Page 39 of Treasured By Them
“I agree.” I notice her outfit—shorts, a tank top, and hiking boots, along with a big water bottle. “Are you going somewhere?”
“Yeah. Malcolm and I were supposed to meet some friends for a hike. He can’t make it because he tweaked his leg yesterday, but they drove all this way. I don’t want to disappoint them by canceling. Wanna come with?”
I consider it, but I don’t know their friends, and I feel like I’m on the brink of figuring something out with my scrapbook. “Thanks, but I’ll stick close to the cold beer.”
She laughs. “Fair enough. Malcolm’s napping in the sitting room. Well, he was reading, but I don’t think he got past the first page before he started dozing off.”
“He sounds just like my dad.”
“Well, they are best friends.” Her phone chimes and she pulls it from her pocket. “They’re nearly here. I better go. See you in a few hours!”
“See you!” I raise my bottle in farewell.
When I glance at the photograph again, I get a niggling feeling in the back of my head, like a memory trying to break through. The math journal keeps catching my eye. It seems like such a weird detail to fixate on, but I happened to bring the math journal along with my other journals. I may as well take a closer look.
Huffing out a sigh, I get up and make the trek upstairs to get it from my room. On the way back down, I peer into the living room, where sure enough, Malcolm is dozing on the couch with a book open, face-down on his chest. It rises and falls with each one of his breaths.
I return to my chair and open my journal.
The first entry is dated June 15th. Spread over the page is Pascal’s triangle, copied carefully in my clumsy childhood penmanship.
1
1 1
1 2 1
1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
1 5 10 10 5 1
1 6 15 20 15 6 1
I love the triangle for its symmetry. Always have. There’s such beauty in how the numbers are arranged, how they add up.
Getting out my phone, I look up the date Britney Gardner went missing. June 24th. Do I have any entries from that date? I flip ahead, past some random experiments I did with squares and square roots. June 24th is empty, but the 25th is another Pascal’s triangle. It looks messy, though, and it’s full of extra numbers next to the originals. The top 1 has a tiny 1 next to it, as if in superscript, as if I’m saying one to the power of one. The next line has a 1 with a tiny 2 next to it—one to the power of two. And the third 1 has a tiny 3—one to the power of three.
11
12 13
14 21 15
16 31 32 17
18 41 61 42 19
110 51 101 102 52 111
112 62 151 201 152 6 1
What the fuck is this?
The triangle only goes down for seven lines. Every number except the final two has a tiny number next to it, and none of them are the same.
This feels…important. I don’t know why, but it does.
