did he think it was okay to put her through this kind of worry and please get to the train station immediately and—
So they climbed down from their celestial perch, helping each other and still managing to scrape their elbows and knees. When they reached the sidewalk, Jeffrey fidgeted a little, tugging on his upturned collar with nervous fingers. He turned away and Skye was sure everything was over for approximately seven seconds before he paused and doubled back.
"Walk with me?"
In physics, Skye had learned about electrons and protons. One went round the other, a perfect microcosmic version of the earth and the sun. They couldn't be kept apart, that was the thing. One was positive and the other was negative and no one could stop electromagnetic force.
"I thought you'd never ask."
So they started walking. Footsteps in sync, elbows brushing; two strangers that had been pulled inexorably into each other's orbits.
And it was suddenly, magnificently, exactly what they needed.
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