None of that was to say that she wasn’t feminine. Believe me, she was. It just wasn’t her whole deal. Though she’d only been at our school a single semester, it was obvious that she had other stuff going on in her life. That was considered a violation by the cool crowd, but she seemed ignorant of those rules, maybe because she wasn’t from California. She came from across the pond. Oh, I forgot to mention that. Claire Fontaine came from the UK. That’s right—the girl had an accent. I think you’re starting to get the picture here.

All I can say is that Europeans must be way ahead of us in math. That’s the only explanation for the way Claire tore apart equations. You could see the chalk crumbling to dust in her fist. When she was done—it never failed—she slammed a period on the end of the equation like she was finishing a sentence.

“Punctuation remains unnecessary,” Pinkton said. “But nice job, Claire.”

She exhaled like she’d just pinned an opponent. As she took up the eraser and wiped the board clean, Pinkton wrote a new line of gibberish and began surveying the class for the next casualty.

“We’ve got time for one more. Volunteer, folks. It’s the American way.”

I cocked my head to make myself look even more engrossed with the textbook. Pinkton’s gaze swept past me and I felt a rush of pride in my acting. Then disaster: Claire was strutting back to her desk, clapping her chalky hands in front of her so that she emerged again and again from smoke like a rock star, and she happened to glance my way. I, of course, was ogling. Her lips twisted into a wry smile.

“Cheers, Mr. Sturges,” she said.

That accent never failed to turn my body parts traitor. This time, it was Mr. Right Hand who betrayed me. It shot up in an overzealous wave, as if Claire were a mile away, and Señor Stupid Mouth got in on the act, too: “Cheers to you, too, Claire!”

“Is that you, Jim?” Pinkton asked. “What a nice change. Let’s see if you can untangle this knot.”

My grin wilted and I faced the equation. It looked as if both the alphabet and the number system had puked all over the board. I grimaced; the bruise on my cheek stung. I considered displaying my wounds and explaining how I could not possibly walk all the way to the board without breaking into wails of the greatest suffering. Instead I gave Pinkton my best pleading look.

She “gave me the chalk,” as we called it, holding up the chalk in her fist like a middle finger.

I steeled myself, stood, took the chalk, and walked until my nose practically touched the board. Without having any idea what I was going to do, I raised my arm before realizing that Pinkton had written the equation at Claire’s upmost reach, which was a good four or five inches above my own. I couldn’t even reach the problem, much less solve it. I bore the laughter rising behind me and let my vision lose focus so that the eraser-swirls of chalk became a fog. A London fog, where girls like Claire Fontaine walked around kicking ass in berets and solving dangerous calculations in between forceful kisses with short, courageous men.