Installment 1

Clio

I sat resolutely on my neatly made bed and stared at the hunched form lying in a fetal position under the mussed covers of the bed across the tiny room. It was my roommate, Natalie. Okay, it was probably my roommate. The odds were high, at least in the mid 70 percent range, that it was Natalie. One could never really tell in the Freshman dorms at Oral Roberts University. All that good Christian talk tended to get left at the door, and I am in the process of learning the hard way, not to mention the bitter way, that going to a religious college didn’t necessarily have any bearing on the disposition of your classmates. It seems like the only thing my floormates are really interested in are boys. I grunted quietly as memories of what I had expected college to be like traipsed through my mind. Deep intellectual conversations around the clock, sweet little coffee shops tucked away in the artsy part of Tulsa, Billie Holliday fans... How naive had I really been? What I had actually found when I arrived on campus the first day of Spring semester was, to say the least, a rude awakening. Alcohol. Lots of alcohol. Trent Reznor. Even more Trent Reznor. And Contempo Casual. I’m pretty sure that all of these current fads at ORU are basically the embodiment of all the evils of western civilization. Oh, and Hanson. I’m beginning to react to the opening strands of Mmmbop like some sort of depressed Lemming. Natalie played it non-stop, and I am therefore perpetually nauseous. I guess I have nothing particularly against the band itself, but Mmmbop, the only song by them I’ve ever heard, makes me yearn to find a gun tower and an Ak-47 in short order.

I fervently hoped Natalie wasn’t suffering from another hang-over -- the minuscule room we share still reeks from the last time Nat had overindulged and not quite made it to the bathroom before tossing her cookies.

I contemplated my next move as listened to the peaceful rasp of Natalie’s snores. I have a huge paper due on the most boring/bizarre book I’ve ever had the misfortune to read -- “Crime and Punishment.” Just the thought of the thick, heavily underlined tome that awaits in my backpack like some sort of wild hyena on the veldt sends shivers down my spine. I have yet to get a hold on the concept of highlighting. Of the book, not the hair, I had gotten the second variety pretty much down pat a few years ago with a scary Angela from My So Called Life-esque brouhaha. In college one buys ones own books for classes, and therefore had free reign to do with them as whim dictates. The issue that my whims often dictate throwing my books out any conviently placed window and watching them flutter to the ground like so many hateful meteorites. To date this whim has yet to be realized, but after a few more archaic Russian epics it might just be given in to. To take my frustrations out I wield my thin, neon orange highlighter like Luke Skywalker with a lightsaber. I highlight EVERYTHING. Every once in a while I’ll realize this and try to decide what is actually important and highlight only this. Occasionally I would find a word or two and deem them as not vital... words like “the” and “but”.

I am resolved to the fact that I have to start on that paper; unfortunately the computer which sits on my desk, taking up a ridiculously large amount of the seven square feet I have to my name in the world, would be really loud to boot up. It would probably wake Natalie with its wheezing, and I’m just not in the mood to deal with her. Not like I ever am. Today just has seemed particularly grating to begin with. All I need now is Nat’s whiny soprano voice following me around campus.

The initial wave of guilt I had experienced in the first few weeks of the semester at the prospect of waking my roomie from one of her frequent all-day slumber fests is rapidly being replaced by annoyance. I paid just as much money as Natalie to call this ten foot cinderblock pit my home. This prompts the eternal question: why can’t I ever just come in and do what I need to do without worrying about my lush of a roommate?

I sighed as I watched the prone form shift under the thick down comforter that Natalie loves so much. I’m just going to have to go to the computer lab, I thought, steeling myself and making a move to scoop my black East Pack into my arms before thinking better of it. I wouldn’t be the only one hysterically attempting to type a paper that should have been started weeks before; it was nearly midterms at ORU, and this translated into lines at all of the computer labs so long one could almost think the people were waiting for Space mountain, not Microsoft Works. I can almost hear my mother’s voice in my head, echoes from my last day at home in January: “Remember sweetie, you have just as much right to be there as anyone else... you’re special... you’re going to do great things.” This little pep talk had been accompanied by a misty smile. I was at this point already feeling tears burning at my eyes, and I blinked rapidly in attempt to halt them from escaping. I miss home so much, not a day has gone by in my month long stay in Tulsa, some 500 miles from where I come from in Texas, when I haven’t thought of my mom and dad, or my best friend Casey, or the life I’ve left behind to start college two years ahead of most people my age. My chest tightened at this thought, and I did my best to exorcise the bad thoughts from my mind. Wallowing in self pity never got anyone anywhere, my dad used to say. He must have been right -- I’ve certainly spent a lot of time in the recent past wallowing, and it has decidedly not gotten me anywhere. In fact, I think I’m stuck in the psychic middle of nowhere. With Hanson. Ugh.

Sometimes I can’t help but feel like self pity is all that I had left in the world. Here I am, three months into my sixteenth year of life stuck in Oklahoma, of all places, for four years of college with no hope of parole. It’s hard, I whined to myself as I put my bag back on the floor and flopped silently on my bed. I should be at home, in my own familiar bedroom, going to the same school I’ve had spent the last two years at, starting my junior year with the same people I’ve been going to school with for the past ten years. But NO. I’m far from home and so busy trying to deal with a schedule filled with 18 credit hours of 100 level courses that sometimes I feel like I actually should to make appointments in my datebook for superfluous personal hygiene tasks, such as showering..

My diary, the small, tan volume that has housed my deepest and scariest thoughts for the past three years, caught my eye from its resting spot on the floor next to my bed. I grabbed it, not wanting to deal with life. Just holding the little book sent a shiver of well being through my depressed mind. It is the perfect journal, a fat little book filled with thick sheets of pale blue unlined paper, and with a built in elastic to hold it closed when not in use. It inspires me, while its familiarity works to comfort. I flipped through it’s pages, reading some of the most recent entries.

January 1, 1998-
Only 8 days left. I’m absolutely terrified. All my life I’ve complained because nothing ever changes, and now I’m staring down an altering that will ensure my life will never be the same again. I wish for nothing more than the same, stoically familiar feeling of Olcott Falls High, where I know the teachers, the students, and the classes. I’ve been worrying about the possibility that I will make no friends and spend the next four years alone all along, but the thought that I won’t be able to handle the schoolwork came to my mind only recently. I’m taking classes that interest me, so if college is anything like high school I should be able to handle it... but who knows what’s going to happen?

A weak smile played at my face as I read this entry. In the time I’ve been a college student I’ve realized the work is nothing. It takes a lot of time, but my tests and papers almost inevitably come back with A’s written in some discreet spot on the back page. Sometimes other comments come back too, ones that make me even happier. The best one so far I keep in the top drawer of my desk, just in case of a self-esteem emergency. “Clio,” my professor’s practically illegible handwriting says on the lower corner of my first essay for English 121, “This is a exceptional essay -- highly original. Your writing is superior. A pleasure to read your work.” I flipped forward a few more pages, still smiling indulgently at my silly actions of the past. I couldn’t help but frown deeply at the next entry I came to. Without even reading the words scrawled shakily across the page I can tell I was crying when I wrote it; the neat, practically mechanical looking, handwriting of the last entry has been replaced by choppy and spread out sentence fragments.

January 7, 1998-

If I don’t stop crying soon I’m seriously going to get dehydrated, but I just can’t. It feels like the world is ending, and I guess it sort of is. It’s not like I’m dying or anything, but it feels like I’m writing the epitaph for the ‘child’ Clio. I know that somewhere in me resides and independent ‘adult’ Clio, but it doesn’t fit me. Not now. Maybe never.

A few more pages on I came across my last entry. It’s not quite so hysterical as the earlier one, but it’s not exactly cheery, either.

January 21, 1998-
Well, here I am, in college. And how do I like it so far? Not at all. I’ve been here for a while now, and I feel so out of place. All the girls on my floor do is drink -- I hate it. Sometimes I wonder if I would be happier here if I just went out with them and got smashed, but I don’t want to. Drinking is such a dumb hobby. I don’t want to be like them. It seems like most of the people here are pretty plastic. We had a floor meeting yesterday and I looked around for a ‘real’ person (don’t ask me what that means, someone who looks like me?) and I couldn’t find a single one. I feel so alone here. Why do I have to be so shy? Why do I spend so much time worrying about things I can’t change?

I let loose with what I suspect could be called a heaving sigh and opened Bucky, as I’ve been known to call my journal, to a fresh page. I don’t feel like writing, but I am going to do it if it kills me. I’ve got to, it makes me feel so much better in the long run. And besides, someday I’m going to be writing my novel and want to look back and see exactly what it felt like to be a college freshman: scared, alone, and exhilarated all at once.

A groaning thud emanated from the other side of the room, and I realized that it was invoked when Nat bumped her head on the cinderblock wall. She does that all the time in her sleep. Sometimes I wonder which is going to be dented first: her thick head or the thick wall. “Urghh....” a grunt followed the thud, “will you please be quiet? I’m trying to sleep.” The behemoth spoke, and my skin positively crawled with annoyance.

“I’m sorry,” I counted to ten before replying, but the venom in voice still startled me, “but it’s three thirty pm on a Wednesday. I have a paper to write. I need to be in here.”

“God, you’re so inconsiderate.” Natalie rolled over and shot me a vicious glance. Great, I thought to myself, she’s been awake for all of ten seconds and we’re already embarking into the wonderful world of cat fights.

“Oh, okay. Whatever you say.” I said, tugging my bag off the floor and slamming myself into the chair at my desk, punching the power button on my CPU with all my strength.

“So hold on to the ones who really care/ In the end they’ll be the only ones there/ When you get old and start losing your hair.” Nat apparently had the remote control to her CD player in bed with her, because the vilely inane words of my least favorite song in the entire world ring through the air, grating on my nerves like a lawn mower across the road at 4 am.

“Could you please turn that down? I’m trying to think.” No answer came from Natalie’s side of the room and I noticed that she had retreated back under the covers. “What’s your issue!?!” I practically screamed, anger boiling up in molten waves before my eyes. I’ve never been this frustrated in my entire life. It’s impossible to room with Satan and not get an attitude, but sometimes I just get so mad that I’m totally out of control. Like now.

I jumped up and strode purposefully to the CD player on Nat’s bureau. I could barely see the buttons through my anger, and simply pounded on the blinking black box until it opened. My hand finally closed on the Hanson CD, and just as I was about to put it back into its case my feet slipped in slow motion from under me and I crashed to the floor on a pile of Nat’s dirty clothes. “Will you ever clean this mess up?!!?” Nat stuck her head out from her cocoon and is looked maliciously at me.

“Where’s my CD?”

“Uh.” That question was the absolute last thing I expected to hear from her, and so I think I sat there gaping for a moment before even grasping the concept enough to wonder where, indeed, her hideous orange CD had gotten to. I looked around, and when I spotted the shinny CD on the bare tile floor near the door I swear my heart stopped for a second. The disc was neatly split in two, snapped directly down the middle. It was Nat’s favorite CD. She would never forgive me.

A flurry of motion blurred in my vision and Nat is suddenly standing over the CD in her flannel Pjs, staring in disbelief. She gives me a look that’s enough to make me thank god cliché’s aren’t necessarily true, because if they were my parents would be making funeral arrangements in the near future.

And then the room was empty, save my quaking presence, and the brutal slamming of the door behind Nat echoed tauntingly in my ears. I sat for a couple of moments, in a pile of my roommates dirty laundry, before fat tears begin rolling rapidly down my cheeks. “Damn.” I whispered, feeling even worse than I could imagine possible, and not knowing what to do.

***

The next day I had to report to work study right after my classes ended and would be there until after eleven. So hopefully avoiding Nat wouldn’t be much of a challenge. I was mad, but I had never meant to break the CD. I tried to convince myself that it was Nat’s own fault, afterall, she was the one who left slippery pleather (ugh) pants lying on the floor for weeks at a time. It wasn’t really helping, though; I was still racked with guilt.

The math office, where I work as an assistant, is a bright and cheery place. It seems like the only spot on campus to be really well heated, and its rich warmth felt comforting on my cold skin as I entered the office. I busily stripped myself of hat, mittens, coat, and scarf, before taking my seat behind the big, worn oak desk in the center of the room.

“Well, hello there, Ms. Chambers,” came a dry and gravely voice from one of the adjoining offices.

“Hi Professor Edelbaum.” I replied, feeling a lot happier. The math office has become my fall out shelter from the great big radio-active world of college. And Professor Edelbaum was rapidly becoming one of her closest friends. He was an old, old man with a face thickly lined with a veritable roadmap of wrinkles. The funny thing about Professor Edelbaum is that he has worn the same outfit every time I’ve seen him since the start of the semester. I saw him get up from his desk and shuffle through some papers and smiled. Yup. Some things never change. He’s wearing the get-up: black pants that just defy description; somehow tight and baggy all at once, and nearly as wrinkled as his face; a white shirt with a full accouterment of stains; a black vest; a black jacket at least five sizes too big and eternally covered with cat hair from the math office pet, a white Persian cat named Billie; and on top of it all a little cap which perches on top of his silver-gray mop of hair, a testament to his orthodox Judaic faith.

“And yes, once again Clio wins a prize for being the most depressed person in the office,” Eddie, as a chosen few were allowed to call Professor Edelbaum, came out of his office holding two steaming cups of hot chocolate. Even from my seated position at the desk I could see an impressive layer of foamy whipped cream covering one of the cups. Eddie handed me a cup, and took a seat in one of the sagging green upholstered chairs in front of my post.

“Well, yeah. I’m suffering from adolescent angst. It’s normal.” I smiled, blowing faint streamers of vapor off my cup of hot cocoa. “You remembered.” During one of our many conversations in the empty math office I had told Eddie about missing how my Mom always used to greet me after school on snowy days with steamy Swiss Miss. The kicker, of course, is that I hate any sort of marshmallow or whipped stuff on top. It’s gilding the lilly. The chocolate is heaven enough without masking it with empty calories.

“How could I ever forget? You’re the second person I’ve met in my entire life not to hold marshmallows in high esteem,” Eddie replied, cautiously putting his cup on my desk before continuing. “I wanted to talk to you about something. We’ve had a request for a tutor.”

“The waiting list for people who want tutoring work-study is over there,” I motioned to a bulletin board hanging next to the door of the office. The list is long, and largely composed of Senior math majors who intended someday to torture future generations as purveyors of high school algebra.

“Actually, I was thinking you could take it. I know the family from way back when I was teaching high schools. I had the parents, Diana and Walker, in a geometry class. Those two never shut up.” Eddie smiled nostalgically at the memory. “We still keep in touch, and they asked me specifically for someone I trust to do a good job.” Eddie tended to have a hard time giving compliments to people, but today they seem to flow with ease.

“But all those people are on the list, and I already have a job here...”

“You’ll just have to deal with their three oldest sons. They’ve always been homeschooled, but recently their education has been interrupted by some events out of Diana and Walker’s control, so they need some emergency catch-up lessons.” Professor Edelbaum didn’t even acknowledge my hesitance.

“Eddie, I don’t know how to break this to you... but I’m terrible at math!” I asserted. I’ve always gotten okay grades in my math classes, but it’s mostly just because I know I don’t have a snowballs chance in Tahiti to get by without studying my butt off.

“It’s simple high school math,” Eddie assured me, his quailing victim. “The oldest is probably at about Junior level, algebra two-ish, I’d guess. The youngest is sixth grade. Don’t even tell me you can’t teach long division, Ms. Chambers. It’ll be easy. And good for you. And good for the family, I’m sure.” Eddie smiled his yellowish grin and said with great finality: “I’m glad we got this settled. You’ll be starting on Tuesday.”

I groaned inwardly and did my best impression of a happy person. Eddie’s obviously finally gone over the deep end. Me, teach long division? I can hear a long line of math teachers chortling at the thought! I’m the girl who has always vowed never to be more than five yards from a calculator. My stomach sinks with horror at Eddie’s diatribe.

Isaac

I sat by the window in the cramped bedroom I share with my two younger brothers, watching fat, lazy snowflakes tumble from the heavens to the rapidly whitening ground. “Urgh,” I grunted, “I can’t believe it’s snowing.”

My twelve-year old brother, Zac, replied merrily from his position behind his huge lego castle on the floor: “love snow... love snow... love snow!” A pillow rapidly flew across the room with, and, with deadly accuracy, struck the over-exhuberant child square in the face.

“Shut up. Sleeping. Losers you are!’ The voice that floated from beneath the mountains of covers on the bottom level of the bunk bed I share with my brother Taylor was barely recognizable as human. “Pillow, please, pillow come baaacckkk...”

“Mwhaha! If you ever want to see this pillow alive again you’ll cut off your rat-tail. After careful consideration,” Zac said in a reasonable approximation of John Malkavich, “I have decided that Tay’s greatest attractant to the female gender is that random bit of hair.”

A blur that vaguely resembled Taylor made its way from the his bed to the pile of legos, grabbed its pillow, and once again metamorphosed to become Mount Taylor.

“You guys, today is the day the new math tutor is coming.” I dampened the festive quality of the morning by throwing in my nightmarish revelation. Turning away from the window, I surveyed the bedroom. It’s messy, not regular old, human produced mess, but the kind of mess that Hollywood studios pay millions of dollars a year for to be used in scenes labeled things like, “the rubble of New York.”

“Hey, wonder how long this one will last? Think she’ll have warts again?” Zac asked. He still has deep trauma issues from an early tutor who most closely resembled the wicked witch of the west.

“Maybe it’ll be a he, like Ashley. Whom, might I add, I can't believe is leaving us! If it is, Taylor still won’t be able to flirt his way out of a bad grade like he used to.” I laughed, hoping this eventuality would come to pass. I was so sick of Taylor getting by on his looks. Teachers, girls, cops, and even our parents treated Taylor differently because of his “beauty,” as Zac and I like to call his hottiehood.

“Yup. No more free rides for Tay-Tay. Good deal!” Zac cackled from his position on the floor. Taylor was apparently not in the same dimension as the rest of the world, and a free for all was about to result from this fact.

“How come Tay’s always asleep?” I asked, crossing the room to my brother’s bedside.

“It’s all that... how shall I say... teenage frustration that his hormones are causing!”

“Zac, like you know the first thing about hormones. You’re twelve. The exciting vistas of ‘frustration’ as you call it is still a long way away from you, twerp.” Taylor was apparently close to regaining consciousness; his speech is only slightly slurred.

“Yeah, hormones and love bunny Marissa!” I couldn’t resist adding this in a high pitched, girlie voice.

“Gee, you sound like Taylor pre-voice change.”

“Thank you, thank you very much for harassing me into the cold, harsh, waking world.” Taylor muttered, hurling his blankets on the floor.

“You’re welcome.” I answered, picking up my guitar from its resting pace against the tall set of drawers in the corner of the room and running my hands along its silky smooth grain.

I’m dreading the resumption of math lessons. Ever since the band the three of us room-mates had started got signed schoolwork had kind of gotten the short end of the stick. I chortled to myself, mentally adding “huhhuh, he said stick.” It wasn’t like touring had caused all that many changes in our schedules, all of the Hanson children had been homeschooled for our entire lives. The change had simply involved being homeschooled in a hotel room as opposed to, well, at home. But between shooting videos, making appearances, and giving concerts, quadratic equations had just tended to take a backseat.

I sighed, dreading the long hours with some scary math teacher. Science, I like. Science is what I guess I could call my passion. Everything to do with the creation or mixing of elements, precise measurements in the tiniest of increments, or cutting things up are my ideal. I love cutting things up. Not that I really get much of a chance to do dissections -- lab science is something that is a little challenging when you ex-music teacher of a mother is your lab partner.

“We got Tay, alright. He’s not going to remember half the stuff we said until after he gets out of the shower,” Zac snickered

“You’d better be out of the room when that happens if you want to go through life with a full set of appendages, Animal,” I warned, sitting down with my guitar and tentatively strumming a few cords.

“Good point. Perhaps I’ll go bug mom for awhile.” Zac rose from behind his rapidly expanding lego structure. Pretty soon it will be requiring it’s own room.

The cords from some long forgotten lullaby burst forth from my lightly stained guitar, and I just went with it. Sometimes it feels almost like I have nothing to do with the music that seemingly takes its life from my fingertips. I’m just the conduit; the sounds themselves well up from some unknown force hidden in some deep segment of my mind. It's almost like I have nothing to say in the matter; the music takes it’s own road and I’m just along for the ride. My thoughts wandered as my hands flowed over the taut strings, and they came back to the same thing they always do. Girls. It seems like everyone has someone to love, someone to belong to. Everyone but me, that is. Even my little brother, even TAY, even the SHY one, has a girlfriend. But not me. Never me. Taylor and Marissa have been together, and going strong, for more than a year. And I’m jealous. I would never really admit that fact, even to myself most of the time, but it can be hard to ignore. My life is so perfect on the surface, but without someone to care about, it doesn’t really seem worth it. Without conscious effort I switched songs and began playing one of my mother’s favorites: James Taylor’s “The Only One.” That’s what I want. Someone to be my only one. Someone to whom I can be the only one.

Clio

My tutoring job started four days later. In one way I dreaded it all weekend; I certainly have enough work of my own without having to guide 3 kids through the jungle of arithmetic. On the other hand, any time off-campus and away from Natalie would be a more than welcome respite from her chilly behavior towards me since the CD fiasco. We keep getting more and more annoyed with each other with every passing day, and I am seriously expecting to wake up one morning with no eyebrows and the wicked giggles of Natalie resounding throughout the room.

As I waited outside my dorm for my ride to the home of my victims I pondered how nice it will be to see the real world again. Being at school for the past three weeks has made me feel like I’m living in a vacuum. I never see the news; I never read the paper. I never even know how to dress for the day because my dorm is practically without windows and every radio station in Tulsa has apparently decided not to play the weather forecast when I’m within fifty yards of a radio. Seeing a family again would be weird, too. I haven’t seen my parents for more practically a month, and the innate sense of safety being around the people who I still secretly suspect to control the rotation of the planets had been long since gone. And MTV. God, I prayed silently, please let the kids beg to be tutored with MTV on in the background! I may miss my parents and friends from high school, but I think that being without MTV has seriously left the biggest hole in the fabric of my existence.

I still can’t figure out why Eddie offered me this tutoring job in the first place. I’m only a freshman, and I know for a fact that there were at least five seniors already on the waiting list for work-study tutoring. On top of this I’m sixteen years old, and one of the kids is actually older than me, even though he's only a junior in high school.

Sometimes I regret having skipped grades in school; I feel like I've missed a lot of the bonding experiences my class had shared. It was really just silly little stuff: seeing the people in my home-room excitedly flashing their hard earned drivers licenses when I was still two years away from my permit, going with friends to buy their first lottery tickets on their eighteenth birthdays when I was just getting that license, and being the last to get that coveted after 1 am curfew. And of course, there was the tattoo thing. It had been pretty embarrassing to be the only one of my friends bringing a note signed by my parents to the man with the tattooing machine whose constant buzzing reminded me of a dentist's drill. Looking back on it, though, it was worth the humiliation. I couldn’t help but smile as I envisioned the tiny black ankh that now adorns the inside of my left ankle.

My reverie was interrupted by a gargantuan white mini-van pulling up in front of me. The driver’s side door opened and a pretty woman about my mom’s age stepped out. “Clio?” She asks, walking over to me.

“Hi,” I replied, extending a tentative hand.

“I’m Diana Hanson -- the mother of your new pupils,” the woman smiled widely as she took my hand. She was small and sturdy, with the longest blonde hair I think I've ever seen hanging in loose waves almost all the way down to her knees. She was beautiful and strong, and age had yet to paint its trails along her still smooth skin. She looked nothing like my mom, but something about Mrs. Hanson's easy manner instantly brought my mother to mind. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Eddie,” she continued, gesturing me towards the passenger door of her vehicle.

“Well, I guess I’d better tell you right now that none of it’s true...” I chuckled. Eddie probably had Mrs. Hanson believing I was some kind of mother Teresa in training or something. Of late I think I’ve been more of a Ted Bundy in training, thanks to living with psycho Nat.

“He says he hasn’t seen a student as passionate about her work -- or as sweet -- in a long time.” Diana grinned at me as she put the car in gear and merged in traffic in front of Shakarian Hall, my dorm. “Would you like to listen to the radio? It drives my boys wild when I leave it off...”

“Either way is fine with me, Mrs. Hanson,” I answered, reveling in the joy of being in an actual car for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. The concept of being able to get somewhere without the use of my own two perpetually sore feet was completely foreign after hauling butt across campus thirty times a day. On the bright side, however, this enforced vigorous physical activity (translation: I’m always late for class and so I end up attempting to maintain my dignity while race-walking to where ever I happen to be going) has actually enabled me to loose almost fifteen pounds.

“Just call me Diana, sweetie. You look awfully young to be in college...”

“I’m actually only sixteen, but I skipped a couple of years in high school by taking summer classes and ended up graduating ahead of everybody else,” I explained patiently. Why, I silently asked myself, do I have to look like I’m twelve years old? Life would be much easier if I was at least identifiable as a teenager, I sighed at this thought. Being young for college is one thing, but looking young to be a high school junior when you’re a college freshman is quite another.

“That must have been awfully hard for you,” Diana sympathised. When I tell people my current scholastic situation the usual answer is something more along the lines of, “wow, you must be a wicked nerd,” but Mrs. Hanson’s comment fairly echoed with empathy. Diana’s resemblance to my mom seemed to grow as she continued to question me about college life, zeroing in on precisely the things that give me the most trouble: room mates, the partying thing, boys, and shyness. These are probably the things that every new freshman has issues with, but Diana seemed to meet me eye to eye on every subject that came up.

“So, have you gotten homesick yet?” She asked as we pulled off the main road and headed into a residential district on the outskirts of Tulsa proper.

“Um, yeah,” I answered, gazing out the window beside me and trying not to get weepy. Sometimes all I can think about is home -- a place where I belong, where I’m comfortable, and where the people love me. Some different from school, I thought to myself. Diana seemed to sense that she was getting into touchy territory, and changed the subject to music. “I supose we should have gotten this out of the way earlier, but what sort of music do you like?” Mrs. Hanson questioned as she guided the lumbering mini-van around someone making a left hand turn.

“I guess I like everything, really. Recently I’ve been on a Billie Holiday kick. I love that kind of smooth jazz.”

“Ah, we’ve got a renaissance woman on our hands here!” Diana exclaimed, pulling to a stop in the driveway of a large house set back from the tree shadowed street on what looked like a lot of land. “I guess I don’t have to worry about you with the boys then.”

“Pardon?”

“Well, you know how it is, teen-aged girls don’t seem to be at their best when they’re confronted with Hanson.” Diana explained, turning off the van. “Last week a woman we hired to help around the house until the baby is a little older brought her daughter, and it was just awful. She actually screamed because she had met someone who released a CD. It was funny, really, but I don’t see how you could be much of a tutor if you had laryngitis from screaming every time you came over.”

“I’m confused. Your sons released a CD?” I asked, brutal realization beginning to creep into my mind.

“I thought Eddie told you our situation.... my three oldest sons, Isaac, Taylor, and Zac are in a band called Hanson.” Diana expectantly watched my expression as she grabbed her purse from its precarious perch on the backseat.

“Hanson. Wow.” I did my best to sound excited, but I think that my dismay might have shown through the facade. I was going to be spending ten hours a week with the boys who introduced the blight that is Mmmbop to the world? Gulp.

Installment 2

Isaac

The afternoon had gone by in a haze, much in the same manner as all the afternoons I’ve been fortunate enough to spend at home since The Middle of Nowhere was released. Time just spent in the house I’ve grown up in had become a rarity. It seemed like we were always traveling around and never here, so I had vowed this morning to enjoy the first day of my extended winter break, despite the dark cloud of math lessons hovering above me.

I got home from my friend Christian’s house only moments before mom was supposed to arrive with the new tutor, relieved to discover that I had beat them home.  It was a good thing I had, because as soon as I entered the amazingly silent house I was greeted with muffled giggling eminating from the sun room.

“Hey,” I called, throwing my jacket on a chair and crossing the hall to the doorway to the blue wallpapered room. I heard some scuffling, and then Taylor’s head popped up from behind the white couch, a nervous grin plastered across his face.

“Hi.” Taylor answered, a blush rushing to his cheeks as he attempted to smooth his ruffled hair. What was up with that boy? I wondered as I watched shades of guilt and embarrassment filter through my younger brother’s shockingly blue eyes. Then I realized, and wanted to kick myself. Taylor must have asked his girlfriend to come over.

Sure enough, after a moment of shuffling another blonde head popped above the sofa. On the torso belonging to this blonde head was a red tee-shirt -- on both inside out and backwards. Even Zac wouldn’t have been innocent enough not to realize what I’d just interrupted. “Hi!” Marissa said, sounding overly cheery and doing her best to hide behind her waves of light hair.

“Oh, sorry...” I quickly retreated to the hall, but, thinking better of my rapid escape, called over my shoulder, “mom’s going to be home with the tutor in, like, oh, 30 seconds. Just a warning.” I was annoyed. It’s not like I don’t want Taylor to be happy or anything, but couldn’t my little brother think of a better place to make out? God, I hoped making out was all they had been doing...

I slammed my way into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice. I should have just shut up, I thought, Tay and Marissa would have gotten quite the surprise when mom got home.

The tell-tale crunch of gravel in the driveway alerted me to the arrival of my newest slave-master. I groaned, leaning over to peer out the window above the big stainless steel kitchen sink, allowing myself a pretty good view of the van.  It seemed like I had waited forever, and I began to wonder what was taking mom so long to get a move on.  Finally, though, the driver’s side door opened and the familiar form of Diana Hanson hopped out. It took the tutor a lot longer to open his/her/it’s door.

When the passenger got out I almost dropped my glass. It was a girl. A girl, who, going against every preconceived notion I had about math tutors, seemed from this distance to be absolutely gorgeous. She must have been a few inches shorter than me, and maybe ten or fifteen pounds overweight, but she moved with an amazing sense of grace. She was like a dancer, acting out some unspoken, yet beautifully choreographed opus right before my eyes. Her hair was cut into a shoulder length page boy, and glistened red, gold, silver, and brown all at once, so vivid in the sunlight that it all but took my breath away.

My mother beat the goddess to the door, and I had to tear my eyes away from the window to greet her. “Hey mom, who’s that?” I asked. It couldn’t be the tutor -- she barely appeared to be Taylor’s age.

“That’s your tutor, Ike!” My mom said teasingly. “It’s the person you’ve been dreading the sight of for weeks!’ She seemed to read my racing mind with her next smug comment, “maybe now you’ll finally pay attention in math.”

I would pay attention, all right. Just not to the numbers, I decided as the girl entered the kitchen. Up close she was even more pretty than I had initially thought. Her incredible, chameleon hair framed a face both strong and delicate whose centerpiece was a brilliant pair of green eyes. Christmas trees were all I could think of when her gaze met mine, their thick green depths glowed exactly the deep shade of the fragrant Douglas furs my family purchases without fail every December.

“Hi.” The girl said in an innately musical voice. I just stared, thinking that she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and probably looking pretty stupid to boot.

Clio

My emotions, as I walked through the back door of the Hanson house, brought whole new meanings to the word chaotic. I was really being thrown to the wolves on this deal. Not only would I get to stutter my way through a semester’s worth of dreary math lessons, but I would be suffering thusly in the company of Hanson. Yuck. Well, I thought to myself, if I ever got back on speaking terms with Natalie this would be quite the roommate bonding experience. I made a mental note to remember every detail of my encounter with her illegal and immoral crush. Natalie, unlike her youthful roommate, was eighteen. Even as a Hanson dissenter I was well aware that this placed even the oldest of the Hanson brothers squarely in the realm of jailbait.

The kitchen was warm and cozy, despite it’s enormous size. After all, I theorized, there were nine Hansons. What would life be like with all of those brothers and sisters, I wondered as I looked around the homey room Diana led me into.  Ahhh... Kitchen.... it had been awhile since I’d seen a real one of those!

It took me a moment or two to realize that the space was occupied by someone other than Mrs. Hanson and myself. A boy. He seemed to kind of blend into the back ground in a vaguely typical awkward adolescent style, but the instant he stepped forward my heart stopped. His eyes were amazing. I stood there, a look of intense concentration no doubt gracing my face, questing into those eyes for what seemed like a thousand years condensed into a heartbeat. Words filled my thoughts, and I yearned to have my diary and a pencil. Hell, the back of my hand and some eyeliner would do in a situation like this, I exclaimed silently. The words that slid unexpectedly forward in my consciousness formed phrases so beautiful they dazzled me, and left me wondering when I had become a poet. For a moment I tried to memorize the cascade of perfectly formed literary images his eyes produced in me, but then I gave up. The sensation of seeing myself reflected in their rich brown depths was too much, and I willingly abandoned myself to it.

“I’m Clio.” The words slipped from my lips without any will or intent on my part. The boy and I just stood there. I didn’t even know who he was, but something about him was driving me crazy. I turned the bizarre and random desire that filled me to run my hands through his wavy brown hair over and over in my mind, but came to no conclusion. It just felt so... right, like I’d been waiting my whole life for this exact moment.

“I’m Ike.” The boy said, sounding calm. He put the glass he was holding in the sink before turning back to scrutinize me with one of those languidly sweeping toe to head glances I’ve always found so offensive coming from boys. He just checked me out so blatantly, I thought to myself, but I didn’t even care. His gaze on my skin was a caress, a touch that I didn’t want to live to see come to an end. “You’re Clio as in Cleopatra, or as in the muse?”

“You’ve heard of the muses?” I was floored by this. My name is a rather unusual one, given to me by my two over-zealous history teaching parents. Clio was one of a group of nine Greek goddesses who were the patrons of inspiration, with her personal specialization being the historic variety.

“Yeah. I’ve read a lot of Greek myths, and I have to say that I’ve always been particularly fond of the muses. I guess that Polyhymnia’s mine. But heaven forbid your parents name you that.” He smiled, showing a mouth full of silvery wires.

“I’d probably be in prison by now if they had gone that crazy!” He was referring to another of the muses, this one the goddess of epic poetry and music.

“Euterpe would have been worse though.” Out of all the muses, mine was really the only name that a child could grow up without suffering from a good deal of psychological damage.

“Out of all the muses, yours seems like the only one you could have been named after without spending thousands of hours of therapy,” his smile widened. I couldn’t even describe the sensation his words gave me, it was like he knew exactly what I was thinking. I instantly, and irrevocably, decided that I liked this boy. A lot.

“Clio.” Isaac said softly, and my world shrunk to encompass only two people. This boy and I were alone, and nothing else mattered.

Isaac

My brain didn’t appear to be functioning. I fumbled mentally for words... for letters... for thoughts, and found nothing but the searing heat of her gaze. The searing heat of Clio’s gaze. No wonder I don’t have a girlfriend, I chastised myself, I’m barely able to speak in the presence of anyone of the female persuasion. But I knew that both parts of this statement were wrong. Talking with girls had never been hard for me, in fact, it had been easy, but this was different, not exactly not knowing what to say, but more like wanting to say everything and not knowing where to begin.

“Well, Clio, I think you and the boys should set up shop in here. The table’s big enough for you to spread out. Where are Zac and Taylor?” My mom asked, breaking the fissureless silence that had hung over the room with her practical mommy banter. “Ike?” She asked, when I didn’t reply right away. She began clearing the morning’s mail from the big rectangular kitchen table.

“I haven’t seen Zac, but Tay’s in the sun room with Marissa.” I answered finally, hoping the errant lovers had had time to pull themselves together.

“Okay then. You go get Taylor, Ike, and Clio why don’t you go hang your coat up? The closet’s down this hallway.” Supermom Hanson ordered us about while she removed her own jacket and put a tea kettle full of water on the stove after carefully lighting the gas burner.

Clio headed obediently down the hall towards the front door and the entrance to the sun room where I had first noticed Taylor and Marissa earlier this afternoon. God, had that been this afternoon? It felt like a lifetime had passed, and like nothing could ever be the same again. I slipped through the other exit to the kitchen, which led me to the other arched doorway to the sun room, almost directly across from its front entryway.

I breathed a sigh of relief upon entering the room to see Taylor and Marissa sitting innocently cross legged on the floor next to the couch, comparing necklaces. I paused for a moment and watched their easy camaraderie; they sat only inches apart, facing each other, and Taylor was examining the silver globe necklace that he had given Marissa when the they had first starting going out last summer. Tay cupped the charm in his hand and said something softly to Marissa. The two laughed animatedly, and leaned in for a short kiss. I kept hearing an old Gin Blossoms song running through my mind -- “Hey Jealousy,” to be precise.

I sighed and prepared to break Tay and Rissa up, but stopped when I saw Clio had paused at the far door on her way back to the kitchen from the closet. She stood just as transfixed by the scene as I was, squinting in concentration as she watched Marissa reach out and tuck Taylor’s shaggy golden hair behind his ears. A frown darkened her face, and my stomach fell. She was watching Taylor with THE look. Over the years I have come to know the look quite well, even though to my knowledge I’ve never been its recipient. It was the look of a girl desperately in love, in crush, in lust... I don’t know exactly what, but I do know that it’s not something I want to see on my new obsession’s face as she looks at my little brother.

“Come on you guys, time to get to work!” My mom called, coming up behind me and placing a hand on my shoulder.

Clio

I had stood in the doorway leading to the Hanson’s living room for several moments, my eyes drawn to the pair sitting Indian style on the floor. They were so close, I thought to myself. Not just physically so, but close in another way, one in which I’ve never been close to anyone before. The boy looked a year or two younger than me, but I could see even from across the large room the he was very good looking. “Devastatingly handsome,” my mother might have called him, and I might have agreed. This would probably be the middle brother of the trio Hanson which I have been forced to listen to so many torturous times by Natalie. Taylor, I remembered, was his name.

The girl was what really shocked me, though. She was normal -- neither exceptionally pretty nor exceptionally ugly. The embodiement of the sort of girl you would see a hundred times in life and yet never think of twice. And there she sat, with what even I, the Hanson hater that I am, would have to consider one of the most attractive boys in the free world. And he loved her. There was no doubt in my mind of this last fact. Watching them interact, stealing casual kisses, was like watching cartoons. For some enigmatic reason, whenever one cartoon character likes another, a dotted line is almost always drawn between the two of them at eye level. The dotted line for these Taylor and his girlfriend was practically visible.

The hot jealousy that surged through my veins shocked me. I was filled with longing for someone to look at me like that; maybe even more importantly, I wanted to look at someone like that. The girl reached out and tucked Taylor’s silky looking hair behind his ears without a hint of shyness or embarrassment. I was sure I was about to die of envy when the scene was interrupted by Mrs. Hanson coming in form the kitchen, prompting me to jerk my eyes away from the spectacle and smile nervously at the spot from which Diana’s voice seemed to originate. Isaac stood in front of his mother in the other doorway to the sunroom, looking rather sullen. I wondered just how long he had been standing there watching me spy on his little brother, guilt washing over me as I made my way into the kitchen and started pulling books out of my backpack.

Isaac

My mother once again took control of the situation when we entered the kitchen. “Clio, this is Taylor. He’s fourteen. And this is Marissa. She’s not one of mine, but you’ll be seeing a lot of her.” Mom and Marissa had gotten along amazingly well from the get-go. That last bit of Marissa's introduction was an understatement: odds were that Clio would be seeing just as much of Marissa as she would be seeing of her charges.  After all, Tay and Rissa seem to be attached at the hip.

“Hey, nice to meet you both,” Clio smiled widely at Taylor as she sat at the head of our huge kitchen table and pulled some alarmingly hefty looking books out of her backpack.

“So, are you going to torture us like all of our other math teachers?” God, I groaned to myself, Taylor was already pouring on the charm. He had whipped the ‘I’m casually interested in you, aren’t I cute?” smile out of bag of tricks. I sympathetically watched Marissa stiffen, her calculating gaze on Taylor as he leaned towards Clio. Once again, Taylor’s bizarre resemblance to Uma Thurman seemed about to get him out of actual work.

“'Fraid so,” Clio answered, sounding rather curt and leaning away from Taylor. “Mostly what I have for you guys to do today is a test. Good way to start off, I thought.”

“Where’s Zac?” My mother asked once again, as if he might have psychically communicated his whereabouts to one of us in the past five minutes.

“Here!” A little voice called out from the sunroom. “Sorry I’m late.” Zac ran into the kitchen, cheeks ruddy from the cold outside and still bundled up in a rediculous amount of winter clothes. “I was building a snowman with the girls next door.”

“Clllkk cllkkkk,” sometimes I wonder if my mother has some aborigine stock in her somewhere. Whenever annoyed she makes that odd clicking noise that drives our elderly cat, Mama, wild. “How about I ply you all with hot chocolate to make the proceedings a bit easier to handle?” Zac threw off his coat and threw his soggy self into a chair next to Clio.

“Hey there. I’m Zac. The late one.” Clio smiled down at him, and he stared up at her with puppy-dog inspired devotion. Apparently I wasn’t the only one impressed with the new math teacher.

I noticed that as Clio and Zac chatted away she was doing her best to avoid looking at me. Her eyes would rest first on the clock over the stove, then the partially opened window, then on Mackie’s interpretive drawing of an elephant, but never would her gaze alight anywhere near my direction.

“I should get going, Mrs. Hanson. My mom’s beginning to wonder if I’ve defected from my family or something.” Marissa stood up from the chair she had been sharing with Taylor. Why? I thought to myself. There were approximately ten chairs sitting around the table, just waiting for use, but those two couldn’t deal with the separation anxiety of being two inches away from each other. I just don’t get love. It is definitely a subject that I’ve been thinking could use some future research on my part, however. Perhaps with a lab partner named Clio?

As Tay and Marissa said their gooey good-byes, which seemed a bit more brief than usual, my mom came forward with four cups of hot cocoa and a bag of mini-marshmallows. I smiled and nabbed my favorite mug, a big green one with a pair of bare feet in the place of a conventional handle arrangement.

After his distraction had left the room Tay finally looked down at his cup. “Ah... no marshmallows? Must you always pander to Ike? He’s the only person in the world who doesn’t like them. There are ten people living here, but nooooo... It’s just not the same when I have to add them later,” he whined. Very few people have such strong convictions as my brother and I. I am strictly anti-marshmallow on everything, but most especially hot chocolate. My stance on the matter is quite simple: who is man to mess with the perfection of the cocoa bean? But Tay, the nutter, complains all the time. Mostly, I think, just to irritate me.

Clio, with her hands wrapped around her mug, smiled into her cocoa. “So,” she said, looking up. “You’re Eddie’s other non-marshmallow acquaintance.”

“I feel it is a moral imperative to leave chocolate as it is.” Our eyes met across the table, and I could see hers sparkling with amusement.

“I’m with you.” Ah yes, I thought to myself. Point one for Ike. Heck, we both hate marshmallows. What else does a relationship need to suceed? “I’m with you” I repeated silently.

Installment 3

Clio

“Okay. Let me get this straight,” Zac said in a frustrated tone of voice. “Numbers and letters? Like, together?”

“Yes. Sometimes letters represent numbers.” I explained relatively peaceably. This is my third mission of mercy to the Hanson home; not like I’m needed, mind you. On my first visit I had administered a group of tests that Eddie had given to me to see how they were doing in math. I had checked the results of the test somewhere in the neighborhood of four times in my shock. Ike had tested into calculus, a class I’m only just getting around to taking freshman year in college. Taylor had gotten a score high enough to place him in Algebra two, and Zac, apparently the true Einstein of the bunch, had gotten a score to put his little twelve year old mind in evil pit that is algebra.

“I just got used to numbers representing numbers!” Zac flipped the page of simple equations I had given him over, presumably in search of an April fool’s sign a few months early.

“Scary sounding, but easy...” I tried to assure him. If only he knew. “We are about to break what every elementary school kid thinks is the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not mix numbers with letters.”

“Guess that makes me cooler than Jess,” Zac shot out as his sister entered the room. I am still taken aback by the attractiveness quotient in this family. With their sunshiny blonde hair, big eyes, and perfectly symmetrical features it's easy to see that the Hanson family had come form the deep end of the gene pool. Their intelligence level was just one of many aspects that attested to this fact.

“Whatever, Zac.” Jessica, the oldest Hanson girl, answered her brother in a coolly unimpressed tone. “Just because you guys get a special tutor it doesn’t make you all that. Even if Ike does say she’s a goddess.”

I felt a burning crimson blush climbing its way to my cheeks. Ike was just the icing on the cake in this family; right from our first meeting I had realized that he was something out of the ordinary. His deep, smooth voice and penetrating brown eyes made me shiver with.... something. I’m not sure what. I’m not even sure if I want to know what, frankly. As my school life spirals out of control it gets harder and harder for me to take anything seriously. The straight A’s I had been earning all semester have kept up, but I had to work so hard for them I’m beginning to wonder if it’s all worth it. And Nat, I shuddered at the thought of my roommate, had been getting worse and worse. On Tuesday she had even kicked me out of the room and made me sleep in the floor lounge so her boyfriend could spend the night. I had not been, to say the very least, a happy camper.

Ike probably doesn't even feel the same way I do, I reassured myself. And anyways, I don’t want to start anything. At this point my one goal in life is to survive the remaining two months of the semester and get the hell out of Oklahoma. In fact, I’d spent most of last weekend working towards this end, and my fingers still positively ache from pounding on the keys of the only remaining typewriter in the universe in order to type out billion pages of college applications. The only thing that remains to be seen, I suppose, was weather I could avoid starting anything.

There was just something about Isaac that made my mind do bizarre things -- like race with some bizzare variety of poetic inspiration -- and my body do even weirder stuff. Stuff so odd that I can’t even think about it in public. When I remembered his strong hands and sweet smiling my breathing tended to get a little out of control. I have been doing my best to avoid him, but even with a million other people in the room he still somehow manages to hold me enraptured.

Zac chuckled, gazing speculatively at me. “Jessie...” he said in a voice filled with gentle warning.

“Like she’s not aware he’s ga-ga over her.” The oldest Hanson daughter replied, grabbing an orange from the refrigerator before wandering out of the room. Ike? Ga-Ga? I doubted it. If he's so Ga-Ga why doesn’t he ever hang out with me after his lesson was completed?

Zac turned from his sister's retreating form to regard the paper before him with a look of dismay. “If you’re going to make me do this, at least you can let me do it in the sunroom where I can watch the snow...” he pleaded.

Ugh. The snow, I thought to myself. As if life isn’t miserable enough, god felt the need to get another laugh. The hateful white stuff had been falling rather steadily for the past several days, and the ground was currently covered with at least of foot of its foulness.

“Go for it. If you have any questions you know where I am.” The present Hansons had already had their lessons, but I wouldn’t be able to get a ride until Mrs. Hanson returned from the dentist with her youngest children.

“Cool...” Zac grabbed the worksheet I had photocopied for him out a basic algebra text book and hopped out of the room, singing under his breath.

I sighed and pulled out my dog-eared, thirty-fifth hand copy of Plato’s “The Symposium.” The book is pretty cool, but then again how can an entire work devoted to talking about love be all bad?  But it’s still kind of depressing to read. Mostly because it’s all theory to me. Any more literature quite this cheerless and I’d be in dire straits. They should have been handing out Prozac at registration for half of my classes. For some reason every Professor at Oral Roberts feels that if a book could ever be considered even vaguely cheerful it doesn’t belong in a college classroom.

Isaac

I walked slowly by the doorway to the kitchen. All I ever do when Clio is over is walk slowly by the kitchen, doing my best not to be obvious but still get a chance to see her. I’ve always realized that I’m the kind of guy who crushes easily, but never before had the mere sight of a girl inspired this feeling of breathless, weightless bliss that envelopes me every time she’s nearby.

We haven’t even had an actual conversation. I entertained rational thoughts like this one in an attempt to fight back my Clio induced flights of fantasy, but it just didn’t work; I’m addicted to her big green eyes and red hair. Not a single defense mechanism is working within me, and she is all I think about. As far as I’m aware nobody has patented “hottie patches” that you could stick on your arm and get some chemical introduced into your blood stream to take away this irrational sort of craving. I’m definitely on the look out for such a product, though. If Clio’s going to tutor us for long I’d have to buy in bulk.

“Hey Ike.” She had seen me. Damn.

“Hi,” I replied, entering the kitchen and sitting down next to her. “I love you...” god, I wanted to say it. Then I wanted to wind my arms around her narrow waist and pull her close... but I suspected that that wasn’t going to be happening anywhere but in the alarmingly realistic dreams I’ve been having about her every night.

“I can’t believe how worked up Zac is about the snow. You’d think he’d never seen it before.”

“Like you?” I asked, looking nervously between her and my hands, which were resting on the table.

“Actually, yes. We got some snow in Arnette, like, once a year. Let me assure you that I don’t get worked up about it, at least not in a positive way.” Her soft voice once again reminded me of music, and unfamiliar notes began running through my mind. I concentrated on them for a moment, trying to fit them into some song I’d been listening to on the radio.... but nothing came. I wanted to write them down, not loose the melody that her words evoked in me, and so I looked around frantically, gesturing for Clio to stay still. I was afraid that any motion would wipe my memory clean of the ghostly phantom music. Finally my eyes feel on a pile of napkins in the center of the table and the highlighter in her hands.

“Sorry,” I apologized, nabbing her writing utensil.

“Um... sure,” she replied, watching me with a look on her face that led me to believe that she was wondering when the men with the straight jacket would arrive.

I hummed to myself, every ounce of concentration funneled into the bars that were rapidly taking shape on the crumpled napkin.

When I finally paused and looked over at Clio she smiled, sending my heart flip-flopping uncomfortably in my chest. “Is that how you always write your songs?”

“I wish.” I tore my eyes away from her perfect face and returned them to my impromptu song. “Usually it takes a lot longer.”

“Guess I’m just good luck.” Clio’s tone was soft and flirtatious.

“Nah,” my manner matched hers as I shrugged, “but maybe you are my muse after all.” The conversation ground to a halt, leaving me regretting my final comment.

“So you play an instrument?” Her voice sparked new notes, which I quickly wrote down, turning the napkin in circles in an attempt to utilize all of the available space. As I scribed agitatedly I would occasionally stop and peer searchingly at her, trying to fathom the particular magic with which she was enchanting me.

“Guitar.” I replied after several moments had passed, handing her the pilfered high-lighter.

“Gee. They have strings. I’ve never been much of a musician myself...” my hand lingered on hers for a moment, and I felt waves of energy pulsing between us. How could she not be feeling this too? I wondered to myself. But other than her comment about luck, she gave no sign she was even aware that I was desperately trying to get her to like me. “Wow...” Clio softly said, taking my hand tentatively in hers and rubbing the tips of my fingers. My heart stopped for a moment, and I lost myself in the sensation of gentle friction. “You’ve got quite the calluses.” She added after a second.

The awkward silence crept between us again. We sat, hand in hand, apparently neither quite sure what to do. “I have a special talent too.” Clio smiled, causing the corners of her eyes to crinkle up and a tiny dimple to appear on her cheek. “I can read palms.” I watched as she turned my hand over so as to cupping it, palm up, in one of hers.

“Yeah?” I found myself whispering huskily and leaning ever so slightly forward in my chair in an unavoidable attempt to get closer to her.

“Um... it’s an art,” Clio’s voice had also dropped to just barely loud enough for me to hear. I wasn’t sure, but I thought her breath had quickened slightly. Ah, I muttered to myself, my imagination. The burning sensation that was slowly creeping up my arm and invading the rest of my body could not be written off so easily, however. Nor could the rapidly increasing tempo of my own intake of the suddenly scarce seeming air around me.

“First of all, you have big, strong hands. That’s means you’re aggressive about getting what you want. And you hate being told there’s only one way to accomplish a goal,” all of my attention was focused on my palm, and as she spoke she ran the fingers of her hand faintly up and down its length.

“Anything else on there?” The silence had changed, and the moment it filled the room seemed different. Sacred, as if I was in a church and the absence of sound was far to precious to be shattered with frivolous words. I watched Clio’s brow knit with the force of her gaze, and saw her pull her chair a little closer to mine for a better look. My heart was racing, thudding so loudly in my ears that I was positive Zac must have been hearing it from his post in the sunroom.

“You have lots of lines on your hands, so that means you’re a very emotional person. You have almost as many lines as me,” Clio sighed in a gentle exhalation of warm breath that I could feel whispering against my skin. She looked at me for a instant, rueful smile twisting her lips. Those lips I was aching to touch with every fiber of my soul.

“These lines over here,” her smooth hand moved from its rhythmic caressing to the spot just below my pinkie, “are called affection lines.” Clio leaned towards me, and her hair fell in a glorious curtain of red silk, surrounding us like blinders and hiding our faces from the doorway. My breath wasn’t racing anymore, I realized as she began to gently stoke the side of my palm, I was holding it. “Your lines here are really deep, and that’s a sign of a capability for strong emotions, too. You’re affectionate, and good at lasting friendships. You want someone who will be faithful, and able to love you as much as you love them.” Our eyes met in a glance that was almost physically palpable.

She was breathing fast, too, I was sure now. Her hand never stopped it’s rhythmic caress of my palm, even when she quieted. With her whole hand she rubbed gently from the tip of my middle finger all the way to my wrist, again and again without pause.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her lips. They were parted slightly, and as I watched she ran her tongue across them, leaving them moist and shining. The world was there, on her lips, and I was going wild imagining how they would feel on my skin.

I tried to calm down, but her knowing hands and beautiful face made me want so much... and I was beginning to think that would become immediately obvious to Clio any minute, despite my seated position.

Clio

I couldn’t believe what I was doing as I finished reading Isaac’s palm. I had just sworn to myself that I wasn’t interested in a relationship with anyone right now, no matter the thrill that filled me every time I saw him. I’m flirting and I can’t stop, I thought to myself as I gently held his hand in my own. And god, I silently added, it feels so good.

When he had sat there, hunched over his musical masterpiece, my mind had floated back to my own reaction on the day we had first met, and the insatiable words that filled my mind at the mere thought of this boy, this stranger, this Isaac Hanson. As soon as I had gotten home from that initial tutoring session I had sat with my diary for almost an hour, doing my best to transcribe my revelations. the same look of aura of intense concentration surrounding me as I could see hovering around Ike right now.

He smelled so good, I ached to bury my face in his wavy hair and inhale the scent that followed him -- the smell of rain and life and growing things. “Um...Isaac,” I found myself whispering as we slowly drew closer and closer. It seemed to take a lifetime to span the gap between us, but it was worth the wait. I was centimeters away from him, and my world was filled with the soft, rasping breaths that both of us were doing our best to make sound normal.

Isaac

“Clio,” I drew her name out, savoring the sweetness of it in my throat.

I slowly raised my unoccupied hand and with it stroked her impossibly vivid hair, and when she didn’t pull away I realized how good she was at reading palms. I am aggressive in getting what I want -- with this thought I finally did the inevitable. My hand found its way to the nape of her neck and gently I pulled her towards me.

The kiss was the sweetest I have ever known. How could I have spent my entire life without her soft lips pressed against mine? How could I ever let her go? Our kissing continued, as did our eternal shifting towards each other, just like the magnets Zac was so fond of. She was the first to open her mouth, and I nearly died of the perfection of her when she leisurely ran her tongue along my lower lip, still emeshed in an unbreaking kiss.

Clio

We had been there for a long time, at least ten minutes, when I began to move from my chair. I couldn’t deal with being even an inch away from Isaac for another moment in my life. The only thought that didn’t abandon my mind to the scalding tremors of passion from which I could not hide was an odd one: puzzle pieces. When I was a little girl I had gone through a brief but illustrious jigsaw puzzle phase. I had put together hundreds of them, loving what other people found the most tedious of tasks-- finding a mate for each of the tiny, wavily cut pieces. Now I could imagine myself as a component to the smallest jigsaw puzzle in the world. After all, it only had two pieces. I had gone through my whole life with my essence unfulfilled. But now it was all different; whomever was cautiously fitting the puzzle of the world together had just found a match: Isaac Hanson and Clio Chambers.

His hands had been resting on my hips for some time, and as I began to slide forward Isaac tenderly tugged me to him. I sighed softly as I abandoned my chair and moved forward to sit on Ike’s lap, facing him with one leg on either side of the chair. The steady flow of our kisses didn’t abate for even a moment, and I could feel Ike’s cool hands running along the alarmingly hot skin under my shirt as he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me even closer. We were pressed together, his lips at the base of my neck, and I could think of only one thing.....the giggling.

I jerked away and returned to my chair in a haze of motion, attempting to look as natural as a panting, red faced person could under the circumstances.

Isaac

When Clio pulled away I didn’t think I could go on living with this new understanding of one the many biblical stories I had learned in my years of church -- the expulsion from Eden. I glanced around, feeling confused and shockingly alone. Why had she left me? Had it all been an accident? I couldn’t help but think back to the expression on her face the first time she saw Taylor. A horrible taste filled my mouth as I realized that she had probably been dreaming that I was Tay and had gotten carried away. My little brother seems to have that sort of effect on girls.

I looked down at the white paper napkin lying on the table before me. Just notes, I assured myself, not a big deal. Sometimes people just randomly write things like that -- I must have been subconciously working on the song for months. No matter what bizzare feelings for this girl were running at full tilt through my head she couldn’t turn me into Zeus; she couldn’t make songs spring full grown from my head like Athena. When I had collected myself enough to once again sear my eyes with the sight of my perfect angel I saw her bottom lip trembling.

Clio was crying, I realized with a start. Even though she tried to hide behind her hands I could see shimmering tears winding uneven paths down her cheeks and the faint shaking of her shoulders with supressed sobs.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered before bolting out of the room, presumably heading towards the hall bathroom.

Clio

When I had seen Zac watching from the doorway of the kitchen the harsh reality of my situation had set in. I was acting like a slut, I thought to myself over and over agian as I stumbled my way to the bathroom and jammed the lock home behind me.

I needed something; I needed someone. Maybe I even needed Isaac, but my behavoir was out of line. I had been making out, or whatever what we had been doing would be called in the lexicon of bad moves, in the home of my employers, with their son. God, I realized, if we had been left undisturbed for only a few more minutes we would have been doing seriously a lot more than making out, and with all probability it would have been happening on the kitchen table.

I sat on the edge of the toilet for a moment before rising to pace anxiously around the room, trying to squelch my frantic tears. It wasn’t working, though. I stood over the sink and stared into my own rapidly redding eyes reflected in the mirror. “How could you do that?” I demanded of myself, no longer scared. Fury had replaced that last emotion. Isaac may have been a nice boy, but what was I thinking about practically jumping him? “Stupid, stupid...” I murmered, turning on the faucet and splashing shivery-cold water on my face.

Installment 4

Taylor

That night as my brothers and I were getting ready for bed Zac slipped with some pretty big knowledge. “So, Ike, have fun getting tutored today?” I taunted. I had avoided math lessons, or as I liked to call them, a fate worse than death, by a fortuitously scheduled dentist appointment. I know Ike doesn’t mind his sessions with Clio, though. Like anyone who wasn't deaf could not know. She had, at some point or another, entered into ninety-five percent of Isaac’s conversations since the day she had first arrived at our house. The man is gone, and amusingly enough, knowing how mushy Ike tends to be I fully expect to see them picking out China patterns in the next few weeks.

“Ugh,” Ike grunted noncommittally from his position in the bathroom adjoining our room, mouth filled with foamy crest.

“You could say he did!” Zac chirped, once again working on his ridiculous lego castle.

Isaac’s head jerked up and he spit out the strong mint toothpaste. “What?” I looked with confusion from one of my brothers to the other, filled the suspicion that I had missed something big today.

“I didn’t say anything!” Zac could never pull off sounding innocent, even when he was. Which was decidedly not the case in this situation.

“Zac, start talking now.” Ike stood menacingly above our little brother, holding his toothbrush so tightly his hand was slowly turning a rather unhealthy shade of white.

“I saw, like, you guys making out. Seriously. I finished my math paper and was going to give it to Clio to correct...” Zac explained lamely.

“Wohooo!” I exclaimed, filled with a sense of well-being. “Ike made out with Clio? We’re never going to hear the end of this one!” I was glad. Ever since Marissa and I had started going out the summer before last it seemed as though Isaac and I had been growing further and further apart. I knew that Ike was jealous of my thing with Marissa, and I couldn’t blame him for that. Everyone should be as lucky as me and have a Rissa.  As soon as these thoughts surfaced my attention immediately began to wander from my big brother’s predicament to once again gravitate to its favorite subject. The love of my life, or at least that’s what I think it is.  It's dumb, silly, stupid, but I can't help loving the giddy emotions that engulf me whenever I think of Marissa.  It's the kind of love that makes me want to call her dopey names and be called dopey names by her, and spend every second of my time in her presence.

The way I feel about her makes me remember the Taj Mahal. It’s a bizarre connection, but I really am beginning to identify with it. When my mom was teaching us about the man who created the most beautiful of buildings for his dead wife, as rediculous as it sounds, I almost cried. If I ever lost Marissa I have no idea what I would do, and even the thought of it me shiver, overtaken with some indescribable chill.  I had vowed two things as I looked at the gossamer perfection of the Taj Mahal’s rounded roof: that Marissa and I would always be together, and that I wouldn’t wait for her to die to do everything in my power to show her how I felt. It made me feel silly to think about it, but over the past few weeks my conviction in this area has been growing and growing.

“Believe me, Tay, you’re going to stop hearing about it. In fact, that sentence was it.” Ike walked stiffly into the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. I frowned in my disappointment. It’s not hard to be happy when someone you love is sad, but it’s hard to feel okay about that.

“Little buddy, you’d better start talking.” I sat beside Zac and began to productively add legos to the monstrosity, as mom likes to call his castle.

“Will you protect me from Ike? I demand asylum. Maybe the witness protection program...”

“Ike wants to talk about this.” I informed my naive little brother, “he just doesn’t know it yet.” Zac raised a dubious eyebrow in response.

“They were... making out... a lot... in the kitchen,” Zac’s speech was broken as he searched for words.

“Define making out.”

“Well, kissing. She was sitting on his lap,” Zac was obviously puzzled by the behavior he had witnessed. The youngest member of Hanson may have been pretty innocent in the ways of love, being only twelve and all, but he knew Ike. And his words showed that he was thinking along the same lines as me: Ike was must have been in even deeper than we thought to make out with some random girl. That's not his style.

“On his lap?” I couldn’t even believe I had heard Zac right. Incredibly weird, incredibly not Ike. Give Zac a few years, I thought to myself watching my little brother shoving legos together and arranging them in colored rows, and people are seriously going to have to lock up their daughters every time we’re in town. But Ike?

Five minutes later Isaac finally let me into the bathroom. “What?” he asked in an irrationally annoyed tone of voice.

“What’s up with you?”

“Nothing unusual, thanks.” Ike said bitterly, closing the bathroom door behind me.

“Zac told me what happened...” I began. Finally, I smiled to myself, I had found a subject that I was more familiar with than my big brother Ike. This was an improvement over past conditions, even if the subject was only humiliating oneself in front of girls.

“So, I should be expecting to see it on the eleven o’clock news?”

“Ike...” It was time for me to cut to the chase, “you’ve had a crush on this girl for three days. What's up with the lap dance?” I was referring to a rather giddy pay-per-view Showgirls session, and the instant the words slipped from my lips I regretted them.

“It wasn’t like that at all. It was, I don’t know... it was amazing.” Ike sat on the edge of the empty tub and sighed in frustration. His halting search for words reminded me of Zac trying to explain this situation, and I was suspecting that both of my brothers were treading on some new ground here.

“Well, when one isn’t thinking with the proper body part...”

“Stop!” Ike rubbed his forehead and paused to gather his thoughts before continuing. “I won’t say that that body part wasn’t enjoying itself, but it was more than that.” Ike pulled something out of his pocket and handed it to me, with a facial expression I haven’t seen on any living creature since my next door neighbor’s cat got cornered up the big oak tree in our back yard by Mama.

After a blank moment or two, I realized that this crumpled napkin held a set of complex bars and notes, which when read in spiraling curves to the center of the napkin, created quite an acceptable tune. “Wow,” I hummed silently to myself, “this is pretty cool. When did you write it?”

“Today. Right before ‘the incident.’ It’s like every time she’s in the room I am possessed by Mozart or something. I just can’t shut off the music in my head.” Ike confessed. “The thing is, she totally stopped it. She had just barely moved over and was... sitting on my lap... and then she jerked away like she saw a ghost or something. Then she cried. Then she hid in the bathroom for twenty minutes, after which she spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding me!”

Isaac was really tearing himself up over this. He seemed incapable of getting two syllables in a row out without a long pause, and his nervous ticks were going like crazy. One hand was flipping his wavy hair and he was chewing quite devotedly on the nails of the other. “Ike.” I pushed his hand down. No matter how hard we try to break him of the habit Isaac always bites his nails, which is not the best of traits to have in a guitar player.

Realization hit as I watched Ike die a thousand deaths before me. “She must have seen Zac! You know he’s about as subtle as a herd of brontosauri on the move! I bet he just freaked her out and she started to feel guilty or something.”

This obviously hadn’t occurred to Isaac, and when delivered in the tone of voice I reserve for violent criminals and deeply perturbed siblings (often the same thing with the three of us sharing a room) it apparently sounded reasonable.

“Hey, if I was a girl and I kissed you I’d cry afterwards, too!” I threw my hands in the air and laughed almost authentically. It hurts me to see people I care about sad, so I of course felt it my duty to bolster Ike’s self esteem. But I couldn’t let him get too comfortable, we are after all, brothers.

“You twerp.” Isaac responded, snapping me in the butt with his wet hand towel.

Clio

The next morning I woke up feeling sick. Not the good old, “I think I’m going to spew chunks,” kind of sick, but the immanently worse, “what is wrong with my life” kind of sick. I lay in bed, listening to Natalie rummaging through her closet for some well hidden, yet direly needed, object for several moments before even bothering to dig my way out from underneath my comfortably stifling covers for air.

“Good morning...” It was worth a try, at any rate. Nat must have come in late last night, because it had taken me approximately forever to get fall into fitful sleep and yet I couldn’t remember the inevitable ruckus that transpires whenever Natalie is in the room.

“Morning.” the reply was so stony and cold that I actually shivered and retreated partially under my dark green comforter. Would nothing ever go right? Ever? After a moment or two I heard the rustle of Nat pulling on her jacket and the slam of the door as my roommate left for the day.

“Nice talking to you, too.” I muttered, rolling over to peer at the gargantuan glowing red numbers on my alarm clock. 7:50, the numbers burned tauntingly into my mind. Great, I thought, just what I need, a while hour to contemplate my blood sucking life before I have to get ready for class.

In a way I longed to stay in bed all day, to pull an ostrich thing and just bury my head, hoping the scary carnivore would just forget about me and go away. The only issue was that the big, scary carnivore just happens to be the next four years of my life. I want to go home -- the words stole their way unbidden into my mind and no amount of struggling would stop their invasion.

At home whenever I got this life-is-crumbling-around-me sensation I would have just gone to my Mother and faked sickness. “Mom,” I would have whined in my most pathetic voice, “I don’t feel good.” I had been a pro; I knew all the tricks: never volunteer unnecessary information, never fake a temperature, and never mention the ultimate goal of the morning: a sick day, the equivalent of a get out of jail free card to the high school world. Oh, and keep the over acting to a minimum, lest one find oneself in a doctor’s office to the chagrin of all involved. If all had gone well it would have been a perfect day filled with Soap Operas, Ben and Jerry’s, and sympathy. Life was put on hold, thanks to a note from mom to hand in at the main office the next morning. Back in the day a respite, a much needed breather, had been as easy as a timely cough.

Now everything is different. No matter what your mom said you had responsibilities, and there was no way around the fact that you were paying hundreds of dollars an hour for the privilege to go to class, or that you had a paper due Tuesday, or that you needed to go to a group meeting that afternoon. You could run, I had realized, but you couldn’t hide. The president of the United States could have called the registrars office and politely explained that I had been kidnapped by aliens, and it wouldn’t have mattered. I had to get up and go to class. There were no more easy answers or escapes, no matter how temporary.

I punched my balled up pillow in frustration before turning on my radio, having given up all hope of returning to the pleasant, thoughtless haven of sleep. “Listen boys and girls,” the D.J. screamed at a brain bending pitch, “you’re gonna like this -- a new Hanson song! It’s a minute without you, and WKKR is playing it now because we know ya’ll can’t stand a minute without Hanson!”

“Oh no...” I pulled my pillow over my face and scrunched my eyes tightly shut. My misery isn’t free floating this morning; I have an actual, valid motivation to want to climb under my bed and hide until summer break -- Isaac Hanson. The pillow proved highly ineffective at blocking out the blisteringly upbeat tune and I finally gave up. The song wasn’t so bad, I noted with chagrin, as I listened for the first time without the seemingly random ornery prejudice I had long since developed when Hanson was concerned.

But Ike’s sweet voice ringing out over the airwaves just made me feel worse. What had I been thinking? I knew what I was thinking now, and I didn’t like it one bit. My body tensed with the memory or Isaac’s capable hands smoothing their way up my bare back, and his soft lips, and his gentle smile.

“Arghh!” I suddenly found myself, through no conscious muscle contractions, smiling and clutching my fluffy stuffed llama, Ferdinand, to my chest. “This is not happening to me!” I cried, throwing Ferdinand down and turning off the radio. “Now I’m talking to myself. Not an indicator of good mental health there, Clio.” I shifted my weight, aware of a dull ache imprinted on my back by some hard object buried in my sheets. After several moments of excavation I pulled out a pen. More memories flew into my head and I nervously peered over the edge of my bed. That hadn’t been a dream, I noticed as I saw flurry of loose-leaf paper forming an elaborate mess on the dirty carpet. My neat handwriting stained every sheet, front and back. I mentally tallied up the number of pages, and realized that there must have been twenty or more sheets filled with tightly packed words.

“Oh my God,” I murmured to myself. The words that had whirled through my mind as our lips met and our kisses deepened -- blessedly perfect words that I couldn’t control and barely even understood. Words that I was beginning to suspect added up to one great truth, no matter how committed I was to denying it: Isaac Hanson was my destiny.

Ike

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror on “Clio day plus one”, as I had been calling it, about to wield my new bic razor against my ever darkening facial hair. Okay, I hesitantly admitted, I wasn’t going to be ready to be a member of ZZ Top anytime soon but there were definite need-to-shave issues in my future. I did it once a week, which my mom says is silly, mostly just to annoy Taylor and Zac.

It's funny, the three of us hang out all the time, and we're seriously best friends, but every once in a while something will happen and the ever growing gap between us will become immediately obvious. Like when I had gotten my driver's license last year. We had all been beyond excited, but underneath the clamor of joy had run a silent river of sadness. I am growing up faster than my brothers.

In less than a year I will be old enough to leave home, and the sweet paradise that has been the childhood we share will be gone, shattered forever by the loss of one of ‘the three musketeers’, as Tay’s girlfriend Marissa calls us. When the three of us are together it is easy to forget this age difference: Zac acts a little older than his age, I act a little younger, and we somehow manage to meet at about Taylor’s age.

As I began the potentially fatal shaving procedure I realized just how soon I would be 18. Just half a year of childhood left, then nothing but total freedom. The thought almost scared me; leaving home will be weird. I contemplated the repercussions of this fact: I will be on my own before my youngest sister, Zoe, even has her first birthday. I will never get a chance to know her like I know my other siblings: totally and thoroughly. To her I will always be something of a stranger, our ages are so far apart that I can't imagine us having anything in common.

“Ike!” There came a violent pounding on the door. “I’m sick of waiting! What are you doing in there, working on your novel or something?” Zac’s anxious voice snuck its way into the yellow tiled room, shattering my introspective reflections.

“Calm down, bud. If you’d get up when you were supposed to maybe you’d get the shower first for a change!”

“Okay. If you’re not out in five I’m lighting the door on fire and smoking you out.” Zac and his unfounded threats... I paused mid-thought. Zac didn’t make unfounded threats. Ever.

“Um, hold on!”

When I finally emerged from the bathroom I found Taylor sitting half dressed on his bed. “Ike, Ike, Ike,” Tay’s words ran together, “you’d better go downstairs. Mom’s on the phone with Clio.”

We exchanged befuddled looks before I turned to race down the hall to the stairs. I arrived in the kitchen just in time to hear my mom say, “no, Clio, it’s really fine. Missing one day of tutoring won’t make a difference to the education of my little barbarians,” and hang up the phone.

“Clio?” I asked, doing my best to sound casual.

“Mmm...” my mother answered, absently watering one of the frighteningly gigantic houseplants that sit sentry on the windowsill in front of the kitchen sink.

“Did she say anything about me?” I slipped in my curiosity, causing a look of measured wariness flashed briefly across my mom’s face.

“No, honey. She just called to say she’s not feeling well and won’t be able to tutor this afternoon.

“Oh,” I answered lamely, picking an offending dead leaf of the luxuriously green plant, “that’s cool.”

Installment 5

Marissa

When Sarah called me to come over and watch TLC's Wedding Show, which we both adore but Sarah’s to embarrassed to tune in to without having me around as an excuse, I headed right over to her house. The day was beautiful, the perfect wintery type we rarely get in Tulsa. The sky was the deepest Van-Gogh-blue imaginable, and the glistening white expanses of the snow covered lawns of my neighborhood only added to its effect. But I couldn’t keep my mind on the scenery around me. My thoughts kept slipping away from my control and to their favorite topic of late: Taylor Hanson.

The sixth months I had spent without him while he was in Los Angles recording The Middle of Nowhere had been absolute torture, and when I look back I can’t help but wonder how it is that I managed to survive without his touch for that long. The phone bills both of us racked up attest to the fact that neither of us was ever truly without the other, though, and when he finally returned to me nothing had changed. I still burned with inner fire at the mere sight of his crystalline blue eyes, and his words still struck me to the very core. If anything, his long absence made me love him even more. We have been together now for more than a year, and he has become so thoroughly a part of me that I don't feel complete without him by my side.

Today when I think of him as I walked slowly down the partially ice covered sidewalk that looked like a half moon cookie, part black pavement and part white snow, I imagined what my life could be like as Mrs. Taylor Hanson. Nothing in the world made me happier than the thought of waking up next to this boy every morning without fail for the next sixty or seventy years, always having the warm comfort of his embrace to fall back on. But, as I was beginning to realize, nothing can ever be perfect, not even my relationship with Tay. No matter how hard I tried to ignore the warning bells that frequently clanged in my head, they still drowned out everything with their predominance. The point some unknown defense mechanism in my head seem so busily trying to drive home is one that it hurts for me to even think about, but it can not be avoided.

He doesn’t love me anymore.

The force of this thought as it rips painfully through my mind makes me pause for a minute, breathing deeply of the frigid air that cut at my throat like a knife. There was no way around it. The tears that began welling up in my eyes were pinpricks of pain as they traveled languidly down my numb from cold cheeks.

I tried to tell myself that I was imagining things, but the memories of the events that brought about this wicked doubt always pushed their way to the black surface of my mind. Taylor couldn’t love me and still behave the way he did around other girls. Clio, Ike’s new found object of desire, was only the most recent of a long line of examples. On the very first day they met Taylor was already working on her; She seemed oblivious to anything but Ike, but I still shudder as I contemplate the possibilities. There’s just something about Taylor that draws girls to him, and I understand that this doesn’t necessarily have to have an impact on our relationship. Or it wouldn’t, if I could keep my mind off the smile that had lit Tay’s face as he sat right beside me at his kitchen table, trying to charm Clio. I finally managed to beat back the tears and resumed my path down the deserted block to Sarah’s house.

I can’t understand the way Taylor’s mind works, no matter how hard I may try; he gives his smiles freely, and his words without thought. And sometimes those words were ones I would rather not hear coming from the boy who I have placed all of my hopes and dreams in, especially when they are directed to other girls.

He’s just a flirt, is another one of my mantras. I want to beleive he can’t help the way he is, and Ike has assured me a thousand times that even though Taylor might sometimes act in ways that to me seem to be serious, he never really means it.  I've seen horrors ranging from things as blatant as wrapping his arms around a girl he met in the mall, to at the opposite end of the spectrum surely imagined phantoms that simply involve his eyes lingering a little to long on, or him standing to close to, any random girl he may come across. That’s why I have come to believe that he doesn’t love me anymore, and that’s why I can barely stand the sight of myself in the mirror.

I’m not enough for him now that the thrill of newness is beginning to wear off, and his wandering thoughts manifest themselves in his manner.

It kills me to know that these thoughts must be true. There’s no other way to explain what has been happening. But I can’t act on them; I love Taylor so much that it has become impossible for me to cut my losses and just step back into my old world, the one that somehow I sustained some excuse for an existence in for fourteen years without the light of him. I know that I will have to, someday. I vow to move on, to not dwell on the inevitable, and to do what I can to help the desperate boy who called me today in an attempt to decode the actions of the girl who haunts him while he sleeps. If I can’t be happy, I think bitterly to myself, the least I can do is try to make someone else happy. After I leave Sarah’s, I silently promise no one in particular, I will find Clio’s number and I will plead Ike’s case to her. These resolutions don’t prevent a new stream of flowing tears as I turn onto Sara’s driveway, staring intently at my feet as one step follows another, leading me slowly and inexorably towards a world without Taylor.

Clio

“Hey Jack, it’s Clio. How’re you doing?” I was too busy discovering how hard it was to talk on the phone and suppress the urge to curl up in a fetal position and hide in my closet to really listen to my sociology partner’s reply.

“Really good, but feeling guilty about the fact that we’ve done absolutely no work on this project.” Jack and I had been assigned to work together on the first day of classes to produce a project that would make up twenty percent of our total grade, and today, three weeks into the semester, we were just getting around to talking about it. The assignment wasn’t incredibly hard, it just involved writing a paper on teen dating practices in America, but we were required to have first hand interviews with at least three kids in our age group, from thirteen to sixteen. I had already gotten one from my little cousin who from Ohio, but at that point I had run out of acquaintances who fit the bill.

“Well, we have that one interview,” well, I have that one interview, you bum, I thought silently.

“I just got off the phone with my little sister, who much to my surprise said she’d talk to us. I had to promise not to blackmail her with anything she says, though.” I smiled. My cousin had demanded the same vow before she would so much as utter a syllable. “The best part is that if we go over there now you can interview of one of her friends, too. And let’s just say this girl is a gold mine of adolescent angst. We could write the paper on her alone!”

It's weird to talk about this kind of stuff with Jack; he has to be at least twenty-four, and this gives him an entirely different vantage point of the teenage years. I always considered it something of a forest for the trees issue in my case; I am too busy being sixteen to be able to dispassionately analyze it. I know that realizes I’m young, but he always seems to work hard to treat me like an equal. I liked him a lot, despite his scary multiple piercings, chameleon hair, and bizarre Marilyn Manson fondness.

“That’s great. Between my cousin, who is something right out of Freud’s dreams, and that chick we’ll probably be able to write a dissertation. My cousin is truly the most unusual girl on the planet.” Sadie really is. Especially since I have come to Oral Roberts I have seen this clearly. There is a phenomenon at work among people my age: they all try so hard to be different that they end up being the same. The concept is rather ironically summed up by a bumper sticker hanging on the wall in Nat’s half of the room that reads: “all you non-conformists look alike.” This was a trap that, while Nat realized existed, my roommate totally fell into. But Sadie, on the other hand, is a wild woman. She is vastly different from almost everyone I’ve met in the last few months; she doesn’t care about being a non-conformist, she just happens to be one.

“Yep, we’ve got the A all sewn up on this puppy -- how about I pick you up in ten? We’ve got to get to my parents’ house to meet our subjects. You live on campus, right?”

As promised, Jack, sitting at the helm of a sickly looking Volkswagen bus that appeared to be old enough for Jerry Garcia himself to have been the original owner, arrived at my dorm parking lot exactly ten minutes after we hung up.  The twenty minute ride to his house left me pale and tense with odd marks on my hand form clutching the seat with all my might; my life flashed before my eyes many a time in that endless voyage, and, as if to add insult to injury, it proved to be depressingly short and barely worthy of a PG-13 rating.

“Nice house,” I commented as Jack pulled up in front of a huge two-story Victorian that seemed to be typical of the neighborhood.

“Eh, spent some torturous years in that house,” he thoughtfully replied. “Sometimes I think I should have gone further away to college -- like Vermont or something. It’s weird having your parents just pop by your apartment all the time.”

“Yeah, weird,” I meekly agreed. Jack had just described what I was beginning to think of as the perfect college experience: living on you own for freedom, but having your parents close by in case of disaster.

“Sarah!” Jack yelled as he entered his house, noisily stomping the snow off his Doc Marten’s and taking my coat.

“We’re in here!” A faint reply floated to my ears from some distant, and judging by the echo, apparently cavernous room.

“Come on,” Jack gestured as he pulled a small tape recorder and notebook from his back pack. He lead me down a hallway and into a cheerily lit space occupied by two invisible, sniffling teenage girls. “Oh goodie,” Jack muttered as soon as he entered the room. “I know that music, tell me you’re not watching what I think you’re watching...”

“Sush! It’s at the best part!” Came a voice whose owner was hidden behind the couch.

“And now I pronounce you man and wife, you may kiss the bride.” I watched the scene on TV while fighting a grin. Well, I thought to myself, suddenly feeling better, at least I’m not the only person who watches the wedding show on the Learning Channel. In fact, I was pretty sure that I had even seen this episode. It involved a bride dressed as Cinderella and a groom in tights. It was at once unspeakably tacky and unspeakably sweet, two opposites all tangled up together until indivisible. It just goes to show that no matter how weird your fantasy is there’s always someone out there who shares it.

“Okay,” the TV flicked off as the credits began to roll, and two girls appeared above the back of the couch. One was really pretty in an Irish Spring commercial kind of way, and the other was... average.

“Oh, hi!” Taylor Hanson’s girlfriend recognized me at the same time realization dawned coldly in my mind.

After several minutes of deliberations it was decided that I should interview Marissa while Jack did the honors for Sara, to be sure he didn’t miss any juicy details.

The questions on the survey were pretty simple, but I soon found out that Jack had been right about Marissa; she would have been a good subject for a doctorate thesis. She talked like a feminist, pointing out things like the unfairness of a woman automatically being expected to take her husband’s name, but underneath all of her Taylor related comments ran a sensibility more appropriate for Marissa’s great Grandmother to have held in the 1800s. Her words for him were all electricity and longing, colored with shades of devotion. The only saving grace to this girl’s seemingly total and unquestioning adoration for Taylor seemed to be that he felt the same way about her.

“So how did your current relationship begin?” I had only worked my way halfway through the lengthy list of questions when Sara and Jack came into the kitchen, where we had set up shop. After some eye-rolling on the part of Sara, they left us to our work, and me to the torture of Marissa’s words.

“We met at a dance; I watched him from afar and then he asked me to dance with him. And I fell wildly in love, without even knowing his name. Looking into his eyes was like touching a live wire.” Under most circumstances I would have been ready to kill Marissa by this point. She just kept talking and talking, using really tired clichés that sounded as though they had been lifted word for word from this month’s Silhouette Romance collection. The thing that saved her was the fact that her inexact and voluminous responses to every question dredged up ghostly memories of how I had felt with Isaac last night. So far Marissa had used the word “electricity” about a million times, and I could identify quite neatly with practically every one of them.

“Do you believe in love at first sight?” This particular query I had added myself. Once a long time ago I had read a magazine article that had explained this phenomenon that has been the basis for a thousand artistic endeavors throughout history, from Romeo and Juliet to Head Like a Hole. It was all in the mind, the article claimed. Since birth, or at least a remarkably young age, every person had been trained to seek their perfect match: the missing piece that would make them entire, the one that they belonged with. As this search commenced they slowly built a picture of their perfect mate. Composites of different personalities, looks, and actions were melded into one image, becaming the ultimate goal of their quest. When someone closely matching this blueprint appeared, the electricity Marissa so extensively included in conversation began. It was love at first sight not because of some unknown guiding hand of fate, but the pragmatic investigations of a lifetime.

“Do you?” Marissa’s bizarre reply didn’t even phase me for a moment.

“I think I’m the one who’s supposed to be asking the questions here,” I defended myself, not wanting to get into a messy session of girl talk.

“Listen,” Marissa stared down at the cream colored linoleum before her for a contemplative instant before looking me right in the eye. This was not just any look, it rang with the same challenge that the bull must see seconds before feeling the sword of the matador. “I’ve heard about the whole Ike thing. I even heard you told Mrs. Hanson you were too sick to tutor today. Ike thinks you hate him, and he’s entered what appears to be a deep state of depression that hasn’t allowed him to leave his room all day.”

“Ummm,” I felt bad. Sheepish, even. I had been so busy trying to deny the feelings of perfection that bubbled up within me every time Ike was in the room that I hadn’t even considered the possibility that he could feel the same way about me. I dismissed this thought immediately, though. Ike didn’t like me, and apparently didn’t even care.

“Do you like him?” Marissa’s question was delivered in a friendly tone, but still stung with its accuracy.

“I think so. Maybe a lot. When you were talking about the whole ‘electric shock’ thing...” I cautiously admitted, fiddling with the tape recorder I had just turned off. It was hard for me to admit my feelings to anyone, and I sat there, feeling naked and alone, under the intense light of Marissa’s scrutiny.

“Good. Because he likes you. I’ve known Ike for quite awhile now, but I’ve never seen him like this about anyone. I know he has impeccable taste, though, and this only backs up my impression of your general coolness. Just,” I could feel the sincerity in Marissa’s final, pleading words: “just don’t hurt him. He’s special.”

“I don’t know,” I hesitantly said, examining the slanting rays of the dying sun that slid through the bay window across the room.

“If Ike’s special?”

“No, no. I’m pretty sure about that. But I don’t think he likes me.” All I could remember as I sat across Jack’s kitchen table from Taylor Hanson’s girlfriend, who had been the object of my extreme jealousy in the recent past, was the crying scene. Okay, so it was the post-kissing crying scene, but it had been dumb. Really dumb. At the time I had been feeling terrible in a way whose surface could barely be scratched by words.  Not only had I had humiliated myself beyond belief, but I also had messed up something potentially important. I had never felt the thrills Isaac’s presense sent tingling through me before, and it seemed as if this was a sensation I should have been working on retaining, not cheapening with my antics. Looking back, though, it seemed a little different. I had sat there, weeping like some pre-menstrual nightmare, and yet Isaac had not done a thing. He had stared at me blankly, not saying a word. How could he have done that? I asked myself, about to disintegrate into showers of tears for the second time in as many days over this random boy. All he had to say was, ‘that was cool Clio.’ I wasn’t even hoping for a ‘you’re so beautiful it hurts to look at you.’ All I had needed at that moment was some sort of indication of... anything. Yet the only thing he offered me was the feel of those brown eyes on my skin. He hadn’t even cared about what happened. Maybe he was even sorry about it. Maybe he was embarrassed.  After all, I’m not exactly Cindy Crawford.

Marissa raised her eyebrows at me, and after a lengthy pause she assured, “he does. Ike isn’t the kind of guy who would just make out with some girl he didn’t like.” The look on her face made me cringe before her next words had even sullied the air with their horror, “you have to call him.”

“What?” I squeaked, in what was doubtlessly a fair approximation of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. So much for dignity.

“Call him. Don’t even mention last night if you don’t want to. Just ask him out.”

“That’s easy for you to say!” I finally choked out after a moment of reflection. Isaac had just said there in stony silence while I cried. He didn’t care, and calling him would just serve to drive that point home. I’m aware of the cardinal rule of dating, and have been for a long time. Jeanine Garafalo perhaps put it best when she said, “that’s right, rejection kills, disappointment only maims.” Calling Isaac would just pull me seven digits closer to having actual personal testimonial to prove this theorem.

“Call him; he likes you.” Marissa looked blankly at something over my left shoulder, but I don’t think she was seeing anything. She played absently with a strand of her white blonde hair in a remarkably girlie girl moment of introspection, even for her. “I know just how you feel, like it could never happen. Someone who you think is incredible thinks that you’re incredible too.” She paused for a moment with a dour expression on her face, “if I have to listen to that damn Nat King Cole CD one more time I’m going to kill myself... moving right along... believe me, exhibit A, sometimes it actually happens.”

“Okay.” I was prepared to pull out the big guns to get Marissa to halt, “I’m a year younger than him, I’m his math tutor, and he’s a rock star. I bet he could have anyone he wanted. So why would he be interested in me?” If Isaac had liked me he would have given me a hug when I cried, or tried to talk to me while I was taking sanctuary in the guest bathroom, or even come within fifty feet of me after I had managed to turn off the waterworks and return to the world of the rational.

“Are you guys still not done?” Jack sauntered barefoot into the room, and began fishing through a cupboard by the backdoor to the kitchen. “I have a load of laundry to do,” he said, pulling out a gigantic tub of liquid Tide, “I’ll drop you off while it’s drying, Clio. The one good thing about local parents.” Jack smiled and flipped his too short to be long, but too long to be short bleached hair from his eyes.

“Actually, Sara and I were going to make some chocolate chip cookies. Do you want to stay? We’ll even let you lick the bowl...” Marissa smiled at me, as though we just hadn’t been engaged in near mortal combat over a phone call. The weird thing was that I wanted to stay. Marissa seemed really cool, and her words reminded me of my best friend from home, Casey. She was never on to take any guff, either. I had missed being around real people for a long time, the kind of people who tell you if you have bad breath, or if you tucked your skirt into your underwear, or if you were about to make the biggest mistake of your life through a crime of omission. In short, I had missed my true friends.

“Oh no,” Jack wailed in mock horror, “Chick bonding! Will the nightmare never cease?”

“Aw, shut up,” Marissa jeered. “Rachel’s into chick bonding...” She directed her next words towards me, “Jack has a huge crush on my sister, and I’m trying to get him to do the same thing you need to do. Just pick up the phone! Please stay, though, it’ll be fun.”

“I guess I could,” with that my fate was sealed; I stayed. I ate enough cookie dough to cheer up all of Bosnia, and Marissa’s Ike suggestions kept coming, relentless as cold in January. The scary thing was, that by the time Sara’s mom drove me home that night I was almost believing them.

***

“Hi. Can I please talk to Ike?”

“Sure, hold on.” I wasn’t entirely sure who was on the other end of this brief conversation, but I suspected it must have been Zac. I was too busy fighting down the alarmingly powerful mental voice which was at this moment hollering, “put down the phone, I repeat, step away from the communication device,” to really care, though. Marissa’s words from this afternoon had really sunk in, and I was doing what I had vowed strenuously to avoid. Calling Ike to... ask him out.

I really liked him, judging from the ceaseless tattoo that my thumping heart beat out at the mere prospect of talking to him. I thought I might throw up as I waited for Isaac to come from the phone. The seconds I passed on the line were some of the longest of my life, and my sweaty hands compulsively opened and closed as I anxiously kicked around a pillow that Natalie must have left on the floor. I couldn’t remember ever having been this nervous before in my life, and I had a feeling that this was a sensation I wouldn’t soon forget.

Every instant of silence found me closer and closer to hanging up the phone. Whoever had answered had no way of knowing who I was. Ike would never have to know that I had called. Life could just go on the way it has been for the past week, with us tacitly ignoring each other and just surviving. I was a few precious muscle contractions away from getting out of this horror movie turned real life, yet while this prospect sounded pretty attractive, I knew that nothing could ever be the same between Isaac and I again. We had stepped across a threshold last night, one that neither of us could recross. One that I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to recross.

“Hello?” I knew Ike’s voice the instant his first syllable reached my ears. It’s timbre was like a smooth caress on my neck, and I shivered involuntarily in response. I can do this, I silently repeated as I energetically began picking lint off my polar fleece covered comforter.

“Hey, Isaac. It’s Clio. How are you?” Not bad, I rated myself, I had sounded reasonably calm, even though too many thoughts were running through my head for me to grasp hold of one and be coherent. What if I asked him out and he said no? This event had been known to take place, especially to me. Why, I’ve never really been sure. I may not be particularly gorgeous, and I may not be particularly thin, but I would consider myself passable in the looks department. For some reason that I’m not capable of fathoming, though, boys just never like me. Once, in an attempt to cheer me up, Casey had told me it was because I was “articulate” and that frightened them away. As one can imagine, this ploy neatly failed. I would almost rather believe that males of the species steered so consistently clear of me because I’m hideous. It’s scary to think that boys don’t appreciate me because of my personality, and the fact that I’m able to string two polysyllabic words together and make sense.

“I’m okay,” Ike’s reply was hesitant and unsure, and I could hear some giggling in the background. “Hold on a second, Clio.” Immediately following this excuse Isaac must have covered the receiver and chewed out one of his brothers, because I could hear faint words that sounded less than friendly and seemed to involve, “bugging off or you’d better sleep with one eye open tonight or kiss your eyebrows good-bye...” This was less than stunningly mature, but even under these circumstances I couldn’t help but crack a smile. “How are you?” Isaac came back on the line after several seconds of silence and the loud slamming of a door in the background.

“Good, listen...” What would I do when he said no? How could I go on tutoring at the Hanson house after being snubbed?  He seemed to like me well enough, but the concept that he might actually say yes to my proposition was so foreign to me that I dismissed it as soon as it tentatively trod into my mind. The only thing that kept me from giving in to the waves of horrific apprehension and slamming down the receiver was my realization that I had already screwed up my position as tutor by messing around with Isaac in the first place, so there was really nothing to be lost in the situation. Oh, wait. There was one thing. My pride, but it’s not like I’m not used to giving that up. This time might be different, screamed those sweaty palms and the incessant tapping fingers on my now spotless desk. This time I cared more about the response than I cared to admit.

“Did you want to talk to my mom?”

“No, actually. I wanted to talk to you about,” big breath, “yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh, um, okay.” Isaac was sounding about as chagrined by this conversation as I was feeling.

“I’m sorry that I got that whole thing started,” I apologized meekly. Why I had even brought it up again I have no idea, but now that I was finally at least making an attempt to cover my butt I was feeling a little bit better about the cosmos in general. My next words shocked me, and I was pretty sure that I hadn’t even thought them before they came sailing destructively out of my traitor mouth, “but... I’m not, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sorry.” Isaac sounded a little unnerved by his response, too. “In fact, I can honestly say,” a long pause came, and I heard a few deep breaths before his all encompassing voice returned to brighten my outlook. “I quite enjoyed that, ‘whole thing’.” I heard a smile come into his voice, and decided to go in for the kill.

“Me too. This call had an actual purpose, by the way. I was wondering if you wanted to, maybe, hangout sometime this weekend.” This entire phrase came out in one breath, and I crossed my fingers in hopes that Ike had managed to understand what I was saying despite me doing my impression of the ‘micromachines’ guy from those TV commercials. Lord only knows I didn’t want to have to say it again. Now all I had to do was sit back and wait for him to tell me he was incredibly busy this weekend, that his grandmother was sick, that he had to wash the dog, or maybe that he was planning on being out of the galaxy. Hopefully it would at least be something creative.

“That would be cool, when?”

“Oh, okay, no big deal.” I paused, silently hitting rewind in my mind. “Wait, what did you say?” It couldn’t have been what I thought he said.

“I asked when. Are you busy Saturday night? We could go to dinner or something?” My fingers were now tapping away a mile a minute in some obscure variant of Morse Code.

“No, Saturday’s great with me. Around seven or something?” I managed to get out.

“Cool beans. Seeings as how you don’t have a car I’ll drive. Pick you up at your dorm?” He asked, sounding terribly nonchalant and experienced at this first date stuff.

“Sure.” I breathed, feeling the adrenaline rushing out of my system. I barely had enough to strength to cradle the phone and lie down on my bed before the realization hit me. Isaac Hanson had said yes. I was going to go out on a date with a boy who made me feel like no one else in the world. “Mission accomplished...” My final energy reserves were depleted on this words, and I closed my eyes and lay shamelessly daydreaming for far longer than I could afford.

Isaac

The week dragged by, as they tend to when one has something as amazing as my date with Clio to look forward too. After the kissing incident I had felt awful -- the doubts about myself that I can usually avoid came rushing in a heated wave of discontent into my mind. She had kissed me, and at the time had certainly appeared to enjoy it, but the aftermath had been deadly. Taylor’s Zac explanation had made me feel a little less like scum, but hadn’t made the situation go away. Clio’s phone call on Tuesday had been the event that finally completed that task. She had sounded so nervous and unsure that I couldn’t help but smile at the memory as I got ready for our date on Saturday. The shaving procedure was repeated, and a healthy dose of aftershave completed my first date ritual. Not that I’ve really had that many first dates, to be frank. If I stretched the definition to include the daughter of one of my dad’s co-workers getting a ride to a school basketball game with me the total came to... two.

“Jeez, Ike...” Zac coughed when I entered our room in search of the set of car keys my dad had given me on my sixteenth birthday last year. “You reek! How much of dad’s high-karate did you use, anyway?”

“Not enough, apparently. My goal was to render you unconscious and apparently I’ve failed.” I snapped. The tension was starting to get to me. I liked Clio so much, and I didn’t want anything to mess up our date. At first I had examined my motives pretty suspiciously. The outside packaging that is Clio was perfect enough to make my heart race, but I wondered if that was the only reason I was interested in her, that and her incredible kisses. But after a while I realized that these things