WESTPORT, CT — A 15-year-old sophomore in suburban Connecticut has become entirely, unshakably convinced that his 27-year-old SAT tutor — a Yale graduate student named Alex — is deeply, secretly, professionally-restrained-but-otherwise-obviously into him, and is simply waiting for him to gather the courage to make the first move.
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The evidence, he explains, is overwhelming.
She smiled at him twice during their last session. She said good job in what he described as “a specific way.” She wore, on the Tuesday before Halloween, what he has referred to on multiple occasions as that shirt. She once accidentally brushed his hand while reaching for his practice booklet, and while any reasonable observer would classify this as the passing physical contact of two humans sharing a small kitchen table, he has classified it as, quote, “a signal.”
His parents pay Alex $150 an hour to help him raise a math score that has, across four months, moved a total of zero points. She has, over the course of their sessions, mentioned her boyfriend David eleven times. He has interpreted every mention as an attempt to make him jealous. He has interpreted her explanations of the Pythagorean theorem as attempts to make him jealous. He has, at this point, interpreted approximately everything as an attempt to make him jealous, including a session two weeks ago in which she was audibly congested and did not smile at him even once — which he took, on reflection, as her “trying to hide it.”
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He has told no one about the plan. The plan, such as it is, involves a look, a pause, and a specific sentence he has not yet finalized but which currently ends with the phrase “…and I think we both know it.” He has practiced it in the bathroom mirror. He has practiced it in the shower. He practiced it, last Thursday, while riding the bus, mouthing it silently, until the freshman sitting across from him asked if he was okay.
He is going to wait, he has decided, until after the SAT. He does not want things to be “weird” during the sessions. He wants, he explained to his own reflection recently, to be a gentleman about it.
The SAT is in March.
Alex is moving to Boston in February to begin a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience.
He does not yet know this.
She has not told him because it has not, at any point in their tutoring relationship, occurred to her that it would be relevant to him. She thinks of him, when she thinks of him at all, as the kid on Tuesdays. She thinks of his kitchen as the one with the big island. She thinks of his mother, warmly, as the one who always offers me the LaCroix. She does not think of him romantically. She has not thought of him romantically. She will not, in her lifetime, think of him romantically.
She likes him. She thinks he is a nice kid who is bad at algebra.
That is the extent of it.
Reached by phone for this article, Alex was told nothing about the student’s internal narrative and answered a few benign questions about his progress.
“He’s sweet,” she said. “He tries. His parents seem great. Is everything okay?”
She was assured that everything was fine.
The student, meanwhile, has been working on his hair. He has been going to bed earlier on Monday nights so he looks rested on Tuesdays. He has, over the past three weeks, purchased two separate colognes that he rotates depending on what he described as “the vibe of the week.” He has begun wearing a specific dark green sweater on tutoring days that he believes brings out his eyes, and which his older sister has, on multiple occasions, tried to gently tell him is a girl’s sweater.
He does not care. He does not, at this specific point in his young life, care about anything.
He believes he is running a long game.
He is not running a long game.
He is a 15-year-old boy sitting across a kitchen table from a woman who is going to complete their final session in mid-February, wish him luck on his test, thank his mother for the LaCroix, close her laptop, walk to her car, drive home to David, tell David about her day without mentioning the student even once, and never think about him again.
He will spend the rest of high school telling the story of how close he came. He will spend college telling it. He will, in his mid-twenties, at a rooftop bar in Brooklyn, tell it to a woman he is trying to impress, who will listen politely, nod, and then say, “Wait. So she was… your tutor? And you were fifteen? And you thought she was into you?” And he will pause, for the first time, and set down his drink, and something will shift very slightly behind his eyes, and he will say, “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
And then he will order another round.
At their session Tuesday afternoon, Alex complimented his work on a factoring problem. He nodded slowly, held her gaze for what he believed was a meaningful three seconds, and gave what he later described to himself, walking back up the stairs to his bedroom, as “a real signal.”
She did not notice.
She was thinking about a paper.