The best class I'd taken in all my years of high school was Advanced Placement Calculus BC.

Yeah, I know how stereotypical it was for an Asian-American girl like me to love math. But there you have it. I was a walking stereotype. The poster child for Asian-American math geeks. So sue me.

For me, math was fun. Math was what I grew up with. Math was…my thing. Kind of like how singing was Kevin’s thing, or fighting was (apparently) my parents’ newest thing.

I liked numbers and the infinite puzzles you could solve with them. I liked that the answer wasn’t always so neat and pretty. I liked that sometimes, you’d go into the problem expecting one thing and realizing you needed to go a completely different route to reach the solution.

Okay, you get the point. Going any further than that would make me sound like a complete nutcase (which, according to just about any other seventeen-year-old, I was).

Despite how much I liked math, for the rest of the week, calculus class was terrible thanks to a certain Alexander Lin.

Or should I say President Alexander Lin?

The ballots for the student council election had all been tallied up a few days after the Facebook fiasco. Three guesses who won.

Plus, as I’d expected, the final count for president was not exactly nail-bitingly close. Let’s just put it that way.

Anyway, I could hardly stand sitting in the same math class as Alexander when kids were slapping him on the back and congratulating him for winning an election (and indirectly ruining my non-existent public image for the remainder of high school).

The funny thing was that I was barely offended by the slander he’d used in his posters. Politics was a dirty game, indeed. I’d already known that. Heck, dirty games were my specialty—staying at the top of the class had forced me to pick up quite a few...not-so-admirable tricks along the way.

I just couldn’t believe that Alexander Lin, who was normally about as aggressive as a sleeping baby rabbit, was capable of beating me at my own game.

He even had the nerve to act all decent after the election, strolling up to me the day the result came out and sticking out his hand.

“Good campaign,” I distinctly remember Alexander saying (while I was plotting his untimely death in my head). “I liked the mustaches you drew.”

To which I responded maturely, “Why, thank you kindly, President Alexander. I will be the bigger person here and graciously accept defeat at your hands.”

Actually, I might have done something more along the lines of giving Alexander a tight-lipped smile and muttering ‘thanks’ while shaking his hand quickly, like it was going to infect me with the plague.

He gave me a funny look, probably judged me in his head, and moved on.

That was the other thing about Alexander Lin. He was one weird kid, for a certified genius. Sometimes during calc lectures I’d look up and catch him giving me odd stares. Then he would glance away as soon as he saw me staring, and we’d go back to our separate spheres of anti social-ness.

Speaking of separate spheres. Pro tip of high school: we geeks were not all each others’ friends.

Unlike what every mainstream Hollywood movie seemed to think, we didn’t go home and study with just any other geek from school. There were social circles within the geeks. It was geek-ception.

Alexander’s and my circles were about as far away from each other as possible, and that was just the way I liked it.

Unfortunately, it seemed like everybody and their grandmother was in love with Alexander Lin, including basically all the girls I talked to on a daily basis. This made pretending he didn’t exist a little harder to achieve than I’d hoped it would be.

“Oh. My. Gosh,” sighed Amelia Xu, one of the only people in school who I considered a friend. She slid into the seat behind me while the rest of our calculus class filed in for third period. “Can you believe Alexander is president of our student council now, too? Is there anything he can’t do?”

I stayed silent.

“Oh,” Amelia said, picking up on the vibe. She leaned over and patted my arm. “And I’m sorry about your loss. I voted for you, though.”

“Really?”

“No,” she winced. “Sorry, but once Alexander showed up in that polo on voting day…” Amelia shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a sucker for a smart guy who can dress.”

I sighed. “It’s okay. Losing is all part of the learning experience, right?”

“Gosh, Nancy, you always sound so serious.” Amelia tapped her eraser against my desk. “It’s okay to sulk about defeat once in a while, you know?”

Oh, if only she knew. I’d been sulking, all right. I’d been moping around the house all week. Liang Liang, our dog, was basically the only living being I bothered to interact with anymore (since me kicking Kevin out of my room didn’t count). I think my parents thought someone must have died or something.

“No, it’s really okay,” I insisted, even though it wasn’t. “I wouldn’t want the universe to go out of whack if Alexander didn’t win something anyw—”

“But gosh, have you seen him lately? He looks way more buff than before. I think he’s been working out—that’s what Margaret and Patty have been saying. Then again, those two are always lying, so who knows?” Amelia took a deep breath. “But like I was saying, there is seriously nothing Alexander can’t…”

I zoned her out. I did that a lot with Amelia. She was nice, as geeks went, but that girl had quite a mouth on her. She was still really smart, of course, with straight A’s in the hardest Advanced Placement courses. That explained why were in almost all of the same classes together.

Just as the bell rang, Louisa Kim slid into her seat and tapped me on the shoulder.

“Hey, did you guys finish the homework?” she whispered. Her almond eyes were wide with panic.

“Yes,” I said slowly. “Why?”

Louisa swiped on some lip-gloss and then let out a long breath. “Crazy story,” she said, swinging back her curtain of hair. “So I was at this party last night…”

“…and you got so insanely wasted that you just couldn’t finish your homework?”

Louisa stared at me with her jaw open. Her gum nearly fell onto the ground. “How’d you know?”

“Wild guess,” I said sarcastically.

“This only happens, like, every day,” Amelia sighed. She tossed her homework binder over to Louisa. “Here you go, loser.”

“Thanks, geek.”

Despite all their differences, Louisa and Amelia understood each other somehow. I was never going to figure out their friendship.

As old Mr. Betts came down the rows, Louisa ducked her head down and pretended to be rummaging through her backpack while she quickly filled in her homework. She’d been using this strategy since…well, since the first day of school, basically. It never failed. Mr. Betts wouldn’t have noticed if the second coming of Christ went crashing through his blackboard.

Louisa Kim was an interesting one. She was probably second closest to me after Amelia. The sad thing was, I couldn’t even tell you her favorite color. I was too busy trying to keep all these math formulas straight to try to figure out little things like that.

What I could say about Louisa is that while she was Korean-American, she was definitely not your typical AP class-taking Asian girl. On the other hand, she wasn't a complete banana (Asian on the outside, but white on the inside). She sure tried hard to have the best of both worlds, though.

This ended up backfiring more often than not.

Anyway, calculus was pretty uneventful, as usual. Amelia kept sighing and Louisa kept snoring. We were learning about polar derivatives, which sound really complex but are quite simple once you look at them the right way.

At some point, I glanced up and found Alexander Lin gazing at something suspiciously near my head. When our eyes met, he whipped his head around like he’d gotten the shock of his life.

I didn’t understand him. I really didn’t. Was he gloating about his latest victory over me, or what?

At least I didn’t have to see Alexander during my fourth period, which was Advanced Placement English Literature.

I sincerely regretted taking this class just to look better on college apps. It was torture. Think medieval torture chambers, and those were a breeze compared to this. Half the time, Mrs. Reed had us analyze a whole lot of nothing and then write essays on all this nothing.

If there was one thing I hated about high school, it was writing essays. Give me a set of calculus problems and I’d hand them back with perfect answers. Hand me an essay prompt and I never seem to know where to even start.

I wasn’t exactly an idiot, but English and I definitely had some issues to sort out. English and I were like oil and water, or maybe celebrity couples post-break up.

I guess that was the one thing I envied about Kevin: things like writing and singing just came naturally to him. Maybe if he put more effort into life, he wouldn’t have ended up like…well, like what he was like now.

 Anyway, today Mrs. Reed stood in front of us and said possibly the one thing that could have made her class even more excruciating.

“We are starting a new unit on love and relationships,” she announced.

I choked.

While most of the girls in class perked up and started giggling, I groaned and sunk low into my seat. I would have rather done a unit on anything but love. I would have rather done a unit on paint drying.

Love was like a foreign concept to me, and not even an interesting one at that. There was nothing in the world more irritating to me than one of those romance novels or rom-coms my mom was always gushing about.

It wasn’t always like this. Back when I was about eight or nine years old, I would sit on the couch and watch romantic comedies with my grandma for hours at a time. And I actually enjoyed it.

I couldn't tell if I'd been brainwashed as a kid or what.

Being a high schooler in almost all AP courses sucked the fun out of romantic comedies, though. It sort of sucked the fun out of everything. School. TV. Life in general. Somewhere along the way of losing my sanity, I’d evolved into a cynical non-believer of true love.

As if starting this ridiculous unit weren’t enough already, Mrs. Reed announced that we were having presentations in a month.

“I’ll give you this entire month to investigate any topic relating to the unit,” she said, her array of necklaces swinging this way and that as she paced back and forth in front of us. Mrs. Reed always had tons of jewelry on. If she so much as lifted a pinkie, the kids at the other end of the school could practically hear the clatter of fake gold.

I bet they could hear the entire class’s groan, too. High school seniors and presentations were not a pretty combination. For the rest of kids in my grade, at least.

Thankfully, with college applications just over the horizon, senioritis was the furthest thing from my mind.

Then again, so was a social life.

I guess this proved that saying: you couldn’t have both pies and eat them too.

*****

When I got home from school that evening, Kevin was sleeping on my bed.

I woke him up by screaming in his ear.

“Jesus!” he shouted, flailing his arms wildly as he tumbled out of bed and took the sheets with him. Kevin glared at me, which might have been intimidating if his hair wasn’t sticking out of his head in all directions. His hair looked like it had completely forgotten the existence of gravity. “Do you mind?”

“Me? Do you mind? What do you think you’re doing in here?”

“Sleeping! Is that a crime now?”

“No, but breaking and entering is.”

“Who’s breaking and entering?!”

“Well, did I let you into my room?”

“Geez, Nancy,” Kevin said. “I just wanted to talk to you about something. No need to flip your lid.”

I took a deep breath. Maybe my brother was right, for once. I was too wound up from that disaster of an election still. “Okay, I might have overreacted just a little,” I managed to spit out.

“That’s more like it. Now call me ‘Supreme Overlord’ and I’ll let you off—”

“Kevin, do not push it.” I threw my backpack down and flopped onto the bed. “Just tell me what stupid thing you’re up to now.”

“Actually, I don’t know if I feel like telling you about my ‘stupid thing’ anymore. Even though something very big and important is about to happen to me—”

“Oh, shut up. Will you just spit it out?”

“I can’t shut up and spit it out at the same time!”

There was a pounding headache developing over my forehead. Three guesses why.

“You are the biggest imbecile in the entire universe,” I said.

“Imbecile?” Kevin snorted. “I remember a time years ago when you called me the best big brother in the whole wor—”

“Don’t bring that up, please! I was nine years old!” I snapped. “And I thought the tooth fairy was real, too. Obviously, I was wrong on both accounts.”

Kevin glared at me. Without another word, he whirled around and stomped out of my room. The door slammed shut behind him.

My brother could be quite the drama queen sometimes. Like, more than me, and I was the one with the XX chromosome here. I still couldn’t figure out how we were related.

Just as I’d sat down to start my calculus assignment, the door creaked open again.

I sighed and put down my pencil. “What now, Kevin?”

“Uh, who’s Kevin?”

That was unusual. I turned around and found myself face-to-face with a hesitantly smiling Alexander Lin.

Standing there.

In my house.

Right outside my door.

This could not mean anything good.

*****

 A/N  - Fun fact about me: I actually hate AP Calculus BC with the passion of a thousand suns and flamethrowers.

Vote/comment if you enjoyed the chapter :) And we shall see what will happen with this Alexander kid....

Expect an update tomorrow unless the world ends or something drastic happens :P