How They Met, and Other Stories(42)
Author: David Levithan

Did I love her then? Yes, in a genuine way. But I knew it wasn’t everlasting, and that was okay. We had the time that we had, and we would be together for the rest of it.

I think I want to leave us there. I want to leave us in that corner of the middle-school soccer field, lit by a streetless streetlamp, listening to our prom song pour out from an old Buick. Let’s stay on this song, before it turns to something else, before it switches to a commercial. Let me hold on to this the way it was, before I knew anything else.

A ROMANTIC INCLINATION

Their eyes met across the room, at an approximate inclination of twenty degrees.

Sallie gazed at James.

James gazed at Sallie.

And at once, both were illuminated.

Through the convex lenses of his glasses, James stared at the beautiful mass of matter named Sallie Brown. She seemed larger than life (a magnification of forty-nine times, to be precise). There she was, thoughts diffusing into her notebook, paying attention to the lecture that he could not bear.

Her magnetism was something he could not resist. He just kept exerting energy in her direction, stealing a glance once every 6.6 seconds. His heart grew in volume and defied gravity at the very sight of her, with her vibrant sense of humor and radiant personality providing other coefficients of attraction. Sometimes, her smile would raise his body temperature two Celsius degrees.

James Helprin was very much in love, for that millisecond.

And so, to add symmetry to our story, was Sallie Brown. Her attraction toward James was not just one of surface value—she liked his inside parameters as much as his outside exponents. The thought of him with her made her head spin like an unbalanced torque and made her heart slide like a kilogram weight on a frictionless pulley.

Sallie Brown desired a romance of great intensity, one that would relieve her from the pressures of her daily life. She needed a buffer from collisions, a balance when her equilibrium was threatened.

And so, periodically, she looked over at James, with James returning the glance with an equal and opposite magnitude at different periods.

Yet Sallie and James had both life and the laws of physics working against them. You see, Sallie Brown and James Helprin were good friends.

Which adds a certain friction to our equation.

The minute their eyes truly met, that fateful day in AP Physics class, both objects were unprepared for the introspection that followed.

Sallie, no stranger to loving, laughing, and losing, was immediately shocked by how serious she was about James. He had long been a constant to her, one that she often relied upon when there were too many unknowns in her life. Did she really want to send their friendship to infinity by liking him?

The crests of every relationship, Sallie figured, were always followed by troughs (and crests again, if you had the patience—which she didn’t). She imagined their attraction turning to repulsion, just like that between a pith ball and a like-charged rod.

My God, she thought. Would I polarize him?

She thought of all the work that it would take to maintain equilibrium. She had only so much potential energy to give.

Would it be enough?

Meanwhile, James was having thoughts parallel to Sallie’s. The look in her eyes had given him a shock. He started to wonder if their “going out” would reduce to zero everything they had. Friendship had long been the basic element of their relationship. Now, both of them contemplated change. Yes, as Lenz had observed, change can turn on the source that created it, creating a force opposite to the best intentions.

James knew that the road to a simple harmonic relationship would be a hard one to follow. The critical point could only be reached through the passing of three states, each one causing a change in speed and the refraction toward or away from the norm.

And James seriously doubted that he and Sallie had the chemistry—or, in this case, physics—to make it.

If it is to be assumed that Newton was correct (as is the general consensus), to every action there is always opposed an equal action. That is to say that love always goes against a certain gradient. Sometimes risk. Sometimes popular opinion. In this case, regret.

Yes, James feared that liking Sallie would lead him to regret. He would regret liking her in the first place. He would regret breaking off their friendship. He would regret it when, after the statistically assured breakup, they would avoid each other like oil and water.

James did not want Sallie’s and his friendship to consist of meetings between classes and periodic waves in the halls. He knew that if their lives had to revolve around each other, they’d grow bored (not to mention dizzy). The damage would be done—the recoil irreparable.

After the initial impulse, James wondered, would the momentum remain constant?

Sallie’s doubts were only reinforced by her textbook. It defined a “couple” as “two forces on a body of equal magnitude and opposite direction, having lines of action that are parallel but do not coincide.”

Would we ever intersect? she asked herself.

She feared fusion would only bring fission, with the mass deficits too great and the energy spent too consuming to make the romantic endeavor worthwhile.

James, having a larger surface and cross-sectional area than Sallie, was worried about the strain that would possibly put a damper on their combined molecular activity. He calculated that as the length of their involvement grew, so would the tensile strain.

He also feared the work that would be needed when he and Sallie wouldn’t be together. Using W = Fd as his guideline, James figured out the work that it would take to keep their relationship at a constant force when he and Sallie were more than a mile apart. Furthermore, if he wanted to reduce the force (and, therefore, the work), he would have to slow down love’s acceleration by massive proportions.

With a girl like Sallie, a constant velocity with little to no acceleration would not be acceptable (or so James thought).

And yet a velocity increase would require an energy increase. Energy that James would find hard to muster up in this, his hardest year in high school.

Even simple harmonic motion, that romantic-sounding phenomenon, said that acceleration was proportional to negative displacement, which was not an encouraging thought.

Would we lapse into inertia without constant acceleration, requiring a larger force? James asked himself.

Even batteries would be sources of potential difference, thought Sallie.

I don’t even know if she’s a conductor or an insulator of emotion, James realized.

Boyle’s law soon served as Sallie’s guide.

According to Boyle, if the velocity of their affair decreased, the pressure would increase proportionally. Sallie was not prepared for this. Her heart had only a certain capacity for crisis.