Never Always Sometimes - Adi Alsaid Page 0,27

I was going to

be. I’ve seen parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts die, but it was

the first funeral I attended that taught me to love life.”

Marroney had the confident, assertive cadence of slam poetry

down perfectly, which was bizarre to see from a guy who looked like

Marroney. He was more animated than Dave had ever seen him,

although Dave had never had him as a teacher, and it made him

wonder if that’s what he was like in class. At one point the crowd

let loose a round of applause, whistles, and Ohh! s that Dave knew happened only when the poet had said a really good line. Julia was

smiling wildly, whooping along with the crowd.

Marroney snapped his fingers and the room quieted back down.

DAVE 93

“This is going to sound like a cliché, but what’s that matter when it’s

true.” He snapped again. “It takes less than a second for the sound of

the friction between my fingers to reach your ears.” Another snap.

“That’s the line between life and death, and you can’t see it but you

sure as hell can hear it.” Another snap. “Listen.” Snap. “To.” Snap.

“Every.” Snap. “Second.”

When Marroney left the stage to the sound of applause, the emcee,

a fat guy in a bowling shirt and a rainbow-colored tie read out the

scores from the judges. Then he announced that they were going to

take a short break and the last round of poets would have their turn.

“First up after the break is Julia,” he said, reading from a clipboard.

“So, Julia, get ready to slam.”

Dave turned to Julia. “You’re not.”

“Oh, I am.”

“You’re going to embarrass yourself, aren’t you?”

“Not at all. But if Marroney doesn’t fall in love with me tonight,

I might need to hire some outside help, because I don’t know what

else to do.” Julia pulled out a folded piece of paper from her pocket.

Before she unfolded it, it looked a lot like the Nevers list had, her

loopy handwriting showing through on the back of the page.

Dave caught a glimpse of the title. “He’s going to file a restraining

order.”

“That or a marriage certificate,” Julia said, grinning. “After his

performance, I really wouldn’t mind.”

“I don’t know if it was that good.”

94 NEVER ALWAYS SOMETIMES

“Dave, it was so good, you’re probably pregnant right now, just

from the sexiness of the words.”

When Julia took the stage, with her bare feet and pink hair, she

looked like someone who belonged at a slam-poetry reading. She was

wearing a high-waisted skirt and a soft cotton gray T-shirt with the

words PURA VIDA printed across the front. Dave glanced over to see Marroney’s reaction, but he didn’t have a good angle.

“Hi,” Julia said, making her voice a little lower and throatier,

affecting a shy look in her eye that Dave knew perfectly well was meant

to be seductive. “This one’s called Solve for X, or Why Mathematicians Must be Good at Sex. ”

A few chuckles spread across the room, but Julia didn’t drop the

act. She lowered her head, hanging on to the mic stand like a rock

star, her pink hair hanging in front of her face like a curtain waiting

to be pulled up. Someone shifted out of his line of sight, and Dave

turned to see Marroney put a hand to his forehead to hide his face.

“There’s something about the slope of his”—Julia paused with

a smile—“cosine that drives me to irrational equations. There’s

something about how he can recite pi to forty digits that makes

my . . . heart swell exponentially. If X is the point where two lines meet, let my tangent and his intersect and repeat.” Someone in the

crowd let out a whoop. Dave sipped from his coffee, unable to hide his

smile. “I plotted him on my graph, and he touches all my quadrants.”

A few more shouts let out, and one of the judges was nodding. Julia

pulled the microphone from its stand and started speaking louder,

DAVE 95

not even giving the audience time to react before moving on to the

next line.

“We’ll never be apart but he still calls me his x-axis because I’m always horizontal. When he’s near, I’m not multiplying or subtracting or dividing, I’m just picturing us with no added variables. I must

be his prime number because there’s only room for him inside my

equation.”

The crowd was starting to buzz. Even the soft clink of dishes being

put in the kitchen had quieted down. Just a week or so ago, Dave would

probably have felt humiliated that Julia could muster up a whole poem

full of math sex puns aimed at Marroney when she had never felt as

much as a pulse in his direction. But tonight, with Gretchen taking

up his thoughts, Dave felt