Love at Fifth Sight
Part 3-2
Zach scuffed the toe of his sneaker against the asphalt, sulking after a dressing down from Jaden. It was bad enough that his parents were always on his case, but he expected some support from his brother. But going off to college had turned Jaden into something vaguely resembling a responsible young adult, even though he did do his fair share of partying.
He shoved his hands into his pockets as he walked aimlessly. Whenever he spotted someone in the distance, especially anyone from his school, he changed his route so he wouldn’t intercept them. It was just about sundown when he noticed a dark-haired girl heading in his direction. ‘It’s the genius girl from school… wonder what she’s doing here?’
Zach considered turning onto the next street but it was a dead end, and he was curious about what she would do if she met him. After Ms. Nichols and some other teachers had spoken of her in such a complimentary way, he had been sure she would be a total bore. So he hadn’t sought her out – for one thing, he didn’t need her help “catching up,” and for another, he had thought she would be really annoying.
At first, his impression had been confirmed. She was a straight A student who had made the honor roll all three years of high school, on the swim team, in the Chess Club and a handful of other science or math-related clubs, and she was slated to be valedictorian. It had thrown him when she didn’t show off in class, didn’t seem to offer anyone offense even when she had reason to.
At the moment, Zach’s only issues with her were that she seemed so square and that she was friends with Leah Hamilton – who was definitely a pompous know-it-all and to be avoided at all costs.
He slowed down as they approached each other. She was just about to pass him by, her dark blue eyes looking straight through him, when he felt irritation spear through him at being ignored. “Hey,” he greeted her.
“Hello,” she responded automatically, and continued walking right past him.
Zach looked after her, bemused. Deciding he had nothing better to do for the night, he doubled back until he had caught up with her. “What are you doing here?”
She just looked at him, her expression bleak instead of shy. “I’m taking a walk,” she replied, her light, crystalline voice starting to show some of her puzzlement.
“Yeah. Of course,” he muttered. “Well, it’s getting dark.”
“Mm hmm.” Ami made a polite noise of agreement, wishing he would stop talking. If he kept talking, she would have to focus, and that would mean she would have to break through the cold haze that had settled over her mind and blanketed the thoughts she couldn’t bear to think.
‘Not very friendly,’ Zach thought to himself. He was about to let her go on by herself when an envelope fell out of Ami’s jacket and thudded onto the pavement. Before she could stop him, he had retrieved it for her. “Here you go.”
She stared at him and then down at the letter he held out, unable to bring herself to take it from him.
“Are you okay?”
Ami nodded slowly, willing herself to just take it back and go on her way. To her dismay, the tears that had threatened to fall for the past hour but just hadn’t come began to stream out of her eyes.
Seriously alarmed, Zach tried to give the letter to her again. “Hey, don’t cry. What’s wrong?”
She didn’t say anything, only shook her head and kept weeping those brokenhearted sobs that tore at his own heart.
He sighed. He hated dealing with crying girls even more than Jaden did. Just his luck, he thought sourly as he tried to calm her down. Of all the girls he had met at this new school, he would have thought Ami Mizuno-Anderson, girl genius, would have been the least likely to break down in the middle of the street. Maybe all that studying had finally gotten to her.
“Come on, calm down.” He dug futilely in his pockets for a Kleenex, even though he never carried tissues anywhere with him. “Is there anyone I can call for you?”
She was finally getting herself under control again and starting to feel more than mildly embarrassed. “No. No one’s at home,” Ami croaked in a voice barely above a whisper. She swiped furiously at the moisture that had collected under her eyes, then looked around for the hated letter.
Zach was still holding it at his side, looking confused and concerned.
“If you’d just – give me my letter back, I’ll head home. I’m sorry for – I have to go.”
He handed it to her, and she stuffed it back into her pocket with stiff fingers. “Hey, you don’t look so great. Why don’t I walk you back? You can’t live too far from here.” He kicked himself mentally when she flushed brightly.
‘Great job, Zach, tell her she looks like a mess. Why don’t you just punch her, since you’re bent on not making her feel better?’
“No, I’m fine, thank you.” Ami sniffed again, feeling hideous. She tried to collect herself but could only glance at the street signs a little hopelessly.
Trying to hold back a smile, Zach asked, “You don’t have a clue where you are, do you?”
“I can find my way back,” Ami insisted, affronted. She sounded more like her normal self, only much stiffer and colder than she did when speaking to Maya in biology class. She also looked completely lost.
“Uh huh. It’s easier this way. Where do you live?”
She looked at him uncertainly, and Zach rolled his eyes. “I’m not a stalker. I go to your high school, I haven’t done any jail time, etc. etc. Besides, at one point, you were supposed to tutor me in European history. Are we going to get going anytime soon?”
Ami blinked, surprised that he remembered who she was. “I live on Hawthorne Drive.”
Zach smirked at her, more in his element now that she was feeling better. “That’s a long street. Mind narrowing it down a little?”
She eyed him coolly. “I said I’m fine going back on my own. If you could just point me out of the development, I can stop inconveniencing you.”
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. You’re not an inconvenience, and now it’s really dark out, so please let me walk you back. Otherwise I’ll be worried.”
“You don’t even know who I am,” she said.
He replied easily, “Sure I do. You go to my school, you’re in my classes. I’m sure you haven’t done jail time, either. Ami Mizuno-Anderson, girl genius, valedictorian, blah blah blah.” He struck a pose, hoping she would smile.
“Some genius,” she muttered bitterly.
Zach raised his eyebrows at her words and tone. “You seem pretty smart to me,” he ventured, his curiosity piqued.
She bit her lip as the pain welled up inside her. “The admissions office apparently doesn’t think so.” She shivered as the autumn wind swept some crunchy leaves along the street and crept under the edges of her jacket to chill her.
Later, she would wonder how she could have been so upfront with a stranger. She would attribute it to being unable to talk to her mother, who probably wouldn’t be home before she slept, or her friends, who were too competitive to be genuinely sympathetic, and even Rei, who felt just a little out of reach.
“Let’s start walking,” he suggested, noticing that she was cold. “Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”
“I…can’t.”
He was getting a pretty good idea at this point about what the problem was. He had seen Jaden’s acceptance and rejection letters, and some of the more serious – and seriously uptight – seniors had been talking about it during school. Keeping his voice light, he asked, “Did you get rejected from some snobby Ivy League school?”
Ami stopped in her tracks, staring at him. “You – did you –”
“Come on, keep walking,” he urged. “Don’t look so shocked. Tell me about it. Sure, it’s ranked in the top ten, but it costs a hell of a lot to go there and the weather sucks.”
Just as he’d expected, she sucked in a breath, insulted and defensive instead of dejected. When she finished listing the virtues of the school, he said, “Okay, got it. Brilliant academics, great student-teacher ratio, and labs where you can build a better Frankenstein.”
Although he had to admit her description of the laboratories had intrigued him somewhat, he prodded, “So why else did you want to go there?”
Ami had looked down while he was talking, but now lifted her chin to meet his gaze again. Firmly, she said, “I want to be a doctor. My mother’s a surgeon, and it’s always been my dream to become a doctor as well. But I’d like to go into pediatric oncology…”
He just watched her, feeling something very much like envy and admiration inside of him. This passion, this drive, were exactly what his parents despaired of finding in him. Zach hadn’t thought it really existed, even in the kids at school who were G.P.A.-crazy. They all seemed to want to get into X college to become a doctor, lawyer, or businessman, for the glory, for the money, because “it was the right thing,” and they didn’t seem to think much past it. The light in Ami’s eyes and the smile on her lips as she talked about her dream made their aspirations seem like pale imitations in comparison.
She continued, “This school, it has one of the top undergraduate biology programs in the nation, and I would have a good chance of getting into a top medical school if I did well there.”
“You’ll do well anywhere.”
“I – what?” she asked, confused when he didn’t come back with another biting question.
Zach looked back at her levelly. “I said, ‘You’ll do well anywhere.’ Look at what you’ve done with yourself in high school. You’re the perfect applicant for just about any school, and you’ll excel there until you do go through med school, become a doctor, fulfill your dream.”
“But – they didn’t accept me,” Ami said, the only response she could think of in the face of such stalwart confidence.
He shook his head impatiently. “One school, Ami. You still have what – at least seven or eight other schools you’re waiting on?” When she nodded silently, he went on, “It’s one silly school, too puffed up with its own importance to recognize that they have the real deal here.”
Ami closed her eyes, afraid to let herself hope it could be true. “No. It’s easier to get in early. The acceptance rates are much higher.”
“If it were that simple, everyone would be applying early.”
“They probably thought I was too square. The typical boring overachiever who only knows how to study.”
Zach felt shame prickling at the back of his neck when he remembered how he had put her in that tidy little box himself. ‘So fix it now,’ he told himself. He wracked his brains, and then demanded, “Aren’t you on the swim team?”
Ami looked a little alarmed at his forceful tone. “Uh…yes.”
“And in the Chess Club? And don’t you do tutor little kids in math and volunteer at the hospital and a million other things?”
She blushed. “I – well, not quite a million other things.”
He smiled at her, a friendly smile without its usual sardonic curve. “Does that sound square to you? Boring? Got nothing else to offer?” Before she could formulate a reply, he said, “Someone on the admissions committee can’t recognize quality, or they were having a bad day and decided to screw every other applicant over. Maybe they just didn’t like your name. They have something against Ami spelled with an ‘i’ instead of with a ‘y.’ Go figure.
“But you can’t let it get you down. It’s your first application, and your others are bound to be better. You have almost two months before the next ones are due to polish them a bit. Your family, your friends, your teachers – they all know you can do it. Even the morons at school who think you study too much know you’re going to be brilliant, and they’re just jealous.
“Life’s unfair, Ami. And that’s what this is – unfair. But you have to go on and show them that something like this won’t break you. All your hopes and dreams aren’t riding on this one letter. I know it seems like that, and what would I know about it, but the truth is, they aren’t. You don’t pin your dreams on this school, this system, these people who sent this letter. You carry them yourself, and you’ll carry them out because you’ll make them happen.”
He stopped to suck in a deep breath, and they had stopped just under a convenient street lamp when he had gotten into his tirade. Ami watched him, not sure if he was angry or just trying to make her feel better, or some of both. He couldn’t tell if her eyes were shining with tears or from the pale golden light overhead.
She gathered her courage in that tense moment, when things were about to turn awkward. “Thank you. It really means a lot to me, what you said. You don’t even really know me, but you seem to know so much about me. You’re right. It hurts, and it’s still going to hurt for awhile, but I let it hit me too hard. I’m going to hope for the best, and really try in the next round.”
Zach was a little flushed from his vehemence. As he raked a hand through his hair, Ami wondered why he looked so much better than Greg, even though Zach’s hair was windblown and had to be even messier than Greg’s had been.
“Yeah. Great. Sorry… I got kind of carried away.”
“No. I really appreciated it.” She hesitated, then said, “My mom’s so busy at the hospital that she isn’t home a lot. My dad…doesn’t live with us, and my friends don’t really get it. Some of them are even more uptight than I am, if you can believe it. So I didn’t really have anyone to talk to right away, and you helped.”
“Well…whatever I can do. Here we are. Sunburst. It’s the main road.”
Ami knew how to walk back from this point, but she looked at him inquiringly. She knew if they parted ways now, things would be awkward between them, and she wanted to put that off as long as possible. “I live in the apartment complex right where Pine meets Hawthorne.”
He smiled at her. “Going to let me tag along?”
“You would be doing me the favor,” she pointed out as they set off.
“It’s nothing.”
They walked in silence for a few minutes, and then Ami took a deep breath and said, “Zach, you seem to… I don’t really know how to put it, so please don’t be insulted. You’re so intelligent, so why don’t you try in school?”
When he didn’t speak, she said hurriedly, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be so nosy. It’s none of my business.”
He shrugged. “It’s all right. You’re not the first person to ask. In fact, I think just about every teacher and guidance counselor at your weird school has asked me what question.”
She retorted, “It’s your weird school now too, you know.”
Zach grinned at her. “You’re so defensive about academic institutions. It’s kind of cute.”
While she turned pink, he gathered his thoughts. “I don’t really have a good excuse, I guess. My parents are supportive, even though they’re pretty frustrated now. They wouldn’t mind that I get Bs and Cs if I didn’t get such high grades on tests. They think I’m fooling around and wasting my potential. That’s one of their favorite words – “potential.” Now it’s one of Jaden’s, too – my older brother.
“I wasn’t always like this. I did the good student routine for nine years or so. Then I… well, there’s a regional science fair they used to encourage the students to participate in at my old high school. I guess you guys don’t do that here?”
She shook her head.
“Well, it was my first year entering. It’s mostly for juniors and seniors, and I was a sophomore then but my science teacher said I should go for it. Good guy. So I put together this project… and it was pretty snazzy. I’m sorry, Ami, I’m just not as modest as you are,” he joked as he managed a small grin and she laughed.
“It ended up winning first place, but this other guy and his father kicked up a fuss about how I was so young and hadn’t even taken any real science classes that I couldn’t have done it by myself. My dad or my teacher must have helped me to put one over the judging committee. Even though it’s more likely that he, or a lot of the other kids in the competition, usually do get help from their parents.”
“That’s really silly,” Ami said softly. “It must have been really excellent to have won first place. He was just a sore loser.”
He smiled at her, wondering why it was easier to tell her now when the bile in his throat practically choked him when he thought about it alone.
“What happened?”
“Well, this guy’s father was some big shot who happened to donate a lot of money to various causes. Not directly to the corporation that funds the fair, because that would have been a conflict of interest with his own son entered, but he had enough sway in other areas. The officials found some loophole about how my teacher should have notified them that I was a sophomore two months earlier than he did and some crap like that, so… the kid, who was second place, was bumped up.
“Then you have me, and a bunch of people who still thought I’d cheated. School kind of sucked for awhile, and I wasn’t into anything anymore. I thought, ‘If something like that can happen, just over something small and petty – winning first or second place at this fair wasn’t going to make or break the kid’s career – well, what’s the point?’
“So I was angry. Really, really pissed off. I felt bad for my father, who doesn’t know a thing about science and couldn’t solve a chemistry equation to save his life, and for my teacher. He’s young-ish, and he felt bad for me. But I didn’t want to talk to him about it. I was mad, and I got lazy, and my transcript is kind of wrecked for the past two years.”
“I’m so sorry,” Ami said, the sympathy plain in her voice and expression.
He resurfaced from the past, dragged himself back into the present, which somehow seemed more muddled than the bright flashes of anger and clarity that darted through his memories. “It’s okay. Nothing on my permanent record, and here I am. My parents thought a new school might do me some good when junior year went badly, so we moved. Plus it’s closer to Jaden’s school.”
When he named the state school, Ami wondered briefly if his brother knew Rei. But it was such a big school…
Instead of asking, she said, “You know, all those things you told me – you don’t believe in them if you keep going this way.”
“Huh?”
Ami nodded, steeling herself. “Your grades aren’t competitive because you don’t do any homework. You’re getting Bs in most of your classes, aren’t you? It’s fine, it’s average. B is average. You can get into a mediocre college, keep getting mediocre grades, and get a mediocre job if you don’t care.”
He glared at her, hating how it sounded in that cool, prim voice. “Are you calling me average?”
She looked right back at him and said calmly, “I’m calling you a hypocrite. You told me not to let some silly admissions office get me down. You’re in a two year slump because of some science fair officials. I know it wasn’t right. It was terribly wrong.
“But now you’re not doing anything about it, and you’re letting that experience get the better of you. You’re brilliant, Zach. Your experience at the science fair showed you that. And you’re getting Bs without doing any work for them. Your test scores are phenomenal – I’ll admit it, even if it’s been a thorn in my side for the past few months. But it’s all going to waste.”
She had been getting under his skin, but now he was getting calmer. “Don’t stop. Keep the compliments coming. So really, it’s been pissing you off, how well I do on tests?”
Ami frowned at him. “You’re being a pain.”
“I believe the exact phrase was ‘a thorn in your side.’ If you ask me, that sounds classier than simply ‘a pain.’”
“Don’t change the subject!” she insisted, even as she hid a smile.
He sighed. “You’re better at this motivation/guilt thing than my parents. So you think you’re going to reform me and get me into some fancy school that’ll whip me into shape?”
“Hardly,” she replied dryly. “You’re going to have to shape up on your own terms.”
When he looked mildly disappointed, she relented and said, “If you want to study with us, you’re welcome to.”
Zach grinned. “Supportive environment and stuff like that? Leah won’t like that, you know.”
Ami wrinkled her nose at him. “If you don’t want to study with us, you can just say so instead of pinning the blame on us.”
“Okay, okay, kidding here. So when and where?”
“Are you serious?” she asked, studying him with those ocean blue eyes he thought could see right through him.
“Yeah. You’re looking at a reformed man, Ami.” Despite the dramatics and slight smirk on his face, he was planning to keep his word. “Just tell me when and where.”
She sighed, wondering if she had gotten herself into more trouble than she had bargained for. “We usually have a study group in the public library everyday after school except Fridays because the school library closes too early. But not all of us are there all the time. With clubs and whatnot, most of us don’t get there until about an hour after school lets out.”
They had reached her apartment complex, and she had her keys out. To her surprise, the lights were on now. “It looks like Mom’s home early,” she remarked. Turning to Zach, she said, ‘Thank you for walking me home, and for telling me some things I needed to hear. And I’m sorry for some of the things I said. I hope I didn’t offend you.”
Zach smiled at her. “No harm done. And I figure, now you have to put up with me – that should be enough punishment for anyone.”
And so they parted ways, she to go in and break the news to her mother, and he to start on his homework.
Love at Fifth Sight
Infinite Ice
