Livvy Jean
The Unit Circle
I have had my results for a long time:
but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.
—Carl Friedrich Gauss
(π/3)
The town started shutting off the lights on the basketball court after Dusty got shot there in the ass by some bipolar kid from the next town over. When the cops came, Dusty ran fast even though he didn’t do anything because Dusty lived in Maplehood not Maplewood, and even if they were the same town with the same area code they were not the same. Dusty was okay. He came to school the next day and pulled down his pants in the middle of English class to show us where the doctors fixed him up. He laughed as he grabbed my hand and ran my fingers across the raised stitches. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, and for a brief second, I considered losing my virginity to Dusty, but he got himself killed before we could kiss. Right before he turned eighteen. Shot in the chest instead of the ass and when the police report ruled it as accidental, I couldn’t help but call bullshit.
(π/4)
I moved across the court. The sound of my feet against the concrete like a record being scratched. Fat Charley sat on the sidelines struggling to light a bowl. I could smell the tips of his fingers burning and I wanted to tell him to put them in my mouth so I could cool them off. Instead, I went for a layup. Missed.
“Fuck,” Fat Charley said and clicked the lighter again. “Jinx, help me out with this.”
Dusty was the one who started calling me Jinx.
Fat Charley handed me the bowl. The glass was warm and shaped like a giraffe with the option to either kiss its mouth or ass when taking a hit. I placed my lips on the mouth, clicked the lighter, and gave my lungs a greater purpose than breathing. I passed it to Fat Charley who took a quick hit before getting up to piss behind a nearby tree.
The loose gravel stuck to my sweaty back as I laid down and listened to Fat Charley urinate. I closed my eyes, comforted by it.
* * *
Fat Charley was not fat and not named Charley, but that didn’t stop any of us from calling him it. The only person who knew Fat Charley’s real name was his mom, but she was an even bigger mystery.
“What’s she like?” I once asked him. We were parked behind the Wawa on Springfield Ave, both of us coming down from a high. Fat Charley was scarfing down a hoagie, and I was on my second Big Papa pickle.
“TV static,” Fat Charley said. “She’s a scrambled mess of radio waves.”
His voice was soft. I’d never heard him talk like that except at Dusty’s funeral two months ago in April, when he stood up and read some poem about how the spirit never dies. It sounded like he believed the words he was saying. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that it wasn’t true. Dusty was dead. Dead dead. He was in the ground, stuck in a coffin with worms sleeping in his armpits and making strange hermaphrodite love inside an open bullet wound that would never heal.
I looked at Fat Charley. He was stuck between an inhale and an exhale. Under the red light of the nearby Wawa sign, he began to look all hot and numb like frozen fingers warming up. I took another bite of the pickle and asked, without fully swallowing, if he wanted me to give him head.
“We don’t do that Jinx,” he said and forced himself to breathe.
“We could?”
Fat Charley looked at me and then at his crotch. I was suddenly aware of how strongly I smelled of pickles and sweat, and when he shook his head no at me, I couldn’t tell if it was because he loved me or found me repulsive.
“Let’s just shoot some hoops,” he said. “It’s a perfect summer night—let’s not ruin it.”
He started up the car. I stuck my hand out the open window and moved my fingers through the air like a confused boy touching a girl for the first time. It was a cold night. Too cold to be perfect but I didn’t say anything about it.
(π/6)
Dusty had one of those walks. Through the window, I could tell it was him coming toward my house. Wobbling and knocking his feet together like they were balls of a pendulum. I opened the front door, and he asked if I wanted to go to the courts.
It was the middle of January. The courts were covered in snow, but that didn’t stop Dusty from dribbling the ball. Snowflakes exploded around it like a glacier. Dusty laughed at this and kept doing it, harder and harder until I was sure the ball was gonna pop.
“Dusty, stop,” I said and tried to reach for it, but he moved away from me.
He placed both hands on the basketball now, his dark fingers adding new lines to it. He kept crashing it into the ground, his arms moving rapidly up and down. He became a sine wave, the basketball just a point.
The air couldn’t hold the sound anymore, and the thuds of the ball began to echo against the backboards. He kept laughing, forcing himself to. It was harsh and high-pitched, the contrast oddly coherent. I put my hands in my pockets and sat down, watching this strange boy attempt to cause an earthquake. I wondered if he wanted to destroy the courts, or Maplewood, or the entire world.
His laughs turned into grunts, his grunts turned into yells, and suddenly he was cursing. Cursing his mother and his father and all the teachers we ever had. Cursing God and Kanye and everybody in the world who was someone when he had to be Dusty. I think I could’ve stayed there for the rest of my life. Content to piss in my pants and never eat food again as long as I got to watch Dusty scream, but then we heard sirens.
The snow was illuminated with red and blue like 3D glasses or fireworks or those popsicles Dusty and I would share at the public pool. Dusty got real quiet and looked at his hands, unsure if he should keep them in or out of his pockets. He was frozen. I dug my shoes into the snow and looked up at him. The cops drove away somewhere between five seconds and five hundred years. Dusty didn’t pick up the ball again. He just kept standing there. I thought he was going to implode, but instead he looked at me and said, “I get so angry Jinx—I get so angry, and nobody will ever let me scream in peace.”
(1, 0)
Fat Charley hated his father and loved his mother to the point where he hated her as well. Charley lost his virginity when he was sixteen years old to a girl in the grade below. He was drunk. She was too drunk. They had sex in the dugout of the baseball field across from Flood’s Hill. It was the same field where Charley’s dad tried to teach him. His dad would chuck the ball at him, spinning it too fast for a boy who was only ten. Fat Charley would come back from the field with his hands all red and sore. His mother would give him a glass of milk and Charley would gulp it down while his mother swallowed her pills.
Fat Charley never told anybody about the girl, except for Dusty one night when both of them were too high.
“Don’t tell Jinx about this,” Charley said to Dusty.
Dusty nodded.
A month before Dusty was killed, Fat Charley’s dad died. Charley didn’t cry or celebrate. He took the news as if someone was telling him the weather when he was already outside. After the funeral, Charley, Dusty, and Jinx went to the basketball courts together.
Fat Charley and Dusty watched Jinx hoop while they shared a joint.
“She always looks like she’s dancing,” Dusty said.
Fat Charley watched as Jinx made a three. Her legs kicked up in the air as she released the ball. She smiled to herself as she watched it go in. He couldn’t explain why, but there was something so sad about it.
Dusty passed him the joint. Charley took a hit.
“I’m not a good person,” Charley said as he exhaled.
“I know,” Dusty responded.
They looked at each other.
Dusty nodded.
“Do you think there are any good people in the world?”
“Yeah, I do,” Dusty said and looked at Jinx. “They just ain’t us.”
(11π/6)
Dusty looked stupid in his coffin. His face was squished together awkwardly, lips pursed like a girl, nostrils stuck with oxygen that would never become carbon dioxide.
I bet the mortician was tired of embalming another Black body when Dusty was wheeled in. Sick of touching familiar cold fingers and trying to cover up chests that looked like tafoni. Formaldehyde, methanol, and sodium borate filling up arteries that used to be coated in 7-Eleven slushies and chewed-up eraser caps. I imagined the mortician pulling up Dusty’s pants as if he was a child learning how to pee, straightening his tie as if he was about to go to the homecoming dance.
Dusty was in his best navy suit.
If nobody was looking, I would’ve pulled him out of that coffin. Stripped off his clothes and used a Sharpie to draw lines between the freckles I never got to touch. Connect the dots. I would step back and see the image it created. I bet it would’ve shown a bluebird. Dusty had such an affinity for birds.
(7π/4)
I laid naked next to Fat Charley. I turned my body to face him. He held my ribs like they were hands.
“I didn’t realize you were so skinny,” he said to me. I watched the small droplets of sweat move down his forehead. His face red and damp like a bottle of Coke on a hot summer day.
“Do you not like that?” I asked him.
He didn’t respond.
We were in the back seat of Fat Charley’s minivan. The windows were fogged over. I placed my hands on them. Fat Charley did the same. We stared at the imprint of our palms until they evaporated into nothing.
“You’re different when you’re naked,” he said to me. I placed my hand on the window again, but it left no mark. I pushed harder.
“Jinx?”
I could still feel Fat Charley in me. His body forever fossilized inside of mine.
I kept pushing, still nothing.
“Do you wish it was with Dusty?” Fat Charley asked.
I removed my hand and rested my forehead against the window instead. I felt like a fish in an aquarium trying to kill itself in front of all the people who paid to see it do nothing but swim and shit.
“It’s only been three months,” I said. “How can I not remember his voice anymore?”
Fat Charley placed his hand on my back and began to kiss my neck like a leech. His teeth were against me. Biting my ear. Licking the inside of it. I couldn’t hear anything. His spit filling me up. I was underwater.
I began to pound my head against the window. I moved my neck back and forth, slamming my forehead. Trying to escape glass that would forever keep me trapped like an asymptote.
“Jinx, stop!” Charley said and released himself from me.
I didn’t. I couldn’t. I felt my frontal lobes liquifying, flushing out the memory of Fat Charley. My skin finally cracked open, blood pouring out of me fast like piss held in too long.
“Jinx!” Fat Charley grabbed me and pulled me away from the window. “Someone is gonna think I’m hurting you.”
I stared at him. He looked so scared. I wanted to ask him to kiss me. To tell me I was still beautiful. Instead, I asked him to unlock the door. He did. I left the car.
As I walked home, I envisioned Dusty next to me. He would call me an odd, little person before asking me to take off all my clothes. He wouldn’t touch me, even if I asked him to.
“It’s okay to be lonely,” I imagined him telling me, tracing his tongue across my body until all the blood was gone and a thin layer of his saliva covered me entirely.
(5π/3)
After we finished hooping, Dusty would wipe the sweat from my upper lip before we walked over to the field next to the courts. Lying down, Dusty would complain that the grass was itchy. He would turn to his side, and I would scratch his back.
One night, after Dusty wiped my lip and I scratched his back, he asked me if he could scratch my back instead.
It was summer. The last one we would have together.
I turned around and Dusty lifted the back of my shirt. He was nervous. Sweat created traction between his fingers and my skin. I felt his hands move to the side of my body. Slowly wrapping himself around me, holding my tits as if he was afraid I would fly away. I placed my hands on top of his. I was just as afraid that he would too.
We would never hold hands like normal people. Never kiss like the elderly or have sex like virgins. When I came home that night, I stared at myself naked in the mirror, my body inked with his fingerprints. I showered, the water touching me like acetone.
(0, -1)
Dusty didn’t mean to, but he always measured time before Jinx (BJ) and after Jinx (AJ).
BJ was mostly him and Fat Charley.
They met in seventh grade; Dusty was drawn to how openly angry Fat Charley was. He would curse loudly while playing video games, call his mom a bitch to her face, call his dad an asshole behind his back.
As they got older, Dusty would try to make Fat Charley mad. He would shit talk Charley on the courts, checking the ball too hard, reminding him that he was nothing but a white boy who would never be able to shoot.
Dusty would watch Fat Charley’s reactions as if he was a lab rat. Mentally noting the way Charley would yell, how he wasn’t afraid to threaten to fight. One time, while Fat Charley was trying to make a free throw, Dusty stood in front of him. Knees bent. Arm up.
“I swear to God, Charley, that junkie mother of yours can shoot better than you,” he said.
Fat Charley instantly dropped the ball. He pushed Dusty to the ground hard. Straddling him against the concrete, punching him in the face. Dusty didn’t fight back. He felt the blood drip into his mouth. The salty taste of Charley’s knuckles. He kept his eyes open and stared at his white friend. He wondered what Fat Charley saw when he looked down at him.
They never spoke of it. After the fight, they both went to the public bathroom. Scrubbed their faces and hands. Played basketball. Walked home together. Got high and watched Adventure Time.
AJ was different.
Dusty thought Jinx was the prettiest and most bizarre girl in the world. They met in biology class freshman year when they were assigned as lab partners to dissect a frog.
Dusty watched as Jinx sliced open the stomach of the frog gently. She placed her fingers in it and smiled when she found the liver.
“It’s ours,” Jinx said to Dusty as she pulled it out and put it in his hand.
They started hooping after Dusty learned that Jinx played at the JCC when she was little.
“I’m not that good,” she said to Dusty, “but I like it. It makes sense. No matter what I do, the answer is always getting the ball in the basket. It’s simple but not. You know what I mean?”
Dusty knew exactly what she meant.
They played together almost every day, with or without Charley. The foundation of their relationship built on no words. Only the thumping of the ball against the concrete, the sound of the net swishing, the promise that eventually that ball would go in.
Dusty called her Jinx. Knocking on wood every time he said her name. Hoping it wouldn’t end.
Dusty would dream of him and Jinx every night. Lying together on the courts. Feeding each other frog livers, wondering how many they would have to swallow so they never would sink. The lights on the basketball court would be on, shining so bright on their bodies that it felt like they could burst into flames at any second.
(4π/3)
I stand at the free throw line. There are no lights on, but that fact isn’t new anymore. Just like how Dusty has been dead for almost two years now. Fat Charley doesn’t speak to me anymore, or maybe I don’t speak to him. The officer still has his job.
I stare at the net but don’t shoot. I hold the ball to my hip. The moon bounces off of me, and I look at my shadow. The space between my body and arm creates an isosceles right triangle. I used to believe that love and time could exist simultaneously. Now I’m unsure if that was ever true.
(5π/4)
After we had sex, Fat Charley disappeared for a bit. I didn’t know where he went. I didn’t care. He came back a month later and knocked on my door. His neck was covered with bruises. I wondered if he tried to kill himself. Choked himself while on his knees. Mumbling psalms to a mute God. Or maybe he got laid again. I never asked. We said nothing and walked to Flood’s Hill together. Sitting near the top, trying to find the Big Dipper. I looked at Fat Charley. My lip was sweaty from the walk up. I asked him to wipe it for me.
Later that night, we decided to go to the courts. It didn’t matter that they were nearly three miles away. We needed to go.
I watched Fat Charley dribble the ball; it bounced next to him like an anxious shadow. His fingers were moving, yet the rest of his body seemed stuck. With no lights, it was impossible to tell where the sky ended and the courts started. Everything was the texture of tar.
Fat Charley wouldn’t shoot. He just stared at the net. I imagined what it would be like to step into his ear, swim through the cerebrospinal fluid around his brain until I popped through the other end. Inside I would find nothing—a welcome mat and a coffee table with no coasters. Charley had been stealing his mother’s valium since the funeral.
“Jinx?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t wanna die.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so instead I just looked at him. He had become skinnier since he started taking the pills. I allowed my eyes to unfocus, and his bones glowed in the dark.
Summer would be over soon. I was going to Boston for college. Fat Charley was going somewhere. School would start and there would be a whole new batch of students who only vaguely knew Dusty’s name from the local newspaper and rotten memorial flowers.
“Jinx?”
“What?”
Fat Charley looked at me annoyed. “You got nothing to say to that?”
“Nobody wants to die,” I said to him and stood up. “You’re not special.”
I walked away. The sky stuck to my skin. Everything was the texture of tar.
(7π/6)
“I was terrified when that kid shot me,” Dusty said to me and Fat Charley. We sat in the middle of the court. It was windy. Dead leaves fell from the trees in preparation for winter.
“What happened, man?” Fat Charley asked. “You never told us.”
I looked at Dusty confused. He told me about it that night. Called me from the hospital, laughing and saying the craziest thing happened to him.
“I was just hooping,” Dusty said. “It was late, but I was all stressed about that chemistry test. So I went to the courts to relax, and this kid came up and started yelling. I don’t even know what he was going on about, but then he got close to me. When I saw his eyes, I knew I was fucked. I’ve never seen anyone so tired.”
I looked at Dusty; he stared back. I wondered why he didn’t cry to me on the phone, why he didn’t trust me to come to the hospital and lick the tears from his face.
“So I ran away,” Dusty said, “and before I could even realize that he shot me, I heard sirens, so I ran faster. It hurt like hell.”
“Why didn’t you stop?” Fat Charley asked.
Dusty shook his head at this. “I love y’all, but you’ll never get it.”
There was a pause. We listened to the wind for a moment. It was strange to be on the courts without the background noise of dribbling.
“Do you shit weird now?” Fat Charley asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Dusty said and laughed. He stood up and began walking to the other end of the court. He stared up at the dark net as if it was a constellation.
“I just wish they didn’t turn off the lights,” he said. “That’s what really sucks about all this.”
(-1, 0)
The unit circle will always have a radius of one. No matter what the point on the circle, the distance between it and the center is one. There are three main functions in trigonometry that are used with the unit circle: sine, cosine, and tangent.
While these are different ratios, they are all for right triangles. The functions work as following:
Sine = opposite/hypotenuse
Cosine = adjacent/hypotenuse
Tangent = opposite/adjacent
“I’m gonna fail this quiz,” Jinx said to Dusty.
“You’ll be fine,” Dusty said. “All you gotta remember is SOHCAHTOA”
“But what if there’s no center? How would I figure out the angles then?”
“Come on,” Dusty said, laughing, “there’s always a center.”
(5π/6)
“You can never tell if they’re fucking or fighting,” Dusty said to me. We were sitting on a bench near the Rahway River. It was spring.
We watched two red-winged blackbirds bounce around each other. One of them chirped loudly.
“I think that’s a mating call,” Dusty said.
“No,” I said, “that’s a scream.”
We watched the birds in silence.
The school sent an email out. The local news only covered it for a day. It seemed that after a week everybody moved on, or maybe they were numb. How many times could one say altercation with the police before the words started molding into one another. Melting and molting into an incoherent sound until everyone in the world needed to take speech therapy.
“Maybe there isn’t a difference,” I said to Dusty.
“Between fucking and fighting?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t Jinx,” Dusty said and looked at me, “don’t be thinking like that.”
I looked at him. It was spring and tomorrow he would be dead.
(3π/4)
The quiz was on a Friday. Dusty and I spent the day before etching a cheat sheet of equations into our desks.
I got a B. Dusty never took it.
SOHCAHTOA
I stared at the quiz when I got it back. Reading and rereading proofs that I wrote, all stemming from postulates.
“There is no evidence that the cop killed him,” my mother said to me as she poured herself a glass of wine.
“Mom, stop,” I said.
“I’m just saying, you can’t make these assumptions.”
I didn’t respond. I knew I wouldn’t be able to without screaming, so I went out to the balcony. We lived up the hill in Newstead where the roads were wide, the houses were rich, and the skyline of the city was right outside our windows. I stared at the distant, yellow buildings until they blurred into one. It was only when I heard sirens in the distance that I realized I was crying.
(2π/3)
I sat on the side of the court and watched Charley and Dusty play ball. Checking it between them. Dusty began to dribble to the left. Sometimes moving the ball between his legs. Fat Charley in front of him. Knees bent, arm up.
“Come on, you got no range,” he said to Dusty. Their bodies moved closer to each other. Dusty lifted his arms to shoot. Fat Charley jumped. The ball swished through the net. A perfect three.
“Now what were you saying about no range?” Dusty said, laughing.
It was one of the hottest days of the summer; the courts were filled up. Dusty and Charley joined pickup games while I sat on the sidelines drinking Diet Coke and occasionally taking a hit from the joint being passed around. Music from different speakers mixed together: Kendrick, Lauryn Hill, Outkast, Cudi, and Carti all blending into the sound of grunts, daps, swish, ew, nice, dribble, fuck, dribble, come on. I looked at Dusty and Fat Charley. They moved across the court with nervous excitement. They jumped and swished. Bodies bent and contorted. Hands slippy from sweat and spit. Everything about it so human.
I took another sip of Diet Coke. Stood up and waited to join the next game.
Dusty ran past me and smiled. This was as good as it was gonna get.
(0, 1)
Officer Stevenson has an enlarged oval face. His stomach rounds over the top part of his belt. His fingers are chubby. There is not a single right angle on his body.
Officer Stevenson played football in high school and drinks orange juice in the morning instead of coffee. He grew up Catholic and continues practicing to appease his mother, and because he believes that he is a good man.
Officer Stevenson is not a good man.
He lives in Maplewood. His house was recently renovated, and he installed one of those waterfall showerheads for the master bedroom. He likes to make it real hot so when he gets out his skin is red and alive. He usually attempts to jack off in the shower, pulling and tugging until he gets tired and gives up before he can even finish.
He goes to bed with his hair wet and his dick soft. His wife touches his head.
“Your hair is wet,” she says to him and goes to sleep without ever knowing of Dusty.