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“And for the lady?” The waitress smiles at Stiles.
Scott watches as the half smile slides off Stiles’ face.
“Just a cheeseburger. I’ll share his fries.” Stiles nods towards Scott and ducks his head. His voice has gone higher, like it always does when this happens. Someone will think he’s a girl and suddenly his voice will lose its careful gravel, become breathier and lighter, and his broad sprawl will disappear as he folds his limbs in to fit a narrower set of imaginary boundaries around him. Like he knows he can’t convince them they’re wrong, so he hides.
“Well, there aren’t any calories if they’re from his plate,” the waitress says with a wink, and Scott prays that she’ll leave before she can use the words ‘girlish figure.’
He wants so badly to tell her that Stiles isn’t a girl, don’t call him a girl, because it wrecks him, but… that isn’t his call to make, and if he did, it would only make this whole thing much worse for Stiles.
Stiles slouches further down when the waitress leaves. He’s drawing spirals in the spilt salt with the tip of his finger.
“Don't worry about it,” Stiles says under his breath. “She doesn’t know.”
But that doesn’t mean it doesn't hurt you! Scott doesn’t say. He looks down at the cracked vinyl seats and wishes he’d sat beside Stiles instead of across from him.
He doesn’t know how to make it better.
When their food comes, Scott pushes the full portion of fries across the table.
Stiles snorts and wipes a hand through his salt spirals, sweeping them off the table.
“Thanks,” he replies and his voice is pitched lower again.
But he’s still curled in on himself, and his eyes still widen and his smile freezes whenever the waitress returns, and Scott wishes so much that he could give him something more than a side bowl of fries to clutch and hold between himself and the rest of the diner.
*
Scott hasn't been to Stiles’ dorm room yet – they usually hang out in Scott’s room or around campus – but he knows where it is and he can’t wait the three hours until their next class together to tell him about the girl he met in the languages building. He never thought he’d be happy about not having enough language credits from high school.
He slips through the front door with another freshman when she swipes her card and then runs up the stairs, past posters about alcohol poisoning and exam stress, until he arrives at the hallway leading to Stiles’ door.
“221, 223, 225! Stiles, Stiles, open up, nap later, I have to tell you about-”
A familiar dark haired girl opens the door.
“Scott?”
Stiles pokes his head around the door.
“Hey, Scott, you finally made it! This is Allison, my roommate. Remember I told you about her?”
As he stands there trying to think of something that doesn’t make him look like a stalker, it occurs to him in the back of his mind that he never did catch her name.
*
Allison is great. There are other words he could use: funny, beautiful, sweet, kind, but really, when he tries to put into words how awesome she is, what comes out is either a half hour speech about her favourite pizza toppings or a goofy smile and the words, ‘Allison is great.’
Finding out that she was bi like him had been great too. She’d told him, in between their fourth and fifth kiss, that she usually liked girls more and had been surprised that she liked him so much.
He remembers the way she’d looked at him as she pulled back and bit her lip after telling him she wasn’t a hundred percent – or even fifty percent – straight.
“Dating other bisexuals is nice, because you don't have to explain as much,” he’d said, naively, and kissed her again.
He hasn’t been this hung up on someone since Stiles let him use his glitter crayons and told him about narwhals on the first day of kindergarten.
Allison is great, but he ends up needing to have things explained more often than he had initially thought he would. Like why Lydia calling her femme at the last club meeting had gotten her so defensive and upset.
“I guess it just threw me,” Allison says. “I’ve never thought of myself as being feminine, I was always the most… well, not masculine, but… I wasn’t like the other girls. I was an athlete, I took wood shop, I… I’m not a girly girl,” she says, scrunching up her nose and twisting her mouth to one side at the word ‘girly.’
He wants to tell Allison that there’s nothing wrong with being a girly girl, but…
He thinks of his mother, furious, after she went on a date with some white guy who was a women’s studies professor and he’d spent an hour and a half – an hour and a half, Scott! – ‘teaching’ her about Chicana feminism. He hadn’t quite understood everything at the time, but he understood that being talked down to had pissed her off. That guy had been a smarmy asshole.
He’s not sure that he can tell an actual girl that there isn’t anything wrong with being a girly girl and that girly girls do really awesome things without sounding like an enormous tool.
*
“What are you making? It’s really pretty.”
Lydia looks up at him from her crochet.
“Oh hi,” she says and then squints at her work and adjusts the tension. “It’s a model of a hyperbolic plane. I heard Dr. Asher saying to Professor Greene that it was a shame that no one in the math department could crochet, since the paper model got soaked by the sprinklers last year, so I volunteered to make one. I crocheted a bunch of these in high school when I was teaching myself hyperbolic geometry. If I knew where the damn things were I could have driven home and picked them up last weekend, but they got packed up when my mom sold the house after she and my dad got divorced. I think they’re still in storage somewhere.”
“Ah,” Scott says, not sure what to do with the news that geometry could be hyperbolic and that Lydia had been learning about it as well as the normal type back in high school instead of just thinking about world domination like he’d always assumed. “This one looks good anyway. Stiles has a purple yarn like this.”
“Stiles had a purple yarn like this,” Lydia smiles. “He gave it to me when I said I needed something acrylic. My stash is mostly all natural fibers right now, but acrylic holds the shape better for this. He was very happy to help me out.”
Rather than get into a conversation that involves pretending he doesn’t know Stiles worships the ground Lydia walks on, while simultaneously pretending he doesn’t know that Lydia knows Stiles worships the ground she walks on, Scott decides pretending he’s interested in math is the more manageable lie.
“So what is a hyperbolic plane?”
“Well,” Lydia says, “hyperbolic geometry is the geometry of saddle shaped spaces, so, while a Euclidean plane is flat, a hyperbolic plane is curved like the outer surface of a Pringle. It’s very hard to render in three dimensions: crochet is the most accurate way of making a model.”
“Cool,” Scott says, because it is, kind of, and he can’t think of anything else to say. “I wouldn't have thought that a lot of mathematicians could crochet.”
Lydia raises one shoulder briefly.
“You’d be right. Daina Taimina made the first one in 1997. The ironic thing is, people were getting excited about hyperbolic geometry at roughly the same time crochet was taking off. Of course, the people who were excited by the possibility of affordable, easily produced lace weren’t the same people who were excited by a non-Euclidean geometry in which the parallel axiom is replaced by the assumption that through any point in a plane there are two or more lines that do not intersect a given line in the plane. If 19th century mathematicians had had a higher estimation of women then maybe someone would have put the two together much sooner.”
Scott nods and decides against mentioning that it looks a little like a sea slug.
*
Going to stay with Allison at her grandfather’s ranch for Christmas had seemed like such a good idea when they’d decided on the spur of the moment that they didn’t want to say goodbye. Stiles had been pissed with him for making him wait for him and then not needing a lift back to Beacon Hills after all, but not so pissed he wouldn't get over it in an hour or so. He’d felt a pang of regret for making Stiles wait around, but it had still seemed like a good idea.
Sitting in the car with Allison’s dad in dead silence is making him start to reassess that judgement. Allison’s pretending to nap against the window and Mr. Argent hasn’t said anything since he’d looked at Scott and said, “Friend or boyfriend?” in a tone that suggested what he really meant was ‘friend or foe?’
Scott looks up and sees Mr. Argent staring at him in the rear view mirror again and swallows, suddenly glad that Allison hadn’t rested her head against his shoulder when he’d offered it.
*
“Dude, your family is terrifying,” Scott says against Allison’s neck, “When I went over to the guest house last night your grandfather cocked a gun at me and asked me if I hunted in this really ominous tone of voice. Then he started talking about how many people get hurt during hunting season and how you need to be careful, while he was looking at me through the sights. And your mom keeps sharpening knives when I try to go into the kitchen to help her.”
Allison laughs into his hair.
“They’ve never had a boy to intimidate on my behalf before. I think they saw a movie once and didn’t realise they had to tone it down for real life. Kate’s being nice to you though, right?”
“Oh, yeah, super nice. A little intimidating in other ways, but-”
Allison pokes him and they both start to giggle.
He settles in against her side and lets her pet his hair. Allison’s family is weird and scary, but Allison?
Allison is great.