“Oh,” Regan said, softening slightly, but Marc merely nodded again.
“Cool,” he said. “You know, I’ve been curious who Regan was talking to from the bathtub at five a.m.,” he remarked with a laugh, shaking his head. “Nice to finally meet you, man. When Regan first mentioned you I was like, ‘Aldo, really?’—but I get it now, it works.”
“It’s short for Rinaldo,” Regan leapt to explain.
“Oh, interesting,” Marc said, and briefly, Aldo thought about bees.
Specifically, drone bees.
“Well, we should go,” Regan said. “Let you get back to it.”
“Yeah, sure,” Aldo said, relieved. “Have a good night.”
“You, too,” Marc said. “Hey, we should all get dinner some time, right, babe?”
“Good idea!” Regan said.
“Sure,” said Aldo, and turned away, continuing in the opposite direction
He was inside of Crate and Barrel （Masso needed a new wine opener） when he got a text message, his phone buzzing in his pocket. He fished it out, turning away from the cheese boards, and glanced at Regan’s name on his screen.
That doesn’t count as one of the six.
No, he agreed, and put his phone back in his pocket before turning to the cutlery.
At home—on the kitchen counter, above the knife drawer—was the notebook Aldo usually carried with him. It was full, which tended to happen every six months or so, but this time it had only been about four. The drawings, more the consequence of impulse than anything, were usually the same; geometric patterns, usually hexagons, all shaded different ways and drawn in smaller or larger increments. Aldo didn’t venture far from shapes, though he’d recently drawn a pair of lips. A regal, haughty chin. A set of eyes refracting a pattern of hexagonal beams. He’d left the notebook above the knife drawer, sitting out on the kitchen counter, and he would need to replace it while he was out.
He glanced up at the cutlery, frowning to himself.
It was about time for a new paring knife.
* * *
FOR THIS NOT-CONVERSATION, Regan wore jeans.
“Is this the Math-Stat building?” she asked one of the students lingering outside, and they nodded distractedly. “The basement is … down, I guess?” she said, and the student pointed out the stairs. “Great, thanks.”
She shivered a little. The weather had cooled considerably, and she hurried inside.
She’d arrived five minutes early, taking a seat at the back of the classroom. The other students were pulling out their laptops, preparing for class, groaning about their work. It was one of those tiny, cramped classrooms, no sunlight. The board sat vacant, waiting to be filled. She caught a few sidelong glances, one or two of them lasting several beats too long. She smiled politely in reply and the heads snapped forward, shamefully remorseful.
Aldo walked in at precisely three in the afternoon, striding up the center aisle. He pulled a textbook from his backpack, set it flat on the table at the head of the room, and glanced down. “The chain rule,” he said, not bothering to greet anyone.
He looked up only to scan the room and then stopped short, catching sight of her.
He blinked.
“The chain rule,” he said again, and turned back to the board without any adjustment in tone, writing out something that looked like total gibberish. “Used to find the derivative of two composite functions.” He paused, and without glancing over his shoulder, prompted reluctantly, “I suppose you’d like an example?”
“Yes,” said one of the people in the front row.
“Fine,” Aldo sighed, as Regan struggled to smother her laughter. “Say someone jumps out of an airplane. You want to calculate a number of factors; velocity, atmospheric pressure, buoyant height.”
He hadn’t bothered to check, but from Regan’s vantage point she caught a few heads nodding in comprehension.
“Simplifies it,” Aldo said. “Takes all the relevant factors and applies a unified approach.”
A few more heads.
“Anyway,” Aldo said, and continued on, filling the board with Egyptian runes and demon-summoning witchcraft （or so Regan assumed） until 3:51 p.m., releasing the class with a stilted reminder that their midterm would take place next week.
Someone asked if Aldo planned to hold a study session. He confirmed that he would. His gaze slid to Regan and then back to the class. They rose, making their way out like a trail of industrious ants. Then Aldo erased the board, placed his textbook back in his bag, and retreated down the classroom’s center aisle, pausing beside Regan’s desk.