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Farkle commonly declared himself an ‘up and coming protege’ within the science world. However, the more he reflected on such statements reverberating around his mouth, travelling as waves upon the nitrogen heavy air surrounding him, and eventually sparking the ear drum of his audience, the more he realized it was a rather broad statement.
He could more accurately declare that he was an ‘up and coming protege’ within most of the branches of the science world.
Farkle Minkus, child genius, could prove, with utmost certainty, that he had nearly mastered his favourite branch of the Science of Earth and Space by being able to name every planet, its average distance from and orbital speed around the Sun, its diameter and axis tilt, its length of both year and day, temperature, atmosphere, and the number of moons it possesses-that was without mentioning his thorough research on any and all terrains that cover the earth’s crust.
On top of that, he had also completed many a textbook to achieve the understanding he required to perform accurate experiments within the Life Sciences branch-his back stiff from hours admiring several cells, amoebas, and other fascinating particles through his microscope-and the Physical Sciences branch-he had the laws of thermodynamics memorized and physics had been, much to his own surprise, child’s play.
Of course, the mastering of the Formal Sciences was simply self-explanatory. Why would one dare to dive into any science without first intimately knowing the groundworks of mathematics and logic that sparked the other branches into being? It would be like declaring yourself a coin collector and then having no collection to boast of.
Yet the branch that continued to elude him, its evasive maneuvers much more evolved than his brain had originally calculated, remained that of the Social Sciences.
Farkle himself believed them an inferior kind of science, the kind you include but don’t exactly respect the opinion of, but still argued that a genius such as himself should explore any and all avenues of learning, and so he had attempted, with a confident and determined grin on his face, to understand them, beginning with psychology.
Sigmund Freud gave him nightmares for weeks.
He had shaken the failure to grasp psychology and turned to sociology, smiling brightly at the librarian when he took out several books written by Karl Marx and August Comte. Yet not even eight open sociology and psychology books, semi-circled around him, would relay their secrets to his curious mind. It was all vague and situational . There were few objective truths about any social science because, while Johnny struggled with aggression because he was sexually repressed, Amanda struggled with aggression because of lack of attention. How was one supposed to find a commonality?
And yet, Farkle did not need the secrets of Sigmund Freud to identify that the tension was beginning to suffocate all members in this...high school canyon.
“It’s not just a hole,”
Riley pushed herself off the wall, her hands clasped primly behind her back as they always were when she was growing increasingly upset, and looked at Lucas with set determination that she was right about this one. Lucas tipped his head back to enjoy the view of the ceiling...since it seemed to be their only view from down here.
“What is it then?”
Lucas’ voice was exasperated before the conversation had even begun and it worried Farkle. Lucas, more often than not, left conversations with Riley expressing exasperation so if he started with it, where exactly might he end?
“You don’t have to get angry,”
Farkle tightened his jaw. While the in-depth secrets of the Social Sciences may still elude him, there was one thing that all the other branches had taught him in a thorough manner: a key pillar of science is observation.
And Farkle was going on nearly three years of observing Lucas Friar. He knew what made him tick. He knew what made him punch. He knew what made him cry.
He knew that Riley telling Lucas that he needed to control his anger was a biohazardous zone. The scene of Riley unknowingly planting a pathogen deep in Lucas’ hypogastric artery and just waiting for his blood to pump it into every inch of his being. Farkle wondered whether Riley mentioning Lucas’ greatest flaw, sometimes incessantly, was like Smackle constantly lording her intimacy with the great minds of Marx and Freud over him. He hated that feeling. That… insufficiency.
“I am angry, Riley!” Lucas stepped closer to Riley, his one step equivalent to her two, and looked down at her determined face. Farkle almost turned away. It’s easier to turn away before the car crash than it is after. “This isn’t how I want to start high school! I want to walk anywhere I want! I want to go out for the football team!”
Lucas gestured blindly up the stairway that bound them as if freedom was singing, a chorus of angels along with it, just atop its peak. Farkle’s brain wondered whether the great heroes of the Underground Railroad-Harriet Tubman, Jermain Loguen, Frederick Douglass-made the same sweeping gesture across whatever landscape was to ‘the North’, their hope burning candles in the night that freedom lay somewhere over the next hill...and if not that hill, the next one. Then he wondered whether the comparisons were even legitimate.
“Lucas, you’ll get killed on the football team.”
Riley tipped her head back, the action almost patronizing, and spoke as if everyone were thinking it and she was the only one brave enough to say it. Yet Farkle doubted they were all thinking it. Mostly because Zay shared what they were all thinking in the most precise manner he could think of.
“Whoaaa!”
Farkle kept his eyes trained on the back of Lucas’ head, disturbingly still while he stared down Riley, as Zay engaged with the conversation, suddenly stiff, a runner waiting for the crack of the gun.
“Really? That’s what you think?” Lucas' head shook a little, as a cat might bat a ball of yarn, and Farkle questioned what words were rumbling around Lucas’ brain. “So you’ll put your faith in some random seniors you just met, but you don’t have faith in me?”
The question had no distance, instead falling like rotten milk from Lucas’ mouth and landing with a wet plop in front of Riley’s feet. Maya even watched it fall, staring at the splatter it seemed to leave; Riley paid it no mind.
“I don’t think that they’re random. I don’t think that anything that ever happens to us is random.”
Farkle squinted, noting that Riley didn’t exactly answer Lucas’ question, instead electing to take one word of the nineteen Farkle had counted Lucas to have said and utilizing it to her advantage.
In a way, Farkle didn’t exactly blame her. They had hit both a physical and metaphorical depression.
“Sometimes… you are just too much for me, Riley,”
And there it was: the critical point. The killing of Tybalt. The murder of Duncan. The stabbing of Polonius. Alea iacta est.
There is one thing that all critical points have in common: they make one think about the place where they fit amongst it all. Farkle couldn’t help but wonder, if he were a tragic character in a tragic play, just a marionnette to the whimsical desires of England’s greatest poet and bard, would he prove himself a man of more virtue than the rest?
Or would he too blindly stab a man through a tapestry, hardly pausing to think about the invaluable life that is wrapped in a beating heart and expanding lungs? Would he too slay the man who murdered his best friend, the guilt of engaging in the combat in the first place a greater drive than avenging his friend’s death?
It was with such thoughts that Farkle was pushed into the massive expanse that was his brain, a universe perpendicular to that of any that exists in the multiverse he was sure.
He was thrown into the question of where he fit amongst it all. Surrounded by his best friends, his girlfriend, and the two girls he had looked up to as goddesses since the first grade, he was unsure where to even begin.
So he began at what he might consider a beginning, if one were to believe that beginnings were real. He personally did not-time just an illusion that the miniscule human mind created that we might measure events within our equally miniscule lives-but supposed that he could overlook that fact to find a way through the sharp turns of his irregular and nonlinear thoughts that were, frankly, making him nauseous.
And so he froze time-an illusion as he had already deemed certain-and broke the ruler that span the length of their lives. He needed to understand and to understand, he needed to make the situation as tangible as he could. The world became his oyster to manipulate.
So, in his mind, he stepped apart from himself, leaving his physical body where it was as a reference of how to manipulate the space.
Zay.
Farkle analyzed Zay, his face and his posture skewed. He too seemed apart from himself. Zay liked the feeling of casual. It was how Lucas and him managed to flourish despite their shocking differences. Yet there he stood, tense as a plucked string.
No. Tense as a soon to be plucked string. The more Farkle analyzed Zay’s soul, the more he became certain: Zay was a pulled string...but not a released one. Ever ready to contain the wild soul that was Lucas, Zay wasn’t engaged with the conversation. Farkle nodded to himself.
This was more accurate. Zay was rarely fully engaged in a conversation. There was always more lying beneath the surface, churning within the slouched ambivalence he exuded.
So rather than engaging with the conversation, Zay was engaged with the people. A poor reader of literature, he was a phenomenal reader of crossed lines between people.
So he was pulled taut, waiting to be released should Lucas make a sudden movement.
Farkle’s soul then abandoned Zay, deeming him a subject studied enough, and side-stepped his own lanky body to observe Smackle.
She was perplexed, nothing more. Smackle had never declared any of them her friends and Farkle could ensure with 93% accuracy that if they were to tell her she was theirs… she wouldn’t believe them. She flourished when she could function as an anomaly. Farkle cracked a side smile when he found her much like Zay, just on opposite ends of the spectrum.
Yet he found her consistent, just trying to mathematically explain how and why they were all there.
She was...Smackle. Always Smackle. Always consistent.
So his soul spun quickly around her demeanor, bored with it rather soon, and travelled to Maya.
Maya, Farkle noted, was perhaps the most tragic soul of them all. Buried deep and too often hard to find, Maya’s soul was a treasure few obtained the honor of bearing. Yet Farkle had prided himself on his passion to discover the unknown and had learned how to hold his breath long enough to reach the deep depths of Maya Hart.
Yet once he got there, he wished he hadn’t.
For the rest of them there, the words had fallen from Lucas’ mouth and landed with a hard and squishy splat on the dirty school floor. For Maya, it had splattered.
Farkle thought back to his project on World War One and the impact it had made on him. He had learned something, reading diary entry after diary entry and letter after letter.
It was never the dead that suffered. It was those who lived.
While the dead entered the hallowed ground of whatever afterlife they believed, their souls free from the bindings of their earthly body, the living were left with nothing but to bear their memory.
Farkle’s soul eyed Lucas and Riley, each with their head held high in pride that would soon be their downfall, and found that it was easy for them to start a war when they wouldn’t be the ones picking up the pieces.
It was easy for kings and queens, noblemen and political parties to spew meaningless words, declaring that war was to be struck against, what they deemed, a lesser nation when they didn’t fight in it. It was harder to be the one defending your country.
Yet perhaps the most tragic souls of any war were those who belonged to both.
The Japanese immigrants who would fight and die for their country quicker than any Caucasian patriot being banished to isolation camps because Pearl Harbour was left to burn. Where did they fit?
What about the tragic souls who loved one as equally as they did the other and were torn apart by a dispute that lodged a wedge so deep they lost themselves in the fray?
So, Farkle's soul wept for Maya’s, unable to shed any tears, when every loyal strand of her body was pulled to its brink.
The screaming survivor covered in the splattered blood of a beloved comrade, a shattered legacy the only image painted on the back of their eyelids. The one who lived.
It was too much to bear… and so Farkle’s soul shot back from Maya’s, trembling slightly from the weight of it all, and swirled around Lucas, angrily curling itself around the broad boy as a python would its prey.
Lucas was to be the protector. He was the oldest and the strongest and the… best. The best Farkle had ever known.
Yet Farkle’s tightening grip on Lucas eased when he found Lucas contained more consistency than even Smackle. Nothing about Lucas’ soul had changed.
Farkle studied closer, scanning every inch of Lucas for any outlier. He found none.
Yet suddenly it all made sense. Of course there was no outlier because the definition of an outlier was to be situated away-detached from one's body. Lucas wasn’t detached. He was perfectly in line.
He was protecting, at least… in the best way he knew how when every variable around them was unknown.
A mathematician’s worst nightmare.
So Farkle studied the glowing orbs of Lucas’ eyes. His desperation to be understood by Riley. And he was desperate for there to be understanding there.
Farkle wondered whether that was their very problem. Desperation, by its very definition, required that a certain hopelessness make one feel the situation impossible. Had Lucas reached a point of utter hopelessness that Riley would ever understand him?
Or perhaps a hopelessness that he would ever understand Riley?
Farkle turned his back to Lucas and looked into the eyes of Riley. Riley Matthews: the sun of the group.
His sun.
Farkle looked deep into the swirling brown of Riley’s eyes and felt anger at Lucas spark anew.
She was hurt, Hamlet’s sword buried deep in her chest, no matter how quietly she attempted to hide behind the tapestry.
And Farkle knew Riley hid. Sure, she was an open book, her emotions swirling the font in and out of focus, but any well-written book-and Riley was the most thrilling novel Farkle had ever had the luxury of burying himself into-required room for reading between the lines. That was where Riley hid: between the lines.
Between the right and wrong, the text and the emotion, the black and the white.
Yet Lucas’ pointed words had found her hidden insecurities all the same. The insecurity that she was ‘too much’ for all of them.
Staring at the soulful eyes of his brightest star, Farkle was realigned with the critical point again and where exactly he fit.
Sometimes you are just too much for me, Riley.
Yet… Farkle didn’t fit. The place where he fit in the critical point was not fitting .
Farkle had learned that history shot the projectile that was the future, choosing where it should aim and how fast it should achieve its destination, and so he analyzed their past.
He could name a situation with each member present wherein Riley’s enthusiasm and zeal for all things happy had proven to be a strain on the group’s wellbeing. On many occasions, Zay had walked away with surrendered hands, Smackle had declared she had no words with which to respond, Lucas had bit his cheek and took a deep breath, and even Maya had floundered for words, her pretty eyelashes batting repeatedly just as window wipers might make a path more clear.
Yet Farkle could think of no moment wherein Riley’s view of their ever-evolving world exasperated him. While her intellect could never compete with his, her lack of understanding sometimes boggling him, he had never found her to be irritating or frustrating.
She was simply an unknown. While studying amoebas always led him to the same conclusions, their pseudopodia repeating the same bulging action each time he peered into his microscope, Riley never repeated the same thing twice.
She would dance and sing around her room, her hair flying behind her as she giggled and twirled, but she would never repeat a motion.
She would twirl her hair around her finger at a particularly hard math question, but it would never be the exact same sequence of strands as the last time.
So Farkle’s soul explored Riley’s, her eyes doleful and sad, her body trembling as it continued to attempt to stand tall with pride and found that Riley had never proven herself to be too much for him. It had been his pleasure-his excitement-to study the behaviours of Riley Matthews.
So how does one find their place in a critical point when there is no available seat?
Farkle soul sighed. There was only one member left.
He eyed himself, saw the fear and confusion, the anger and protection, the desire and the helplessness, and sighed. He never was one to fit.
Farkle blinked, and time caught up to him, Smackle’s breathing even beside him while Zay’s remained as tight as his shoulders.
“Guys, can we just calm down? This isn’t who we are,”
Farkle’s gaze landed on Maya, her stature emanating from her deepest feelings-small and helpless-and he wondered whether Maya was asking or pleading.
“Yeah?” Lucas’ voice was rough and detached. There weren't any of them present who he would’ve responded differently to but Maya seemed to take it as a personal hurt. Perhaps because previous hurts had walked that this one may run. “ Who are we?”
Lucas ultimately directed his question at Riley, her chin trembling slightly from the desire to keep it held high and the tears blossoming in her eyes. It made Farkle’s heart clench. Riley crying was his Achilles heel.
Maya’s eyes also remained fixated on Riley’s breaking soul with an uplifted chin as Lucas fled the scene, his own harsh words haunting his trail as he hopped the stairs two at a time.
Zay stretched a useless hand out to him before addressing the group, unwilling to make eye contact with anyone but Smackle, her calm stability always being a draw to Zay while he was a recipe for consistent entropy.
“I better-you-you know, this is when he does something,”
In the span of moments, six became four, and Farkle felt comfortable enough to shuffle himself out of the cramped corner, his eyes fixated on the dusty ground and Riley’s bright sneakers.
Whether right or wrong, Farkle wished he had an easy escape like Zay.
He was a genius-and a proud one-but it was Riley. What could he possibly tell her that he hadn’t already tried expressing in countless ways?
For while she may be his greatest excitement in this life he called his own, he wasn’t hers. She didn’t want to hear that he thought her beautiful, fascinating, awe-inspiring. She wanted Lucas… and she was willing to do whatever she needed to get there.
All costs thrown to the wind in her typical Riley style.
So Maya filled the empty space, as she almost always did, filling the empty canvas the space had become.
“You guys are the geniuses! You got this all figured out?”
She was visibly distressed, her eyes sunken and her posture deflated, as she turned to both Smackle and Farkle, expecting them to have the answer she was so desperate for.
Farkle looked up at Maya with a shock that he wasn’t expecting. He had calculated there was a 81.3% chance that Maya would fill the empty space. He hadn’t, however, considered the probability that she would address him.
So he floundered within himself for a few moments. Yet he came to a similar conclusion that he had come to only a few moments ago: what could he possibly say?
If he were to embrace the scientist he had always aspired to be, he would be truthful. Riley had been optimistic… and forced all of them to follow her optimism with the same rigor.
She had always been a leader, even Maya willing to follow the silly escapades Riley had taken them on when they were kids, but they weren’t kids anymore. Wasn’t it honorable that the captain go down with the ship?
Being a leader meant holding the responsibility for the wellbeing of the group, didn’t it?
Or was that just what Farkle told himself so he could shrug off any responsibility he ought to take? Hadn’t that been what politics had taught him? It’s easy to blame the leader for the sinking ship while sitting there and watching the water pour in. Didn’t they all have a responsibility to keep the boat afloat? Still...it felt like Riley had steered them right into a reef, the very soles of their shoes scraped clean off.
Yet sometimes being truthful is more cruel than anything else. Sometimes there has to be a measure of grace.
So Farkle opened his mouth slightly, thinking of a way to express his willingness to forgive Riley. His willingness to understand that Riley was just doing the very best she could-her and Maya the only ones even trying to keep the increasingly fragile ship afloat.
Yet Smackle spoke first. And sought truth above grace.
“Your dad’s right. You do always look for the good in people, Riley.”
Farkle spurred his mind to catch up-Riley and Maya his responsibility to cheer up. His one thing that Smackle didn’t have too.
So he spurred into action, thinking of the bright smiles and overwhelming giggles that would consume Riley in their younger years, many a class ruined by her exasperated father remaining unable to keep her on task.
“You were a great leader in middle school, Riley! You always made us believe the world loved us,”
Farkle widened his eyes and curved his mouth upwards, reaching a tender hand out to the fragile pride Riley was still clinging to. He wanted, so desperately, to be there for her. He just wasn’t sure how to do that in-as Mr Matthews claimed-this so called ‘bigger world’.
He wanted to encourage her, but his light fell when he seemed to just lay the foundation for Smackle to lay down the cruel truth they had all been desperately clambering to protect their Riley Matthews from.
“This just isn’t the same world,”
The final kick to Riley when she was already down.
And yet, Farkle couldn’t help but wonder if all the years they had spent so fervently blocking Riley from the world and the world from Riley just ended up hurting her more than helping her.
Maybe she should know and understand that some things just can’t last. That growing up meant letting go of old strings, old hopes.
That Pluto couldn’t be a planet forever.
Farkle had wondered whether grace should emanate over Riley more than truth… but maybe a lesson needed to be learned.
Mr Matthews had explained that they weren’t children anymore. How was it that Lucas, Zay, Smackle, and even himself could somehow manage to find a niche in their freshmen world but Riley and Maya couldn’t?
Darwin had believed it was the survival of the fittest. Perhaps high school followed a similar trajectory. You either make a path for yourself… or you get left behind.
Farkle knew he had the potential to be a great mind of their school and beyond. On top of the potential he had the drive to achieve it. His father wasn’t the top businessman in America because he waited for some unknown aspect of the universe to launch him to greatness. His father had written his own success, just as many other historical figures before him had done.
Each second was an opportunity for each of them to write their own autobiography, yet why is it that only some soar to become greats?
Why is it that the Harriet Tubman’s and the Marx’s and the Freud’s stories got told, their legacy shining bright even while their bodies are decomposed into the same molecules from whence they came and others are forgotten, their tombstones vandalized and their graves unmarked?
Each man has a responsibility to burn their own candle. Farkle didn’t want to hide his under a bushel in a hole at Abigail Adams high school.
Perhaps he had hidden Riley from the world for too long. Smackle was right. They weren’t in the same world.
“What if this one just doesn’t love us as much? No matter how optimistic you are, Riley, I think this time you just led us down a hole.”
Farkle dropped the statement with as much confidence as he could, fully aware Maya’s eyes were bearing holes into his lanky teenage body, but Riley’s eyes were too much to handle.
Their sunken orbs, the world an onslaught of disappointment. The realization that she was the last on a sinking ship, all other crew members abandoning her to find her own fate.
Riley Matthews was a little less bright than before.
So Farkle fought his instinct to embrace her, fought his instinct to tuck her hair behind her ear, fought his instinct to protect her as much as his lanky body could, and walked away. He looked up the staircase with the hope that a brighter horizon might lie over its peak, but he was wrong.
Unlike the slaves of the Underground Railroad, the ascent of the hill didn’t bring a lightness to his feet with every step, nor did he feel like each hill brought him closer to freedom.
In fact, he felt he was walking South while begging for North.
Perhaps it was because he had always called Riley his compass, his true North. Perhaps his idea of freedom was skewed.
He had often declared himself an ‘up and coming protege’ in the science world. Yet his perception and pursuit of any truth was fast receding-at a terribly alarming rate.
Yet here he walked with Smackle hanging off his side and chattering about gaining the courage to join the chess club tomorrow, and her presence just made Farkle feel false.
Any scientist would be ashamed of him. His experiment was faulty because he had altered his numbers, altered his fate, and skewed his answer that he would feel best comfortable with it.
He had thrown his cards in, taken the comfort that Smackle’s mind had offered him, and rewritten his fate because that was easy. He wondered how different the world would be had Marie Curie not pushed through the devastation that plagued her when her husband passed. If Charles Darwin, Nikola Tesla, Galileo Galilei, Rosalind Franklin hadn’t embraced the hidden pillar of science: enduring the frustrations that befall any great discovery.
His greatest pleasure in life had been studying the behaviours of Riley Matthews...and he had tossed in his cards before he had made his greatest discovery.
His throat grew tight when he realized that he would never understand Social Science because it wasn’t Freud who needed to share the secrets of the human heart and mind with him.
It was Riley… and he had left her treading water in a vast ocean, the world now drowning out any secrets her heart was constantly attempting to sing to his.
He had left her drowning in a lie that she was too much for him when she had never been anything but enough.
His constant as he searched for his experimental variable.
His equilibrium in an unequal world.