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