Fourteen

Haley

Scott was gone, and the only thing that made Haley get out of bed on Monday morning was the start of summer classes. After a weekend spent holed up in her room watching Romeo + Juliet on repeat, Haley was glad something was forcing her to react. With two grad computer science courses and an advanced statistics class on her plate, she hoped she’d be too busy to mope over Scott.

He’d called every day since he’d gotten to California, but talking over the phone was a poor replica of a real-life conversation, and every single time he’d been in a hurry. Too many things to set up, too many places he needed to be. And he hadn’t even started working yet. If things kept going this way, she’d be lucky if they managed to talk for more than ten minutes at a time.

Unfortunately, the first week of school proved all her fears right. The classes were demanding, but not nearly challenging enough to absorb Haley completely. She still had plenty of time to feel lonely. After almost seven months dating Scott, she was used to being held, kissed, and cuddled. The lack of physical contact was taking its toll, and the difficulties in talking to each other were rattling her emotionally. Conversations with Scott were officially counted in minutes—single digits—and not hours.

Saturday morning, still in this state of mind, Haley was positively scared of spending another full weekend in her room. She worried she’d end up with another forty-eight-hour marathon of tragic love movies and endless tears… so she decided to go to the library to do her homework. Usually, she didn’t care to use a shared space to study. Library goers had a tendency of rolling their eyes at her constant keyboard click-clacking that made Haley uncomfortable. But staying home wasn’t an option today. In a public location, Haley would have to get her act together, concentrate on her assignments, and she definitely wouldn’t be able to watch any movie or cry.

Of all the facilities available on campus, Haley settled on the Widener Library. If she really had to go study somewhere, she might as well pick Harvard’s flagship library. The building was an impressive brick rectangle, its front lined with huge white pillars that stood at the head of a flight of steps. Inside, the larger study room, Widener Loker Reading Room, had an old-style feel and was even more impressive with its high-vaulted light-green ceiling that let in plenty of natural light.

The place must’ve been a lot emptier than during a regular term, but still, all the long rectangular tables had two to three students already seated at them. Haley shuffled to the back of the room, toward a table with only two busy seats at the opposite ends. On the left, facing Haley, was an Asian girl in a red cotton sweater with long dark locks, her neck bent over a set of open tomes. On the right, there was an empty chair with a messenger bag strapped across its back and a laptop opened on an Excel sheet.

Haley’s first instinct would’ve been to grab a seat in the middle, but the Excel sheet had caught her attention. Whoever was working on that model was doing a really poor job. To be fair, Haley could understand the base logic they’d applied. But they were going at it all wrong… a few lines of well-thought code inside an Excel macro could solve the problem in a matter of minutes. Otherwise, it’d take them hours…

Careful not to make it scrape, Haley drew back the second to nearest chair to the abandoned laptop and sat down, setting up her MacBook on the table. Where to start? The STAT S-106 homework assignment seemed to be calling to her. And while she worked at it, the fella next door could get a better idea of how data should be handled. Secretly, Haley hoped that whoever was going to sit next to her would realize how good of a job she was doing and plead for her help. She couldn’t help it. When it came to numbers, she was such a show-off.

Shuffling the syllabus out of the way, Haley found the paper with the first homework assignment. Question one looked easy, a straight statistical analysis of a given pool of data, complete with Mean Absorbance Ratio, and prevalence calculations. Question number two, instead, was the open-ended kind Haley hated:

The Boston Mayor is determined to assess the population satisfaction with the performance of the Police Department (PD) and the District Attorney (DA) office in all the city’s counties.

You are in charge of the team contracted to do the study and must report to the Mayor.

- Who should you poll? Do you attempt a census or opt for a well-designed controlled poll/survey?

- What sample size(s) would you use? What criteria do you need to satisfy to argue about the validity of your final conclusions?

The assignment continued with more stupid open questions. Ugh, what a waste of brainpower… going over the methodologies to acquire the data was so boring. Essential for any analysis to ever make sense, but still boring. Haley wanted to play with the numbers, not the methodologies they were collected with.

Let’s get the dull questions out of the way first.

Haley was working on the first point—Who should she poll?—when the mysterious next-door neighbor showed up. Haley recognized him a second before their eyes met, from the light scent of citrus and sun-kissed skin that filled her nostrils.

Open-mouthed and wide-eyed, she lifted her eyes and met David Williams’ gaze, the same shocked expression mirrored on his face. With his dark hair tucked behind his ears and wearing a simple white T-shirt, faded jeans, and sneakers David looked… well, there was only one way of putting it: hot.

Haley cursed under her breath. All of a sudden, a day spent in her room crying seemed like the better alternative.

“Hi,” he whispered.

No mocking grin, no challenging attitude. He sat in his chair and, with a few clicks of the mouse, he revived the laptop screen that had gone dark in the meantime.

Haley was still staring at him, ready to pack her things and go, when—eyes still glued to the screen—he added, “We’re in a public library, Haley.” Haley. Not Sunshine or another stupid nickname. “I’m here to work, no need to fidget.”

Haley shut her still open mouth and imitated him, turning her eyes to her Mac and trying to concentrate on her homework. She could do this, ignore David and complete her assignments. Haley reread the first question.

Who should she pool?

Well, who was interested in the service levels of the Boston PD and DA? All adult residents of the Boston area counted, for sure. But should she also include non-resident students? Did minors count? Did tourists count? Did David Williams count?

She jotted down the questions—all minus the last one—to justify the inclusion or exclusion of the different groups in her final answer.

What sample size should she set on?

That depended on the margin of error she was ready to accept, and on the desired responses confidence level—to account for the statistical probability of people lying when interviewed.

And what was the statistical probability of her picking the one chair next to David Williams on a campus with more than twenty-two thousand students and over seventy separate library units?

On a regular day, fooling around with percentages and deviations—even for stupid open-ended questions—would’ve intrigued Haley, but on this particular morning, she was having serious troubles concentrating. What with having to fight the urge to spy on David and what he was doing every five seconds. And what with his distracting aftershave that she could barely—but definitively—detect.

Maybe she should rethink her strategy—start with the heavy-handed numerical problems first, and research the philosophy of statistical analysis later. Yeah, okay. But why was David so blatantly ignoring her? And why was it bothering her if he did? Wasn’t it what she always asked of him, to leave her alone? Yeah, which he never did. So why start today?

Careful not to be too obvious, Haley threw a side-peek at David. Contrary to her, he appeared very concentrated on his analysis and was still sorting through his data—manually. Could it be that David Williams wasn’t the issue? Maybe the nagging at Haley’s sides came from the poor way such a beautiful set of raw data was being handled. That must be it. She should show him how models were built, and move on with her homework.

“You’re doing it all wrong,” Haley whispered.

David turned toward her. “Excuse me?” he asked in an equally low voice.

“Your model.” She pointed at his screen. “If you keep doing it like that, it’ll take you forever.”

“I bet that was the point.”

“Uh?”

“My boss dumped this”—David tilted his head toward the laptop—“and five other models to build on me last night saying he needed them ready for Monday morning, but granting me the special privilege of working from home. So I suspect he wanted to make sure I spent every second of the weekend slaving over this.”

“You have five more?”

“Yep.”

“If you keep going at that snail’s pace you’ll never finish.”

“Thanks for the cheer up.” His signature mocking grin finally made an appearance. “Now I’d like to keep working if you don’t mind.”

“I could show you how to make it a quick job,” Haley said. “You’d be done in no time.”

David arched both his eyebrows in surprise. “And why would you do that?”

“I can’t help myself when it comes to numbers,” Haley blabbed without thinking, opening her defenses up for an easy gibe. She’d served it to him on a silver platter.

Haley watched a twinkle appear in his blue eyes, the phantom of the easy retort she was sure they were both thinking: You mean you can’t help yourself when it comes to me.

She waited for him to rip away, but he didn’t. David only smiled, he turned his laptop toward her, and said, “Knock yourself out.”

Haley shifted her butt into the chair next to him and avidly set her hands on the almost-virgin dataset. “To do a good job, you need to clean the data first. Then you can start elaborating them…”

“And how do I do that?”

Haley started lecturing him on everything that he was doing wrong, and David stoically took a notebook out of his bag and began to take notes on all his unforgivable model-building mistakes. He watched Haley sort through his first model in less than an hour, asking her to explain what she was doing step by step. And she did, enjoying both the work and the chance to show off her mathematical skills.

Admiring her new model all shiny and pretty on David’s screen, Haley felt better than she had all week. With a big smile, she said, “And that’s how it’s done.”

David low-whistled, careful not to make the sound too audible. “Thank you,” he said, his gaze more intense than ever.

Despite herself, Haley blushed. “You’re welcome. Now I’d better get back to my own work.”

She considered returning to her chair, but the gesture would look ridiculous at this point. So she simply pulled her laptop closer and resumed working on her homework questions. And in a weird way, David’s nearness stopped bothering her. Haley was still hyperaware of his presence next to her, of his unmistakable scent, but most of the uneasiness she usually felt in his presence had gone. Perhaps because for the first time since Christmas, he’d behaved like a normal person and not a psychopath. The library was a good influence on him.

So Haley spent the rest of her Saturday working side by side with David, answering his questions whenever he hit a snafu in his model building, and even forgetting to eat lunch altogether. When an attendant came to tell them they were ten minutes past closing time already, she was utterly surprised. Even if it was already late afternoon, the sun, being late June, was still high in the sky and the room as luminous as in the morning. So nothing had alerted Haley of the passing of time.

Outside, they stopped on the steps for an awkward goodbye. As long as they’d been cocooned in the protected environment of the library, it had seemed all fine and uncomplicated to sit next to David for an entire day working together. But now that they’d moved outside, Haley was second-guessing the choice she’d made to stay.

“Hey, I’m starving,” David said, breaking the silence. “Want to grab a bite?”

Now, going out to dinner with David was a definite no-no.

“No, thanks.” Haley pulled at the strings of her backpack. “I have to go and call Scott,” she said, blurting out the first excuse that came to mind. Probably not even an excuse. She hadn’t checked her phone all day, library’s policies and all, and she really had to call Scott. Also, it was good to remind them both that even if he was thousands of miles away, Scott remained the huge pink elephant standing right next to them.

A dark shadow clouded David’s features. “Sure,” he said, descending a step. “Well, I’d better get going. Bye.”

“Bye.”

Faster than she could say “Williams brothers,” he was hopping down the remaining steps and sprinting away.

Haley sat on the edge of the porch with a sigh. Unhooking her backpack from one shoulder and rolling it from back to front, she fished her phone out of the small pocket at the base. She unlocked the black screen and saw five missed calls—all from Scott.

Crap.

After plugging in her headphones, she tapped his name.

He picked up on the second ring. “Babe, where have you been? I’ve tried to call you so many times.” He sounded hurried.

“Yeah, sorry. I’ve been at the library all day, doing homework. I even forgot to eat lunch, and I had my phone on silent.”

Why was she leaving out the part where David had been there too?

You know why.

I’ve done nothing wrong, Haley argued with herself.

Such a pretty little liar…

“Haley, I’m sorry…” Scott said. “I had time to talk before, but I can’t now.”

“Oh.” So the one time she could’ve had a real, longer-than-a-few-minutes conversation with her boyfriend, she’d spent the day—doing what, anyway?—with his brother and hadn’t checked her phone once. Haley wanted to kick herself. “Going somewhere?”

“Yep. Dr. Allen’s assistant just called, he’s removing a brain tumor today, and I’m invited to watch the procedure.”

“Will it last long?”

“Hours, eight to ten.” So she wasn’t going to hear from him again today. “And the patient will be alert the entire time, isn’t it exciting?”

How Scott could get so enthusiastic about spending ten hours watching one person crack another person’s skull open and fiddle with their brains—while the poor dude was awake—was out of Haley’s comprehension, but she tried to sound supportive all the same. “Wow, brain surgery… sounds thrilling.”

“Um, listen, I really gotta bounce. Call you tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Love you.”

“Me too.”

The words had barely left Haley’s lips when the line clicked off. She was tempted to hurl her phone down the steps; it seemed so satisfactory when people did it in the movies. But in real life, it’d only leave her with no phone, or with a seriously damaged one, and she doubted broken technology would lift her mood. A stomach cramp reminded Haley of the skipped lunch. Better get home and order a pizza.

Haley stood up, resenting the warm June sun caressing her face. Never had she hated a summer so much.