The Curve

Three weeks in, Arjun had been wrong about exactly one thing, and it was an important thing, and it irritated him. Theo was not stupid. He was unprepared, which Arjun had mistaken for the same condition. But on the days Theo did the reading — and he did it now, Arjun had noticed, in a cramped hand on the backs of old setlists — he asked the kind of questions that made Professor Mensah stop and actually think. *Why this mechanism and not the other one. Who decided that. What does the molecule "want."* Arjun had spent years learning the answers. Theo had a gift for the questions, and the questions, it turned out, were the harder thing. "You don't ask why," Theo said one Thursday, watching Arjun set up a titration with the speed of someone who had done it forty times. "You just do it. Doesn't that bother you?" "It's a titration. There's no why. There's a procedure." "There's always a why." Theo nudged the burette stand a centimeter, pointlessly, just to have touched it. "I think you knew the why once and then you got so good at the procedure you stopped needing it. That's kind of sad, partner. Efficient. But sad." Arjun added the indicator with more force than the procedure required. "Some of us have a curve to beat." "There's the curve again." Theo leaned on the bench, chin in his hand, watching Arjun the way he watched everything — fully, without the protective half-attention most people used. "You talk about the curve like it's a person who wronged you. Who are you actually trying to beat?" It was a Theo question. It stopped Professor Mensah cold and it stopped Arjun cold now, the swirl of the flask suddenly very loud, and Arjun discovered he did not have a clean answer, only the shape of his parents at the kitchen table and the particular silence that followed a grade that wasn't an A. "Watch the flask," Arjun said, "or you'll miss the endpoint," which was a way of not answering, and Theo let him have it, which was somehow worse than if he'd pushed. The solution turned pink and held. Endpoint. Theo wrote the volume on the back of a setlist — *Saltwater, then Greyhound, then* — and Arjun found himself reading the song titles upside down and wondering, against the five-year plan, what Saltwater sounded like. "My band's playing Friday," Theo said, capping the burette. He said it lightly, the way he said the thing about being exothermic, a low-stakes offer Arjun could let fall. "The Hollow, off campus. Eleven-ish. You should come." "I have a problem set." "You have a problem set every Friday. You'll have one when you're forty." Theo shouldered his bag. The setlist flexed. "It's just — I ask you questions all the time, and you never ask me any. So here's one you could ask. You could ask what Saltwater sounds like." He grinned, crooked, exothermic. "Or you could beat the curve. Your call, partner." He left. Arjun stood at the bench with a flask of pink solution and the upside-down setlist still printed on the inside of his eyes, and for the first time since August he found a Friday he could not entirely account for in advance.