The Mad Scientist's Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke Read Free Book Online

spare bedroom. To learn math. Algebra. She even hated the sound of the word.
      Cat sat down at the table set up in the center of the room. Finn looked up from his laptop and smiled at her. "Would you like to change out of your bathing suit?" he asked. Cat shook her head no, drawing her bare stomach tight against her spine.
      The algebra lesson that day was like all the math lessons that had preceded it. Finn presented Cat with a simple equation, an unnatural mixture of letters and numbers. Cat stared at it. She tapped her fingernails, currently covered in peeling green polish, against the table. Her head seemed full of cotton candy. Finn waited for her to respond: he didn't cajole or plead or mock, but sat silently beside her, his hands folded in his lap. The air conditioner kicked on. Eventually Cat began to write out her calculations, her simple, neat rows of arithmetic, but then the equation started to shift and muddle, and the letters transposed themselves over the numbers and vice versa – the 5s became Ss, the Ss became 5s. Cat threw her digital pen across the room and slouched in her seat.
      "I can't do it," she said. "I'm too stupid."
      "You're not stupid."
      "Mom thinks I am."
      "You are not stupid."
      Cat pushed her hair, damp and sticky with river water, away from her face and looked at Finn. He pulled out a spare pen and leaned over her writing tablet. He was close to her. Cat felt light-headed, and she knew it had nothing to with her inability to understand math. She was on the precipice of something. It coiled inside her like a snake and made her fidgety and distracted, especially around Finn and his constant stream of algebraic equations. But the algebraic equations were not the problem.
      Finn wiped away all of her work on the learning tablet. "Watch," he said. Then he wrote out the solution to the equation, slowly and neatly, stopping after each line to look over at her. Her cheeks warmed. She tried to memorize the way the solution looked when it was correct. She tried to forget all her frantic scribbling in the margins. She tried to ignore the distraction of his closeness to her.
      Finn wiped the learning tablet clean again. "Now you try."
      Cat took the pen from him and worked through the equation, glancing over at him occasionally for assurance. When she had finished, he said, in his even way, "That's correct. Very good." He smiled. "You're not stupid."
      "Thanks." Cat meant it. She knew that he never said anything ironically.
      And so it went for the rest of the afternoon, working through one equation after another, Cat struggling to find the common concepts between each individual problem. But they were all fragments of glass, glued back together to make a vase that had shattered a long time ago.
      It was difficult for her to concentrate on algebra for more than an hour. Eventually, she only noticed Finn's fingers, tapering down into points. Or his hair, which tended to fall into his eyes. She made note of the mechanical way he moved. The shape of his spine, his shoulders, his waist. He wasn't an adult, not really, so it was OK for her to see all these things.
      Some nights Cat drew pictures of him under the covers of her bed. She used to use the electronic drawing tablet her father gave her for her birthday, but recently she had switched over to paper from the art co-op, expensive and rough against her skin, her fingers smudging the charcoal as she worked. Her bed sheets were coated in a fine layer of black dust. She sprayed the drawings with hairspray and kept them in a folder in the back of her closet, away from the paintings of flowers and dragonflies she knew to be more innocuous, even though she could not quite give a reason as to why – she suspected it was related to the panicked feeling bubbling up inside her, the appearance of feathery golden hairs along the incline of her thighs, the reason her mother hated her yellow swimsuit.
      "Very good," said