The Boy Who Asked for the Chalk

Mr. Carter — I'm Dr. Maya Chen, Mathematics. Before the meeting with Professor Harrow's office, I would very much like to see your notebook.

Chapter 10: Dr. Chen

Dr. Maya Chen's office was on the third floor of Kellogg Hall, the smallest office Isaiah had ever seen a professor keep.

Books stood in columns on the floor because the shelves had given up years ago. A whiteboard covered one wall, dense with work in three colours of marker, and in its corner someone had written DO NOT ERASE — SPRING. The desk held two mugs, a chipped teapot, and a photograph of a younger Dr. Chen standing in snow beside an older woman, both laughing at something outside the frame.

"Sit," she said. "No — not that chair. The other one, with the papers. Move them. They're mine, which means they're mostly wrong."

Isaiah moved a stack of drafts and sat. His notebook was in his backpack, and his backpack was on his knees, and his hands were on top of it like a man guarding a briefcase in a film. He had rehearsed this meeting on the walk over, and every version had ended with her smiling politely and using the word interesting, which Theo had taught him was academic for no.

Dr. Chen was thirty-four and looked younger, which she used, Isaiah would learn, the way other people used a weapon. She told him none of her history. What she said was:

"You cleaned my building last year."

Isaiah blinked. "Ma'am?"

"Kellogg. Evenings. You used to hum when you worked — don't look like that, the walls are thin and I work late. I never knew your name. Last week I watched a video filmed in Harrow's hall, and I thought, I know that voice." She folded her hands. "Then I froze it at your fourth line, and I forgot about the voice entirely. Show me the notebook, Isaiah. Professor Harrow calls you Mr. Carter, which in his mouth is a warning label."

He unzipped the backpack slowly.

The notebook was a composition book, black and white marbled, the cheap kind sold in drugstores, its spine reinforced with tape. He had bought four at the start of term because they were on sale. This was the second. He set it on her desk and held it a moment longer than dignity allowed.

"I should tell you," he said, "the first pages are bad. I was wrong a lot at the start. It's not — it isn't clean work. And some of it is just me copying other people's attempts to see where they—"

"Isaiah." She said it gently. "Wrong pages are the most honest thing a mathematician owns. Edmund Harrow's notebooks would fit in a teacup. Do you know why? He throws the wrong ones away. Then he stands in a hall and announces that the truth arrived clean, because for him it must never be seen to have struggled." She opened the cover. "May I?"

She read the way she presumably did everything: entirely. Page by page, without hurry, her expression giving away nothing. She passed his false starts without a flicker. She passed the night he had filled six pages with a borrowed method and written beneath it, in furious pencil, THIS IS A ROAD TO NOWHERE, CARTER. Her pen stayed capped.

Isaiah watched the clock. He counted the books in the tallest floor column twice and got two different numbers, which under other circumstances would have troubled him more.

At page forty-one, she stopped.

Page forty-one was the fold. Not the polished four lines from Harrow's board, but the wild original — three pages, diagrams like turning staircases, the spiral of squares drawn and redrawn, and in the middle, underlined twice, the small statement he had built everything on since. A lemma. His lemma, though he had never called it that aloud.

Dr. Chen read those three pages four times. Isaiah knew, because he counted her eyes moving, the way he counted everything when he was afraid.

Then she uncapped her pen — and set it down again without writing a word, as if she had decided his pages deserved better than her first thoughts.

"Who taught you to do this?" she asked.

"My father. And then — nobody. Then the board, I guess. At night."

"Your father is a mathematician?"

"He was a teacher. High school." A pause he had practised and still failed at. "He died when I was twelve."

She closed the notebook with both hands, the way you close something that matters, and slid it back across the desk to exactly the spot his hands were waiting.

"Isaiah," Dr. Chen said, "hear me precisely, because I am not a person who says this to be kind. What you have on page forty-one is not a trick, and it is not luck. It is a real lemma. I believe it is new. I believe it is the first true step anyone has taken toward the Kessler Equation in thirty-seven years — and I intend to spend tonight proving myself wrong about that, because that is my job. If I can't —" For the first time, she smiled, and it transformed her. "If I can't, then you and I are going to have a very interesting semester."