“Weird?”
Stop asking about her.
“Like, we all expected her to be hurt, or injured, or upset, or have slain a bear and painted herself with its blood—you know, because she was just moments prior literally yelling. When she came in though, she seemed fine. Frosty, but fine.”
“Frosty?”
“She was about as warm and friendly as a polar vortex. Super frosty.” Kaitlyn frowned, and then scrunched her face. “I’ve read that about her. Mona DaVinci, supergenius, personality of fifty below zero. But then, if I had her IQ, I might be the same way. We must all seem like single-cell organisms to her.”
I bit the inside of my lip to keep my expression dispassionate and from asking another question, though many scrolled through my mind, How long did she stay? Did she say anything to anyone? Did she say she’d be back down tonight?
“Anyway,” Kaitlyn continued, “in that interview I read? The interviewer said she was a cold person. Perhaps she’s the mythical Snow Queen. And that yelling was her speaking the snow language, giving orders to her minion snowflakes. ATTACK THE BEARS!”
Preoccupied and unsettled, I forced a smirk at Kaitlyn’s silliness and scratched the back of my neck. I’d read every interview Mona DaVinci had given, or all the ones I could find online, and Kaitlyn was right. If Mona was described in an interview, they used words like cold, emotionless, blunt, and abrupt just as often as they used gifted, intelligent, smart, and brilliant. They’d also called her “the greatest mind of her generation,” and, “this generation’s Einstein.”
The closest anyone had come to ‘friendly’ was when Rolling Stone had done a profile on the exceptional children of famous musicians. The journalist mentioned something about Mona DaVinci only being animated while she discussed advances in the field of physics with an audience of high school seniors.
According to the article, Mona donated some of her free time to a foundation dedicated to advancing women in STEM fields. Mona flew around the country a few times a year, giving speeches to assemblies in rural areas and underserved schools. Apparently, she was also a philanthropist. I didn’t know why, but evidence of her good deeds aggravated me.
However, the rest of the article went on to describe her as single-mindedly focused on her research and the foundation, disinterested in questions about all other facets of life.
At one point they’d asked, “Do you think you’ll ever get married?”
To which she’d responded, “Irrelevant. Next question.”
Then they’d asked, “Anyone special in your life?”
To which she’d responded, “Yes. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Next question.”
And that made me laugh. It also pissed me off when her responses in interviews made me laugh.
Kaitlyn pulled me out of my thoughts by bumping my shoulder. “Hey there, Abram. What’s going on in your brain? You are behaving in odd and uncharacteristic ways.”
I lifted an eyebrow at her. “What do you mean?”
She studied me for a moment before asking, “Why are we here?”
“To write music.” And to assuage my . . . curiosity.