A check of the schedule sent Jon—no, Jonatha—on his way to, somehow, the same advanced math class that he'd had before everything went all crazy. He tried to ignore the craziness in the halls and simply get in.
As he might have expected, instead of a man, a woman taught his math class. Jonatha sat in the back row, as usual, and took out his homework to turn in. He noticed his handwriting had changed. It was a lot neater and straighter. Sort of like what girls, prior to all this, had.
It was that realization that made him look at the classroom again from the back row. He looked to the side and saw Jade Duncan. But in front of him and to the other side...all girls. He slowed down a bit, but as students passed their homework up front and Ms. Hafner prepared to lecture on trigonometry, it felt like there was a flash of normalcy. Math was math. Numbers were numbers. That should be comforting, right?
The new deep, husky voice of his math teacher, however, snapped him out of that notion.
"We're going to go in deep today on the graphs of these functions, girls. How's everyone holding up?" She looked most intently at the only two boys in the class. Of course she thinks boys can't do well in math, Jonatha thought. "Alright, let's get to it."
The next slide featured a graph of the sine function. "This is the sine function, which starts at 0, goes up, down, and then back up to end at 2 pi, and repeat..." Jonatha started listening, but his mind trailed off. He felt intimidated. He was short. curvy, almost alone. He felt like he was being towered over.
Jay, or Jade as everyone was calling him now, was one seat over, and while he was looking at sine waves, he was experiencing a wave of emotions.
Math had always been one of his strong suits. He was, after all, quite geeky. But this was new. Now people looked at him not for his brains, but for his body. It rose and moved in its own curves, far more real than a parabola, closer to home than a cosine.
Since he was in class, he couldn't pull out his phone. They'd look at me...like one of the ditzy...guys? He felt overwhelmed. That cosine function on the screen might as well have been a roller coaster. He sure felt like he was on one.
"Jade? Jade?" Ms. Hafner's low, rumbling voice pulled him out of his reverie. "You look like you're dozing off again. Come on! This is math! This is serious! Don't be such an airhead!"
With the lecture over, there was some time to get started on homework while Ms. Hafner passed back graded assignments.
Jade saw the teacher in her dress shirt come over to him. She stopped and said a few words. "You wanna be a doctor? Rethink that, boy." She handed him a test, with a massive, scarlet red "D" emblazoned across the top.
He could hear the snickers of a girl not far away.
"More like Double D."
He broke down crying, a tear trickling onto the printed exam.
