Present Day

The chalk danced in my fingers, screeching against the blackboard and shedding streaks of itself onto it. White dust flew into the air, settling onto the dark sleeve of my uniform jacket like an exploded bag of flour. The individual orange rays of the sun's last light revealed themselves as they streamed through the classroom window and the Tyndall effect scattered them through the suspended particulate.

It coated my hands like the aftermath of an overindulgence in powdered donuts, but the drying grip mixed with the sweat of my focused enthusiasm. My hand cramped from the restless scribbling, but I barely noticed, and only scrunched my fingers around the chalk harder to block it out. It felt familiar, elemental to me.

I was careful to avoid swallowing any of the dust, but my throat already felt chalky from all my excited babbling in front of the near empty classroom. My red uniform tie around my neck didn't help matters, even after I loosened it as much as I could without appearing disheveled.

The three disinterested faces of my fellow physics club members gaped slack-jawed back at me amidst misaligned, pushed-aside wooden desks and seats. Koharu insisted on sitting in his usual second-to-last window spot as if he inhabited some anime, his feet propped up on a non-parallel desk. Michiru followed along, albeit not to my words, but rather in silence to her accompanying textbook while twirling a lock of her red hair. Sasahara tried to listen at first, as his open and half-filled notebook attested, but I lost him and now he devoted himself to balancing a pencil on top of an eraser. Traces of the smell of pizza wafted from a now-empty box on the teacher's desk beside me.

The disarray nearly prompted me to stop and straighten every last item of furniture, but to interrupt my proof midway would have disgruntled me even more. They would never show such blatant disrespect to an actual teacher - but alas, I only captained the school's physics team as a mere fellow student, and it was my turn to give the weekly after-school free-form team lecture.

My father suggested that smiling could attract more of my audience's attention, so I tried morphing my stern mouth for a moment, before giving up after noticing no immediate effect. It's not that my fellow teammates had no interest in physics, but I was babbling on about a topic beyond even a physics acolyte's comprehension and which only showed up in maybe the final question at the competitions. I glanced at the esoteric, meaningless argot I've decorated all over the board: squiggles, forks, h's stabbed through, angles. Except to me they all had their own ineluctable meanings: Feynman diagrams, psi wavefunctions, reduced Planck's constant, Dirac bra-ket inner products.

"By adding an annihilator tensor, and taking the Hermitian for its creator, we can model the creation of quark-antiquark pairs in imaginary quantum time," I concluded with a few finishing strokes, "we can relate the Wilson loop expectation value to the static quark potential, and after taking sufficiently large time, thus derive a roughly linear relationship between it and distance, thus proving asymptotic freedom, and this should give some intuition on color confinement as well."

Sasahara raised his hand, and I obliged him with a point.

"Hey Reader," he called out, "do you think you could just give a simpler explanation? As Stephen Hawking once said, every equation halves the sale of a book."

"Why are we even talking about this stuff anyway? We still need to practice the easy level pulleys and frictionless ramps and elastic balls - you know, a level appropriate for a high school competition," Koharu added.

I nodded in reluctant acquiescence. The club had taken turns discussing those topics for the past few weeks, but I had thought of today's particle physics as a rewarding side-jaunt. I supposed it would have been too much to expect anyone else to enjoy it.

"The strong nuclear force holds together the nuclei of atoms. It's the strongest fundamental force, and it behaves weirdly compared to what you'd expect. In this case, it gets stronger as you move the two particles apart, and that's called asymptotic freedom."

"You sure it's not love?" Michiru chimed in. "Strongest force in the universe, gets stronger the further away you become."

Koharu chortled in agreement. I rolled my eyes, but I couldn't help but let out a muffled chuckle myself at her joke.

"As for color confinement," I continued, "it means that quarks, which the nuclei of atoms are made of, cannot be alone. They have to be bundled into a bigger particle with at least one other quark, to form a meson or baryon."

"Awww," Michiru purred.

"It's just like the government marriage notices, forcing you to be with someone," Koharu quipped while staring out the window.

"Is that all you think about ever since you turned 16?" Michiru snapped. "Way to rain on the vibe."

Koharu swerved his gaze back to her, lifting his palms in defeat. "Hey, you would too."

"Guys, guys," I interjected, trying to wave off the distractions, "let's get back to the topic at - "

The sunlight crawled through the open doorway, falling upon her as she walked by in the hallway, right as I caught a glimpse. It skipped across the shoulder-length curtains of her onyx-carved hair like across the shimmering surface of a pond at sunset, curling at the very ends and framing a pale, gentle face. She hid behind eyes colored with lonely, roiled deep ocean that sparkled in the light and wore a politician's smile, the impeccable and impossibly beautiful kind I knew was not meant for me.

She paused, then glided into the classroom, her blue plaid uniform miniskirt lilting behind her. She always rolled it up a few centimeters shorter - out of personal style, or vanity, who knew? - and I could not help but notice every time I looked. In her slender, delicate, surgeon's fingertips she clasped a limp piece of paper, and with her others she brushed aside a few strands of hair from the side of her face.

"T-Taka-Takasaki-san," I stuttered out, performing a quick bow. My legs shivered and I clasped my hands together, as if a sudden chill had entered the room. Yet I felt a sense of warm pride standing before the backdrop of my tangle of equations.

"Reader-kun~" she incanted in her soft, melting melody. My heart started racing just to hear my name clothed in such a gorgeous finery, and only accelerated when I started to worry whether she could hear it.

"Yes, of course - why did you decide to stop by?" I mumbled, my lecturer's composure dissolved.

"Reader-kun," - this was just a generous second helping - "I thought you might be the single best person I could ask about this. Could you help me with this problem on the homework?". She passed me the worksheet, and I accepted it with both hands. I felt my mathematical aptitude suddenly useful, as if endowed only to serve her in this moment.

"Find the area bounded by the following function: r = 1 - sin(θ)"

"Of course! Any time, feel free," I shouted with a dumb grin stretching across my face. I normally did not entertain pedestrian requests for homework help. Such a waste of my intellect, like asking Mozart to tune my piano. And people would take advantage of me if I did not forcefully reject such requests.

But I would have preferred it if Takasaki were to "take advantage" of me more often.

I picked up the chalk I had set down on the sill, but before I even pressed it against the board, I blurted out, "the answer is three pi over two."

"Hmmm, thanks," Takasaki replied, "I appreciate the efficiency, but I need to know for the test, too. I was wondering if you could actually teach me how to do it?".

I raised my palm and buried it in my face. Any contrivance to excuse spending more time with her - how did I not think of it?

"Of course, Takasaki-san," I obliged. "The only trick in this problem is using an integral on a function in polar coordinates."

I pointed to the pizza box. "A normal integral just slices up a box into really thin strips and adds them together. A polar integral would take, let's say the pizza, and cut it into slices."

I reconsidered the analogy for a moment. "For something like calculus, where we chop it into really tiny pieces, you might actually want to imagine something like a wedding cake where you're trying to divide it among a hundred - "

"….Wedding cake?" Takasaki mused to herself, her eyes becoming distant. The tiniest corner of the ebullient twinkle on her lips began to melt down into a frown.

I tried to dismiss the thought with a frantic wave, then clasped my own hands together. "Wait, no forget about that, bad analogy, didn't mean it!"

Then I realized how suspicious my apology seemed, and added, "I hope you're not worried about turning sixteen soon or anything."

"I already did," she clarified, "but I haven't received my government notice yet."

She grinned and shrugged. "No sense in worrying about it, it'll come when it comes, I suppose? The system tries its best, after all!".

I tried my best to cobble together my own nervous smile to reflect hers, running my hand through the back of my hair.

"Yeah, I guess, haha…anyway, to continue…a circle's area is pi r^2, and going around the circle is two pi radians. Half of the area is pi/2 r^2, and going half around is pi - both just halved. So you can tell the area is angle/2 r^2. So for a really tiny angle slice dθ, the slice's area is dθ/2 r^2, and you take the integral of that. So r in this case is just…"

I drew a cross set of axes, took a look at the "r = 1 - sin(θ)" function, and computed the trigonometry in my head. I clicked down the chalk at a few representative points, then connected the dots to reveal…a heart.

At this moment, I felt as if mathematics itself had betrayed me.

"I swear, that's just what the function you asked me about really looks like! I'm not making it up, or anything!" I disclaimed with another fervent wave. I dropped my piece of chalk and its clattered to the floor, breaking in two. Takasaki said nothing in response but a wan smile.

I picked up the longer remaining end, and bashed out the trig identities and antiderivatives in a whirl and a babble fast enough to make a pharmaceutical side effects announcer proud. My chalk shattered again with the sheer inelegant force I applied it with to the board, and I continued with the stub until I finished and took a bow.

"I…I hope that answers your question!".

I remembered my teammates' existence and could feel their stares boring down into me, the flustered team instructor. No, this incident reminded them that I was just a normal fellow student like them.

Takasaki nodded, taking back the now-slightly creased paper and bowing.

"Thank you, Reader-kun, that really saved me!" she replied. "You really are as good at explaining as my friends say you are."

"Anything else you want to say, Rea - " Sasahara began, before my poison-coated glare silenced him.

With that, Takasaki performed a frictionless turn on her foot and skipped out, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Wowww," Michiru drew out. "You're always sooo rude to people who ask you for homework help."

I took a second to close my eyes and exhaled, as if that would melt away the implication of Michiru's words, and then punctuated it with a clap and a weak grin.

"He he he...alright, team meeting's over. Hope you found today's lecture fun enough, and see you all bright and early tomorrow!" Everyone complied, Koharu rushing out and the others shoving their belongings back into their bags. Sasahara patted my shoulder on the way out and nodded, and I returned the gestures.

Seeing Takasaki filled my heart with joy. Being of service to her even moreso. And yet also young, heart-pounding anxiety.

And maybe, even if I didn't want to admit it to yourself, inevitable, futile sadness.

Author's Note: Happy holidays everyone. I'm sure everyone did that r=1-sinθ trick on their graphing calculators to their crushes in high school, although maybe I have a biased sample.

See disclaimer in chapter 1.