The Geometry of Sisters by Luanne Rice

Author:Luanne Rice [RICE LUANNE]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-553-90622-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

12FOG BROUGHT COZINESS TO NEWPORT ACADEMY. Heat rumbled through the ancient pipes, making them rattle and hiss. The windows were shut tight against the cold, damp air, and everyone wore thick wool sweaters. Beck stayed close to Lucy, and one late afternoon they went to Pell's room to work on their math formulas by the fireplace.

Seeing Pell at her desk, Lucy sprawled nearby on the floor by the fire, made Beck's throat ache. She watched Lucy absently kicking the rungs beneath Pell's chair, saw Pell reach down and gently stop the kicks with a hand around Lucy's ankle.

“Okay” Lucy was saying to Beck, pushing her paper closer. Beck glanced down, saw a series of six thick, fat columns about a half-inch wide. “Limits and infinity, right? That's what we're dealing with. These big, ugly, clunky columns are limits.”

“And these,” Beck said as beside them she drew six elegant, thin lines, “are infinity.”

Everything clicked together in her mind. Mr. Campbell had shown them new formulas that seemed almost magical to Beck. He'd spoken of infinite divisibility, a theory that went beyond classical geometry. He had them read George Berkeley's The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician, told them that Berkeley had lived and worked in Middletown, right near Third Beach.

She'd read the book with the cats on her bed. The text was wild, strange, about math but somehow not. It seemed to be all about small, smaller, invisible. Beck worked as she read, examining how a tangent drawn to a parabola was performed by “evanescent increments.” How could you not love that?

She read: “When x by flowing becomes x + 0, then xx + 2 x0 + 00: and the area ABC becomes ADH, and the increment of xx will be equal to BDHC, the increment of the area to BCFD + CFH.”

The concepts and equations boggled her thoughts, but the odd and amazing part was, her pencil understood it right away—she wrote the notations, and her mind saw the puzzle and began moving the parts around. As long as she didn't worry, didn't tell herself it was too complicated, her hand moved swiftly over the page, working out the formula. It was like hearing a new language for the first time and being able to speak it fluently—as if she'd known it in another life. The language was geometry, and it brought her closer to Lucy and, somehow, to Carrie.

“So,” Lucy was saying. “We're trying to move from the mass of those columns to the skinniness of the lines. With our proofs we just shrink and shrink and shrink them down to almost nothing, and then we'll…”

Pell was listening too, holding Lucy's ankle. The sight of it was a sharp thorn poking Beck's eyes, making them water. Tears bubbled up, the bottomless longing to have her older sister here to do something so simple as grab her ankle. She saw where Lucy was going with the proof, but suddenly she didn't care.

“They're just numbers on a page,” Beck choked the words out.

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