Chapter 42: There's a Girl
New Jersey. Hadley Township High School. Friday evening.
The senior prom was already underway inside.
Leonard Hofstadter was standing on the front steps, which was not where he had intended to end up, but which was where the last sixty seconds had deposited him — frozen in place, one hand still half-raised in a wave that nobody had acknowledged, watching Stephanie Barnett and her friends disappear through the front doors in a cloud of hairspray and laughter.
He lowered his hand.
The laughter faded.
He stood there.
He'd heard it clearly. They hadn't bothered to lower their voices.
"Isn't that Leonard? Aren't you going to say hi?"
"Say hi? I barely know him."
"You barely know him? I've seen you two together like a dozen times."
"You must have been seeing things. Or maybe you saw him trying to talk to me. That happens constantly. I can't keep track of all of them."
The way she'd said it — not cruelly, exactly, just breezily, the way you'd describe something that had no particular weight — that was the part Leonard's brain kept returning to, running it again, trying to locate the version of the last four years that matched what Stephanie had just said.
He couldn't find it.
He'd met Stephanie at the beginning of freshman year.
At that point in his life, Leonard's social landscape was approximately what it had been since middle school: teachers who recognized his ability and occasionally said something about it out loud, which made everything worse; and classmates who had developed, over years of practice, a fairly comprehensive catalog of ways to make his existence uncomfortable.
The list was not short.
Peeing in his Hawaiian Punch at lunch. Snapping his underwear waistband from behind with enough force that he'd spent most of seventh grade walking carefully. Convincing him that the chemistry teacher had assigned extra credit for eating his own eraser. Rolling him into a gym mat and leaving him in the equipment closet. The time with the parrot. The time with the super glue and the Hershey's Kisses. The time Kyle Brannigan had challenged him to a walnut-cracking contest and specified that the walnut would be cracked against Leonard's forehead, and Leonard had somehow agreed because Kyle had phrased it as a physics demonstration.
He had survived all of it with the resilience of someone who had learned, early, that survival was the available option and had committed to it fully.
A large part of that resilience, for the past four years, had been Stephanie.
She'd appeared in his life at the start of ninth grade with the specific quality of a genuinely beautiful person who had decided, for reasons Leonard could not identify, to be kind to him. The first time she'd asked him for help with a chemistry problem, he'd been so surprised that he'd answered in the wrong subject for thirty seconds before correcting himself.
The kindness had come with a condition, which she'd explained on the second or third occasion, in a way that had seemed reasonable at the time:
"Leonard, you're honestly one of the nicest people I know. But I have a lot of guy friends who get weird about it, and I don't want them giving you a hard time. So let's just keep it low-key for now. When we're out of here — when we graduate — it won't matter anymore. Okay?"
"Okay," Leonard had said, nodding with the enthusiasm of someone receiving news they'd been waiting their whole life to hear.
His IQ was 173. In every domain of his existence except this one, that number meant something.
In this one, it had been completely, comprehensively useless.
He'd spent four years helping Stephanie with homework — her assignments, her college application essays, a term paper on the French Revolution that he'd essentially written in an evening while she worked her way through a bag of chips and said things like "you're so good at this, Leonard, I don't know what I'd do without you." He'd held her hair back when she'd had too much to drink at a party he'd been brought to as a homework resource. He'd proofread her Cornell application, which had been accepted, which she'd announced to her friends tonight as though she'd done it alone.
And now: I barely know him.
Leonard stood on the front steps of his high school on the night of his senior prom and did the math.
It took him about forty-five seconds.
When he arrived at the answer, it was the kind of answer that was obvious in retrospect and devastating in the present tense.
He stood there for a while longer, not quite able to make himself go inside and not quite able to make himself leave, which was, in miniature, a reasonable description of most of his high school experience.
"Hey, Hofstadter."
A large hand landed on his shoulder with the weight of someone who had forgotten that other people had nerve endings.
Jimmy Callahan — six-two, starting tight end, currently operating at a blood-alcohol level that had made him generous and loud in approximately equal measure — draped his arm across Leonard's shoulders and breathed beer in his general direction.
"Nancy! What are you doing out here? Prom's inside."
"My name is Leonard," Leonard said, for somewhere between the fifteenth and twentieth time in his high school career. "Leonard. Four years, Jimmy. We have had this conversation."
"Sure, sure." Jimmy took a pull from his cup. "What's the matter, Nancy? You look like somebody ran over your dog."
"I don't have a dog."
"It's a figure of— you know what, never mind." Jimmy tightened his arm around Leonard's shoulder. "Come inside. I'll introduce you to some people. It's our last night, man. You should—"
"I'm fine," Leonard said. "I'm just — I need a minute."
"You've been standing out here for like ten minutes."
"I'm aware of how long I've been standing here, Jimmy."
"Okay, okay." Jimmy held up his cup in a peace gesture, sloshing slightly. "I'm just saying. Nancy—"
"Stop calling me that."
"—you should come inside—"
"I said stop."
Leonard stepped back, out from under Jimmy's arm, and turned to face him. He'd said it louder than he intended. Loud enough that the two girls near the door looked over.
Jimmy's expression shifted. The loose, beer-generous friendliness compressed into something harder. He was six-two and two hundred and twenty pounds and currently not operating his best judgment.
"What did you just say to me?"
Leonard's brief, unprecedented surge of backbone made contact with the reality of the situation and began to recede immediately. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
Jimmy stepped toward him.
Leonard reached into his jacket pocket, found his inhaler, and took a pull — the automatic response of a nervous system that had learned this particular sequence of events.
"He said stop."
The voice came from the parking lot. Calm, conversational, carrying the specific quality of someone who was not raising it because raising it wasn't necessary.
Both of them looked.
A guy around Leonard's age was getting out of a parked Ford Tempo near the lot entrance — tall enough, easy in his posture, with the look of someone who had assessed the situation from approximately forty feet away and had arrived at the relevant conclusions before he'd finished parking. He wasn't rushing. He walked toward them at the pace of someone who had somewhere to be and was not concerned about the intervening steps.
He stopped a few feet from Jimmy. Looked at him with the mild, direct attention of someone waiting for a decision to be made.
Jimmy looked at him.
The calculation that happened behind Jimmy Callahan's eyes over the next four seconds was visible to anyone watching. He was large and drunk and had momentum. The guy in front of him was steady and sober and had the specific quality of someone who had already run the numbers on this situation and was not worried about the outcome.
Jimmy looked at Leonard.
Then back at the guy.
Then he laughed — the loose, retreating laugh of someone choosing a different option. "Relax, man. Just messing around." He clapped Leonard on the shoulder one more time, lighter this time, and headed back toward the entrance. "See you inside, Nancy."
The door swung shut behind him.
Leonard stood there with his inhaler in his hand.
He looked at the guy who had just gotten out of the Ford.
"Thanks," he said. He meant it, but it came out slightly wary — the wariness of someone who had learned that social interventions on his behalf usually came with a cost.
"Owen Carter." Owen extended his hand. "I drove down from New York this morning. I was looking for you, actually."
Leonard blinked. "You were looking for me."
"Yeah."
"Why?"
Owen looked at him for a moment. "I read your mother's book," he said. "The new one. I went to her signing in Manhattan yesterday and asked her where you were."
Leonard stared at him. Several things moved across his face in quick succession — surprise, confusion, and then the particular, exhausted resignation of someone who had spent their entire life being discussed in academic terms by a parent and had developed a reflex response to it.
"She told you," Leonard said flatly. "She told a complete stranger where I live."
"She said, and I'm quoting, that given your circumstances there was nothing valuable enough about you for someone to commit a crime over."
Leonard closed his eyes briefly.
"I'm really sorry," Owen said, and meant it.
"It's fine," Leonard said, in the voice of someone for whom it was not fine but who had been saying it was fine for so long that the phrase had lost all tonal variation. "I'm used to it." He opened his eyes. "So you read her book. Case study three."
"Yeah."
"And you drove to New Jersey."
"I wanted to meet you," Owen said simply. "Not case study three. You."
Leonard looked at him.
In sixteen years of life, several highly specific things had happened to Leonard Hofstadter. He'd had a paper accepted in a physics journal at fourteen. He'd built a functional electromagnetic can opener at nine. He'd once correctly identified a previously uncatalogued variable in a fluid dynamics problem that his father's graduate students had been working on for three months, which his father had acknowledged by saying "hm" and walking away.
Nobody had ever driven to New Jersey to meet him.
"Why?" Leonard said.
"Because I think you're going to be one of the most important people I know," Owen said. "And I wanted to say hello before things got complicated."
Leonard stared at him.
"Also," Owen said, "your prom is apparently happening right now and you're standing outside. Do you actually want to go in, or do you want to get food somewhere and talk physics?"
Leonard looked at the door.
He thought about Stephanie's voice. I barely know him. He thought about what was waiting for him inside — Jimmy and his friends, and the DJ playing songs he didn't like, and the specific social experience of being Leonard Hofstadter at a party full of people who had spent four years demonstrating their feelings about Leonard Hofstadter.
"There's a diner two blocks east," Leonard said. "They have good pie."
"Lead the way," Owen said.
Leonard pocketed his inhaler.
For the first time in approximately an hour, he started walking with some sense of where he was going.
Hope you liked the chapter
Want more?
500 Power Stones = New Chapter
10 Reviews = New Chapter
20+ chapters ahead on P8treon: DarkFoxx