Elizabeth Lennox

Her Unexpected Admirer - Introduction

Fashion beautiful photo of man and woman in love

Davis’ Story….

The explosion caught Davis by surprise. One moment, he was adding a tiny bit of potassium iodide to the test tube half filled with hydrogen peroxide and the next moment, a black fog burst out of the test tube, forming a very impressive mushroom cloud that eventually dispersed all over the black counter top and tile floor.

“Hmmm….” The science teacher said, his hands behind his back as he walked closer to survey the damage. “Looks like you left a bit of soap in the test tube after cleaning it.”

Davis looked at the now smoke-filled test tube, awed by the chemical reaction. Still a bit stunned, but fascinated. With a slow grin, he turned to the teacher. “Can I do it again?”

The science teacher actually laughed right along with the other students who were crowding around the mess. “I don’t think so. Clean it up and be more careful.”

While Davis cleaned, his mind went through the chemicals he’d used, trying to figure out why they had exploded on contact and how he might be able to repeat the process once he got home. Of course, he’d have to be careful not to do it around his mom. She sort of freaked out when he did experiments like this. But how was a kid to learn if he didn’t experiment?

He could get Marcus and Antonio to help, he decided, thinking that the three of them could go out to that flat rock on the far side of the north pasture. The rock would eliminate any damage to his mom’s kitchen. She had been really upset the last time he’d experimented on her granite counter tops. She’d been afraid of the glaze getting messed up. Or maybe it had something to do with all the black smoke on her ceiling. Boy, she’d been really pissed off about that one, he chuckled.

“Hi Davis,” Julia Smithers said as she walked by him after chemistry that day. “Cool explosion!”

Davis smiled, agreeing with her. “I like explosions,” Jennifer Collier’s said as she leaned against Davis’ locker.

Davis appreciated Jennifer’s blond hair and the tight sweater she was wearing. “I’m pretty good at explosions,” he teased.

Jennifer’s eyes lowered to his lips. “Prove it,” she whispered.

Davis enjoyed the flirty banter as much as the next guy, but he was dating Sylvia this month. “You’ll just have to trust me on this one.”

Jennifer rolled her eyes. “All talk,” she sighed and ambled off, but not before Davis saw her teenage “come hither” glance as she walked away. And Davis enjoyed the way her hips swayed as she strolled down the hallway. Damn, he liked women, he thought with relish. They were so soft and enticing. He liked everything about them, from their long hair to the way they wore those crazy, uncomfortable shoes that made their legs look extra hot. They were a curious species that he enjoyed trying to understand, but he suspected that they were a mystery he would never fully unravel.

Tearing his eyes away from Jennifer’s very sexy legs, he grabbed his history book and slammed his locker closed. Hurrying down the hallway, he made it to his history class only moments before the bell rang.

“Okay class, settle down!” the history teacher called out to the restless students. “Today we’re going to take a look at some pictures that help us understand what was going on during different periods in history.” The lights went out and a projector turned on. Davis groaned out loud as he stared at the art. It was a stupid picture of a man pushing a woman on a swing. The woman was wearing about a hundred yards of fabric, just in her skirt alone. The man was dressed in what looked like formal clothes, complete with a necktie that seemed to be strangling the guy.

“So this looks like a very romantic painting of a man pushing a woman on a swing. Anyone care to tell me what they see when they look deeper into the picture?”

Davis’ mind moved away from the stupid couple swinging and back to the science experiment, trying to remember how to recreate the very cool explosion.

“Exactly!” the history teacher exclaimed. “The man is looking up the woman’s dress!”

Huh? Davis focused on the picture again.

“So we have a very Victorian looking couple that initially appear to be posed innocently, but looking more closely, there is a suppressed sexuality about the painting.”

Davis squinted at the painting, trying to see the “suppressed sexuality”. But all he saw was a bunch of white ruffles on the woman and uncomfortable clothing on the guy.

“It is an erotic picture but what the artist is saying about society during the Victorian era?” she asked.

Davis mentally shook his head. It told him that people wore way too many clothes, he thought.

“Yes! There was a lot more going on under the surface. It doesn’t have to be sexual either. Politics, economics and all of the ‘ics’ that we study now, were happening back then as well. We just need to look under the surface, to move past our initial impressions so that we can understand what was, and is, really happening in society.”

Davis thought the teacher was crazy. In his mind, trying to understand anything in society based on a painting was ridiculously inefficient. If he wanted to know what was going on during a certain period in history, he would just pick up a book and figure it out. History books provided facts and figures – hard data that provided a much more accurate account of what was happening in half the time. He wasn’t going to stand in front of a painting, trying to guess what the artist was trying to tell him. What a monumental waste of time!

Kate’s Story…

“It’s really good,” the art teacher gushed, standing behind Kate to observe the portrait.

Kate lowered her brush and tried to look at her painting objectively. But it was hard to be objective when her heart was soaring with the teacher’s praise. She was too excited. In fact, she always got too absorbed when she painted. In her house, the need to express herself through art was almost a curse.

“Why did you add this red over here?” the teacher asked.

Kate looked at the red, then glanced away. “I think I was angry yesterday and the red just…worked in that mood.”

The teacher’s smile broadened. “That’s exactly what you should do, Kate.” Moving around so that she was looking at her student instead of the amazing art, she said, “Kate, you have a real talent. I’d like you to consider entering some of your paintings into the art competition next week.”

The soaring excitement she’d been feeling a moment ago popped like a bubble. “No. I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

The teacher persisted. “It’s always hard to let others see your work and have that horrible fear of being judged, but you’ve got what it takes to become a great artist.”

Kate laughed softly. There wasn’t anything in the world that made her feel better than painting, but showing her work? That wasn’t going to happen. “I’ll think about it,” she lied, just to get a reprieve from her teacher. Only ten more minutes in this period and then math. She absolutely hated math. It was the most tedious, horrible, boring period of her entire day, but her father insisted that she take the advanced math classes. So here she was, a junior in high school and dreading calculus. Her father had already signed her up for the advanced placement calculus test next Saturday and Kate was trying to psych herself up for it. She kept telling herself that, if she scored well enough on it now, she wouldn’t have to take it in college.

But it was calculus. There was no way she could get excited about math. It was pure torture to sit in the class while the teacher droned on about formulas and processes. Somehow, she’d maintained an A in the class but that didn’t mean she liked it. She studied hard to get that A while other students in the class seemed to just “get” the concepts.

The bell rang and Kate had to hurry to clean her brushes. Scrambling to clean up her work, hide her canvas and grab her books so she could get to her next class, she tried to shift her brain into “math” gear instead of “art” mode. It was hard going from something she loved to something she abhorred. She should have switched classes. Maybe math should have come first so she could be looking forward to art class afterwards.

But as she slid into her seat and pulled the math homework out to turn in, she realized that her schedule was better this way. If she had art after calculus, she’d be distracted – too eager to get to art class – and wouldn’t concentrate.

“Excellent job, Ms. Evans,” the teacher said as he handed out the calculus test from the previous day.

Kate stared down at the paper, sighing with frustration. She’d missed just one question, earning her an A-. Her father wasn’t going to be happy about that.

She almost groaned as she slid lower in her chair, wishing her father would forget this detail. But she knew he wouldn’t. If he had his way, she wouldn’t be taking art or science or even French. She’d be taking extra math classes because in his world, math was the only thing that made any sense.

Unfortunately, in Kate’s mind, art helped make sense of the world.

She sighed as she stuffed the paper into her folder and tried to focus on today’s lesson. Her father was even excited about her taking something called “discrete math” next semester. What in the world was discrete math? Was it math that whispered the problems? She smiled to herself as she pictured a bunch of numbers shouting to each other on one half of a canvas while the others whispered. She could name it “Discrete vs Indiscreet Math” and she could use a bunch of crazy colors for the “shouting” numbers and blues, soft pinks and barely there yellows for the discrete math. The indiscreet math numbers could start gossiping while she could paint surreptitious “serious” faces on the discrete math numbers.

The teacher noticed her smiling and called on her to do a problem from their homework on the board. Kate’s smile instantly vanished and her stomach fell to a place somewhere below her knees. She hated going to the board. She hated how she would write her problem out, praying that she’d done it correctly, praying that she wasn’t the last one standing at the board, which she usually was.

And she absolutely hated the feeling of chalk on her fingers.

Why why why did the world have to revolve around math? She didn’t have a logical brain! She knew how to express herself with brushes and colors. No matter how many times her teachers told her to write out a math expression, it was like they were talking in gibberish. What nonsense! Math was not expressing one’s self. Math was Satan’s way of torturing humans so they went stark raving mad. She smiled about the t-shirt she had seen that said “And then Satan said ‘Put the Alphabet in Math’”.

She hurriedly wrote her work out on the board, then slunk back to her chair, her mind still whirling with the crazy images of math numbers gossiping instead of caring about why things change. Really, does anyone really need to know WHY the slope of a line changes? It curves! She didn’t need to be able to mathematically express the area underneath the curve or what that meant about what the equation represented. As far as she was concerned, the equation didn’t actually have a meaning. And comparing equations? They were a whole bunch of different numbers (and letters, she thought with a sigh).

“Excellent work!” the teacher called out. Kate relaxed with relief, and went back to her discrete vs indiscreet number day dreams.

Learn more about Her Unexpected Admirer, book one of three in The Alfieri Saga

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