#distant stations

Saturday begins, as your days so often have recently, with a mad dash from one side of campus to another.

Taking a job at the diner was a good idea, you remind yourself. The tips are good, the hours are flexible, and it's the closest job to campus you could find. After a few weeks, you were starting to get comfortable with the menu, the pace, the wave of drunk frat boys that always seems to roll in around ten. It's chaos, but it's chaos you could handle.

You'd gotten enough practice over the last few weeks that your manager and the other girls are actually starting to trust you. You're pretty sure it's the first time you've felt good at anything since school started. That is, until you'd been assigned your very first Saturday morning shift.

You're only on because Paula asked to trade with you. Her daughter had a basketball game. Who were you to say know when you weren't even busy until the afternoon? Some kind of monster? No. You're a good friend, you thought to yourself when she called, and a good server.

Turns out, what you really are is a mark.

Breakfast itself had been exactly how you'd expected. You'd been so busy darting from table to kitchen to table that you didn't even feel how badly your feet hurt until after ten. It was lunch that had caught you off guard.

What kind of rule is it that your manager is allowed to keep you an hour late to cover the lunch rush, heedless of how you were supposed to be off by noon? If you hadn't already decided against dropping out, this morning would've sealed it. You promise yourself: one day, however far it may be from now, you'll steer your own ship.

You had planned to make it back to your dorm with enough time to change and shower, but Lady Luck has turned her back on you.

If you hadn't known campus so well, you might have given up entirely. Thankfully, you know a few alleys to cut through that save you a solid five minutes.

It's a considerable effort, but you manage to throw the doors open to the dorm building at 1:08. You count this as a victory even if you're still dressed in your work uniform, a decidedly old-fashioned number that's all '50s pastiche over practicality. You'd fit right in with Shelly Johnson on an episode of Twin Peaks.

You finally break your run once you spy Lip through the glass door to the floor's common area. At first, he had offered up his dorm as a meeting place. His roommate is out with his girlfriend, he'd argued. It only made sense!

No way he had any actual tutoring planned for you alone in his room. You lobbied hard for a semi-public setting.

Once you spot him, he's already situated at a table in the corner of the room, feet kicked up up on the chair next to his own with his head buried deep in a copy of Critique of Pure Reason. Kant, you note. They must be doing German idealism in his philosophy class. He seems... focused for once, a subtle wrinkle to his brow. It reassures you somehow. Maybe there are things Lip has to try to be good at.

You knock on the glass to alert him before you enter, and instantly, his head snaps toward the noise. You wave briefly through the glass before you move to enter, but it's not your hand that's caught his attention.

His eyes widen at the sight of you. The uniform, it occurs to you, is a little different than what you'd throw on for class, and a grin blooms across his face as he admires you.

"Forget your roller skates?" he calls out, once you finally step through the door.

You can't stand a great many things about Lip Gallagher, but you hate this one most of all: he's funny.

Your nose wrinkles, and you drop your backpack at the table with just a hair more force than strictly necessary. But your obvious vexation only seems to egg him on, as it always does.

"Almost thought you were standin' me up."

Standing him up. You scoff.

"Manager wouldn't let me out," you explain, still breathless from the run. "Lunch rush."

He tsks. "You were breakin' my heart, sunshine."

But he doesn't look terribly bothered by your near tardiness. In fact, you believe the scowl you're wearing--the one he seems to inspire so effortlessly in you--lifts his spirits.

"Don't you have a work-study?" You brace your hands on the back of the chair. You're too winded to stay where you are, but you're not yet willing to sit down eye-to-eye with Lip. "You should understand."

He's unimpressed. "They let me wear pants at the dining hall."

It shouldn't be such a relief that he works--Lip probably has to put in just as many hours outside of class as you do, and he's still kicking your ass in physics--but it is. You're pretty sure there are more students on this campus who are went backpacking in Europe last summer than have jobs.

"Maybe," you concede, releasing the chair. You bend at the waist to dig your notebook and jacket out of your backpack. "But I bet my tips are better than yours."

Lip is quiet for a beat longer than you expect him to be. You're used to him being light on his feet when you talk. It's not like him to just let you have the last word. When you straighten up, pulling an arm through your jacket, you find his eyes scanning up and down your legs. He nods slowly. "Bet they are."

Maybe you're the weird one. You consider that maybe any other co-ed within a ten-mile radius would've understood the innuendo when he agreed to tutor you. The real intention behind his agreement. Maybe he never would have taken you up on it if he thought tutoring would just be tutoring. Maybe you shouldn't be so upset.

You breathe out. It's possible. But you don't care.

"Look." You hold your hands out in front of you. "You have to cool it."

Lip is still smirking; it spurs you on. You lean over the table toward him.

"I don't know if this is how things normally work for you, if 'can you tutor me?' is how they say 'fuck me, please,' back home--"

"Hey--"

"But I really, really need to learn this. Like, today, or I'm never going to get it together in time for this exam. So, if you think I'm doing all of this as an elaborate set-up for a quick fuck, and you don't actually have to teach me anything--"

"Hey, no--"

"Then, I really, really don't have time for it."

You reach for your backpack, but you're stopped when Lip grabs your wrist. He's not smirking anymore. There is a hint of what you would call alarm shading his features. "No, just--just hang on a second."

You stop. The hand not currently in his is braced on your hip.

"Look, I can teach you. Promise. Just... sit down, alright?"

You stare him down skeptically, scanning his face for any sign of dishonesty in those clear eyes. He holds your gaze, daring you to walk out.

"Nice socks, by the way," he offers, eyes flitting down toward your shoes.

You glance down, realizing for the first time that the socks that peak out over your non-slip shoes do not, in fact, agree with one another. The left is sky blue with a row of daisies knitted at the cuff, while the right is white and patterned with ladybugs. Huh.

You got dressed in the dark this morning to avoid waking your roommate before dawn on a Saturday. There's a lesson in here somewhere that the world continues to pound into your head, but fuck it; you're not going to take it. You shake your head, smiling despite yourself.

"Thanks," you answer sagely, finally dropping down into the chair across from him. "They're supposed to be like that."

Lip ends up moving his chair to the same side of the table as you, watching over your shoulder as you re-work the problems from last week's quiz. He corrects you as you go, pointing out errors in your math and nudging you along whenever you find yourself getting lost.

All things considered, it's a fairly painless process. Maybe your pride still smarts, but you know Lip to have the capacity to be far more annoying if he really wanted to be. This is him being gentle.

That is, until you reach your first cross-products problem.

"Woah," he says, leaning back as though the strokes of your pen had blinded him. "Is that a fuckin' matrix?"

He seems less horrified by your method and more awed, like he's just encountered some kind of endangered species he may never lay eyes on again.

You huff. "It's a perfectly valid way of computing a cross-product."

He's honestly trying not to smile and failing, which makes it even more insulting somehow. "And settin' your house on fire is a perfectly valid way of solvin' an ant problem. Why are you computin' anything when all you need is the direction of the magnetic force?"

Therein lies the reason you hate cross-products.

As has been endlessly drilled into your head in the last few weeks, you have to think about magnetism differently than a force like gravity. There are no potentials, no theoretical force that increases the higher you lift an object or stretch a spring. Before any magnetic force can exist, something has to move.

Once it does, the force acts neither in the direction of the magnetic field nor the direction of the particle but instead in a surprise third direction: the cross-product, which is perpendicular to both of the previous vectors.

Why, exactly, does it do this? You're not sure. You've tried asking, but you've been waved off by professor and TA alike. Apparently, that's a question for a more advanced course, one you needn't concern yourself with. Convince yourself this is true, Dr. Smith had told you.

The lack of any real reason for why anything happens the way it does nags at you like a rock in your shoe that remains stubbornly in place no matter how many times you try to shake it out.

"There's an easier way of doin' it, that's all," Lip reasons, biting at the inside of his cheek to smother his smile.

A scowl rolls over your face again. This time, it isn't even fair to him--he doesn't write the course material.

Still, he does his best to win you over. "It's not that bad!"

Your expression remains decidedly stormy, even as you try to school it into something more neutral for his sake. He chokes on a laugh at your attempt.

"It's not! All the vectors just gotta be--"

"Perpendicular to each other!" you finish for him in exasperation. You've heard the words so many times now that they've become nothing more than sounds to you.

"See?" Lip says with a teasing grin. "You know this stuff."

You groan, rubbing your eyes. "I can parrot. That isn't the same as knowing."

"Look, you're overthinkin' it. There's a trick," Lip explains, interrupting your thoughts. You stiffen in surprise as he takes your right hand, plucking the pen from your grasp and dropping it to the table. He pinches your thumb, pointing it upward.

"This," he says, wiggling your thumb for emphasis, "is the direction the particle is goin' in. This," he shifts his grip to to point your index finger toward him like a pistol, "is the direction of the magnetic field. So that means this," he bends your middle finger toward your left, "is the direction of the magnetic force."

His hands move deftly as he walks you through his little trick. They're rougher than you expected--the pads of his fingers are callused where they pinch yours--from a fellow student at your university full of nerds and rich kids. There's a scar at the base of his middle finger that brushes against one of your knuckles. He's warm.

"If you're doin' it right, all three of them should end up perpendicular to each other in different planes."

Looking down at your hand, it's clear that he's right. Your fingers all point at ninety degree angles to each other, forming tidy corners. It works. All you have to do is adjust your hand based on the problem.

When look back up at Lip for reassurance that you're doing it right, you find a gleam in his eyes that you haven't seen there before. Like the two of you are in on a secret together.

You can't help but smile back.

Something still digs at you, though. Lip's trick works like a charm, sure, but you still don't know why. Your disquiet must show on your face because Lip quirks a brow at you questioningly. You could ask him, you realize, and finally settle the lingering confusion hanging around you.

But he's already been shockingly generous: he stayed when you were late, even after you specified--none too politely--not to expect any favors in return; he's fixed your mistakes and shared his tips. You're only halfway through the quiz, and he must have somewhere to be tonight. You can't make him late.

"Make sense?"

"Yeah," you confirm, nodding. "I got it."

The rest of your review goes off relatively without a hitch. At least by your standards.

To your delight, you manage to keep your word: you finish up well within your self-imposed--and rather nebulous--window of early afternoon. Whatever plans Lip must have for his Saturday night won't be disrupted on your behalf.

He surprises you, though, when you slip your notebook back into your bag. He glances over your shoulder through the window to the dining hall across the quad. "...You hungry?"

"Uh--" you stutter, blinking back at him. You are. You had to skip lunch after your shift was extended. But why is Lip asking? You already shut him down, and he's done tutoring for the day. What's his angle?

You still haven't answered him, you realize suddenly. "Ah--yeah, I could eat. You?"

He isn't so bad, not really, and you need to eat before you do anything else regardless. That's all it is.

"Yeah, yeah, sure," he says, relief palpable in his voice. He stuffs his hands into his pockets. "I was thinkin' of headin' that way."

"Mind if I join you then?"

He shrugs, suddenly coy and teasing. "You got meal swipes?"

You roll your eyes, quickly spotting where exactly this is going. "I never end up using all of mine for the week."

This is how you find yourself in line at the register with Lip's lunch stacked on your tray alongside your own while he holds down a table. The sweet old lady working the counter raises a brow, and you answer with your best upstanding-citizen smile. Luckily, she must not be paid nearly enough to decipher the antics of hungry students and waves you through without any further thought.

You shake your head as you approach Lip, tray in hand, while he grins back at you, the very picture of the cat who got the cream.

"We committed fraud," you say, struggling mightily to keep a straight face. You settle down across from him, placing the tray between the two of you. "We're fraudsters."

"Oh, please," he groans, leaning back in his seat. "We're broke-ass students, not Bear Stearns."

"If the feds come knocking, I'm telling them it was your idea."

"After everything we've been through?" He whistles lowly, clutching at his chest. "Cold."

"Everything we've--" you laugh incredulously. "Is that what you call an afternoon of tutoring and a month's worth of making passes at me?"

He kisses his teeth in mock disappointment, picking his slice of lukewarm cafeteria pizza up from the tray. "You're safe, sunshine. I'll be damned if they even send the campus rent-a-cops over six dollars."

"Yeah, yeah." You mirror him, placing your own tray in front of you. "I wouldn't really rat."

"No?" he asks, mouth full.

"No. Who would tutor me if they locked you up and threw away the key?"

"Real sweet of you, Sunny."

The silence that falls between the two of you as you eat is comfortable, easy. Something occurs to you: since Lip doesn't seem to be in any hurry to get rid of you...

"I had a question..."

"Yeah?"

"Okay, so," you begin, leaning in with your brows pinched together in thought. "So, I understand that the magnetic force is a cross-product of the electric field and the magnetic field--"

"Uh huh?" Lip prompts, the corners of his mouth turning up like he had been hoping you would ask.

"But why is it a cross-product?"

"Special relativity," he answers, smirking.

"Oh, okay. Obviously," you intone sarcastically, but you're not annoyed like you might have been this morning. He'll let you in on the joke if you wait. "Why didn't I think of that?"

He leans forward, hands held out in front of him as he explains, "So, length and time aren't absolute, right? They're relative to the movement of the observer. An object that's moving relative to you takes up just a liiiittle less space than one that isn't."

He glances over at you to make sure you're following, and you nod. You're walking with him, at least for the moment. He smiles back.

"Alright, so, imagine you've got a wire." He snatches a napkin from the dispenser at the end of the table and produces a familiar green pen from his his pocket, earning an indignant guffaw from you. He doesn't seem to notice. He draws out the wire for you, a cylinder with protons on top and an equal number of electrons at the bottom. "It's electrically neutral 'cause the positive and negative charges just cancel each other out."

You lean over the table to get a better look.

"We'll say it's got a current runnin' through it," he says, drawing an arrow to the right through the electrons, "so the electrons are flowing in this direction, but it's still neutral. Same charges as before. Now, let's say you got a positive charge outside the wire." He adds a plus sign outside of the cylinder. "There's no force on the charge--"

"Oh..." you murmur, eyes widening as the picture begins to slot into place.

Lip's smile grows as the realization begins to dawn on you. "'Cause it's not moving. But if it does move," he draws an arrow, showing the positive charge moving in the opposite direction as the electric current, "then, relative to the charge, the electrons in the wire are movin' faster than the protons. And if they're movin', that means..."

He looks back up, waiting for you to finish the thought. "That means... the electrons take up slightly less space than the protons?"

He grins pointing your pen at you in confirmation. "And if they take up less space, they're closer together, and relative to the charge, there're more of 'em within the frame of reference--"

"Oh!" you exclaim. It makes sense! If there are more electrons than protons, the greater relative negative charge of electrons within the wire will attract the positive charge outside of it. Lip nods, drawing a final arrow in agreement. The more the positive charge accelerates, the more attracted it is.

That's a magnetic force.

"Shit," you say with a huff of laughter, sitting back in your seat. "Why didn't they just say that?"

Lip chuckles along with you at your astonishment, covering his mouth with his hand. "'s, like, a whole 'nother class. Think they'd miss out on an opportunity to charge you for that shit?"

"I guess not!"

He laughs again, shaking his head. "Not everyone wants to know, Sunny. Easier to just nod along."

You scoff at the new nickname as Lip tucks your pen behind his ear. You don't think you'll be getting it back any time soon. "How are you supposed to remember something you can't justify?"

"Most of our classmates seem to manage."

"Sure, they manage," you counter, "but that's not the same as learning. It'll all be gone in a week."

He hums at that, less interested in arguing than stealing off of your plate. "That's what fifty grand a semester will get you: student loans with six-and-a-half percent interest and an education you could've got off Youtube."

That might be a shade too cynical even for you. "Maybe I could've," you acknowledge, "but I probably wouldn't have. What's your major anyway?"

"What, you can't guess?" The smugness rolls off of him in waves.

Isn't it so obviously physics? Since he's sooo amazing at it?

"No," you deny, even if he has a point. "It could be engineering, too."

The comment earns you a puff of laughter before he takes another drag. He admits, "Still deciding between them."

"Oh! You're undeclared?" You tilt your head, scandalized. Lip Gallagher knows everything--except what he's actually doing here at Polytech.

"There's time," he says, just a hint of defensiveness seeping into his tone. You ferret that piece of information away in case you need it later. It's not often you get to feel like you have the upper hand with him. "Gotta knock out the same weed-out classes either way."

"Sure," you concede. That's why the two of you are in the same physics section to begin with. "But what's holding you up?"

He ashes his cigarette, looking down at his hands. After a moment, he shrugs. "Money's better in engineering."

A snort escapes you at his bluntness. Sometimes, his honesty moves you. "You mean you're not here to follow your dreams?"

"Nah, I am," he says innocently, leaning in like he's about to share a secret with you. "My dreams just include six figures and not having to grade seventy freshmen's half-assed term papers for some one-hundred level class."

It doesn't shock you. Lip doesn't seem to have much patience for delayed gratification. You shake your head, smiling. "Still beats the hell out of getting someone's coffee for a year at some start-up."

"Nah," he denies, tossing a handful of your fries into his mouth. "It wouldn't take me that long to move up."

"You wish." He's talented, obviously, but there's no talent-ing your way out of an industry-wide hazing ritual. "And you'd be so bored once you did. Imagine you get all that education just to watch spreadsheets all day."

"Yeah, well--I'm bored now. Much easier to be bored and well-compensated."

He's still funny--it's getting just a little easier to admit that the more time you spend with him--but something about that makes you a little sad. He's bright. Passionate. And already, he's consigning himself to some soulless private sector monstrosity.

"You'd be good at it," you muse, scanning him over like it's the first time. "Teaching. That's all I'm saying. You seem to like it."

It's important, you think, to like what you do. Especially if you're going to put in as many years as the two of you are just to do it.

Lip smiles slyly. "Only when my students have the whole carhop chic thing you have goin'."

You bury your face in your palms, a laugh bubbling out of you. You've managed to find yourself sleep-deprived and cracking up in a dining hall, still wearing your uniform and smelling like diner, across from a boy who you couldn't stand a week ago. How quickly things change.

Something about the brightness of the sound has him chuckling along with you. He gestures vaguely at you. "Just sayin'. They're nice legs. It helps."

You throw a fry across the table at him and bury your face in your elbow, trying and failing to hide how your giggles only get louder.