I got into AP physics senior year of high school because I had received near-perfect grades in advanced biology and chemistry in junior and senior year, as well as become an active member of the astronomy club on the side. Mostly that last bit, really.

The fact that the telescope had been broken for a long time and the Astronomy club was mostly just a secluded room with a disgusting couch (you know why) and an omnipresent weed smell mattered little. Same with the fact that we mostly just watched Star Trek and waited with increasing desperation for SETI newsletters. I had shown an interest in a public school where a good chunk of the students had been pulled from their science classes for “religious reasons.” I got into AP physics.

To be honest, I was pretty stoked. At the time, I fancied myself a future xeno-biologist. It was a job I was fully convinced would exist by the time I graduated from college, or maybe completed my PhD, both things that I believed at that time would happen. AP physics was also further proof that my by-now-historic status as a “gifted child” had not been a mistake. My future lay before me, beautifully paved with core roles in grand discoveries, along with some Ancient Aliens appearances on the side for the sake of funding (until I got my own show, of course).

It wasn’t until I actually attended the class that I realized how much math was involved in actual real-live physics.

This was devastating.

Math was certainly not a class in which I had received good grades previously. In fact, I easily had a reputation as an abysmal student in every math class I had ever taken, the last one especially. It was simply a language that did not stick in my brain the way English did, the way words could. I needed a story to make sense of anything, and while math certainly told a story, it was always in the language I couldn’t understand to begin with, so. Didn’t quite work out.

Like a fucking angel from the heavens, however, there she was. My table partner. Hahn.

I have no memory of Hahn’s last name. I’m actually unsure at this point, a decade and a half later, if her name was Hahn, and if it was, if that was how she spelled it. I’d known of her at the time merely as the sole Vietnamese girl who refused to choose an “English name” in our very red, very white fringe Philadelphia suburb. Her English was shaky, her politeness was on point, and her mind for numbers was a fucking miracle.

For a week, maybe, we struggled next to one another. More than once, she would lean forward and ask me how to say a thing in English, and we’d play a game where she used all the synonyms, antonyms, vagueries she could think of until I guessed it. I loved this game. It made me feel clever in this un-clever context, and the teacher never stopped me, so I figured it was fine.

One day, Hahn leaned forward again with her question. As she did, she was looking down at my test. I answered, proud to know, and she glanced up at me. “Write?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

I blinked. “Sure?” I said, and began to write on the margins of my test.

“No, no. Trade?”

“Eh… ok?”

I took her test, glancing up at the teacher, who smiled at me and then looked back down at his book. Hahn snatched up my test.

I filled out all her essay questions. She filled out all my math.

Thrilled and nervous and thrilled, I turned in my paper, she turned in hers, and the year of abso-fucking-lutely perfect grades for us both commenced.

As did something else.

“It is cheating, you know,” I said dutifully, guiltily, in the library a few weeks later. We were crouched in the back row over her cellphone, playing whatever stupid cellphone game was popular when the concept was new and fresh and less ad-riddled.

“Yah,” she said, “fuck duh.”

“Fucking duh,” I corrected.

“Fucking. Fucking the duh! Ha.”

I giggled. The librarian came around the corner, squinting curiously, and Hahn immediately beamed up at her and said in more broken English than she had been using recently, “She helping me with English words!”

The librarian smiled, bowed her head slightly, and left.

Hahn snorted.

I hadn’t been popular. Part of that was most certainly my personality, but the bulk of it came from all the side effects of a sick mother. The obvious ones, of course–people do not react comfortably around brain cancer, children especially. The tragedy hung around me like a toxin. Folks were often fearful of proximity, as if it might infect their own mothers. Less obvious, yet far more damning: no one at home was really reminding me to shower or brush my hair by the end of high school.

Hahn didn’t mind this. She pointedly did not sit at the enormous table that virtually all the Asian students sat at during lunch. While this seemed to many of any race to be some kind of political statement, it became clear to me quickly that she simply hated a crowd of any kind.

We ate together in the library, and she never said I smelled. When I finally told her my tragedy, she nodded sagely and shared one of her own.

We sat for a bit. “This sucks,” she said. “Life is crazy like this.”

For the final, we all had to sit apart. Everyone except Hahn and me. “You’ve been so kind and helpful to her,” the teacher had gushed, right in front of her like she wasn’t there, right in front of the whole class, like that wasn’t rude. “Going out of your way to help her with her English? That’s just wonderful. It’s against the rules, but I’d appreciate it if you helped her on the final, too.”

My instinct in these circumstances had historically been to suck up any and every compliment, recognition, attention I could get. Yet in this moment, something twisted in me, and I froze, and I looked at Hahn.

Behind the teacher, she rolled her eyes. Shook her head, very slightly.

“Yeah,” I mumbled, not making eye contact. The AP physics teacher was one of those middle-aged men who still seemed to fit the profile of a teenage boy, too tall for his girth and gangly, yet with the ruddy wear of someone older in the face. He was tall enough to not expect eye contact. “No problem.”

We did the thing we did. We passed with flying colors.

Despite reality, I was proud as fuck. “Maybe I’ll major in physics after all,” I said dreamily.

Hahn snorted. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m not going to your school for college. How you think you do this without me? You can’t.”

I snorted, giggled, and she cracked a grin back at me.