She hadn’t forgotten; she was convinced of it.

“Alice--”

And yet, it all took so very long to come to her. She sat with her hands balled up into fists against her forehead. The figures scribbled onto the pages of her open notebook looked simple enough to work with. There was ‘a’ and there was ‘b,’ and they were equal. Another ‘a’ was multiplied to each. Then two “b’s” were subtracted from both quantities--but was it really two? The explanation had been ‘b’ “b’s.” That’s how many “b’s” there were supposed to be. Then what good were two?

“Alice?”

It was only the beginning of her long hike. On the other side of the equation, there were ‘a’ “a’s” less ‘b’ “b’s.” Numeration aside, it all seemed self-explanatory, at least as far as she was willing to struggle to accept. Subtraction was, and had always been, simple enough. It was just the opposite of addition, losing something instead of gaining something. She struggled to reason where the gain was coming from, then. A loss had turned into a loss and a gain, side by side. Was this mathematics or poetry? Was something of value lost or something invaluable gained?

“Alice!”

Alice Liddell snapped awake. A sea of grinning and snickering faces spread out around her. She would’ve been considerably more embarrassed had she not already become so well acquainted with such an expression. It was something Alice recalled from a series of days and nights that seemed frozen in time. Those strange and lonely times only seemed to take hold of her whenever they felt pleased to.

Lightly rapping the grand and authoritative pointer against his palm, the professor shook his head at Alice, tut-tutting with an almost unenthusiastic disapproval. “If this problem is beyond you, Miss Liddell, you certainly should’ve just said that when I asked you to solve it.”

Alice decided not to fight it. She simply nodded in agreement, saved by the tolling of the school bell. The professor rose and heaved his mighty textbook closed, causing all of the children to pause in their attempts to escape. He raised his pointer toward the crowd, carefully eyeing children as he searched for something unknown to them. It occurred to Alice that the professor looked remarkably silly for springtime. His emerald shirt and mud-brown vest would’ve made him look like a heavily branched tree if it wasn’t for his head. Bald save a few stray locks along the sides, he reminded Alice of an old, discarded vegetable. In fact, that description seemed perfect to Alice except for the spectacles. The professor had them tightly pressed against his nose, seemingly glued into place. While he certainly always retained a fair view of the student body and the troublemakers lurking within, he seemed perpetually unable to take in a consistent view of the clock. One day, time was on his side, the next, it left him grasping at the air for a meaningful conclusion. Today, however, the professor had the air of someone wholly concerned with someone else’s time.

His pointer rested on a plain looking young man with a red tie, a full patch of light brown hair, and kind eyes.

“Mr. Lent, since your command of the material has proven to be most substantial, I suggest you spend the afternoon with Miss Liddell.” The professor snapped his pointer back like a soldier repositioning a gun. “I expect the erasers to be clean when I inspect them tomorrow morning. Does that sound suitable to you?”

A certain longing in the young man’s kind eyes seemed to refuse until he glanced at Alice. She turned away, blushing slightly and wondering not only what it was about this boy that would make him refuse, but what it was about her that would make him change his mind.

“That sounds perfectly suitable, sir,” the boy replied. He seemed calculatedly unsure, as though he was saving his confidence for something far more deserving.

The professor gave a small smile and a wave of his hand. “Very good. Class dismissed.”

He gathered up his textbook and attendance list, laying his pointer in the corner of the room. It made an eerie tapping sound as it struck the wall, echoing on the breeze seeping through the open window and sending an apparent shudder running amongst the sea of departing children. Alice mused over it for a moment, and then shook her head. It was only a pointer, after all. It didn’t have to be anything else.

Upon the professor’s departure, the boy stood with his hands behind his back, rocking lightly as if in thoughts that only puppy lovers have. He turned to face Alice as she tried to shrug herself awake. It seemed to do very little good, but she kept at it. After all, those days and nights of smiles and snickers never stopped keeping at it every time she dozed off in curiosity. The sun set and rose on them as it pleased, swinging to the tick of some other clock. Alice suddenly wondered if the professor happened to carry a pocket-watch. The thought that he didn’t was almost laughable. Stranger creatures had perfectly good uses for pocket-watches; the professor’s possible ignorance of time would make him a very strange creature indeed!

“Um, Alice, is it?”

The young man was now standing next to her with his hand stretched out. Alice blinked a few times and shook it in return, nodding in reply.

The boy smiled slightly. “You know, I don’t believe I’ve ever introduced myself to you. Silly, isn’t it? I mean, we’ve been in this class together for almost an entire term, and never once have I had the opportunity nor--”

He stopped himself, suddenly unsure in full about the word he was searching for. Alice found his searching mildly amusing and almost wanted him to continue like that, but he simply cleared his throat in an introductory sort of way. “Never mind all of that. I’m Ethan Lent.”

He paused. Alice nodded again, a little slower this time, and then turned back to her scribbling.

“Well?” Ethan piped up after a few seconds of silence. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“You have a pleasant name,” Alice said, smiling. Something inside her wanted to comment on Ethan’s kind eyes, but she kept the desire to herself.

Ethan grinned, running a shy hand through his hair. “Yours is pleasant as well. If I’m correct, it has French origins. Although I’m typically more partial to Hebrew names myself--there are so many in such great texts, you know--”

Alice suddenly drowned out Ethan’s projections, something French poking around in her head, something that she simply couldn’t remember. It was like a mouse poking around for lost cheese, or maybe a cat poking around for a lost mouse. Alice frowned, trying to draw up something that made sense in any sense of the word sense.

Ethan called her back. He looked rather defeated. “I’m sorry…you’re probably not interested in my rambling. I imagine you just want me to help you with that math problem?”

Alice nodded, feeling compelled to add, “It seems like it would be suitable of you.”

Ethan smiled slightly, catching this small jab at the professor. He walked over to the corner of the room and tried to pick up the pointer. It proved to be a disgraceful task: Ethan gripped the long rod with both hands, wobbling a little from side to side as he attempted to make his way to the blackboard. “If I’m correct, we ended here in class, didn’t we?”

The unfinished equation read (a+b)(a-b)=b(a-b). The daunting task of gain by loss seemed to taunt Alice as she stared down at her own scribbling. It felt oddly therapeutic doing so as Ethan’s own scribbling echoed off of the blackboard. He seemed just as lost in thought as she was. She wanted it to stay this way, to keep losing herself in the thought of the coexistence of gain and loss until it made sense--some sense, any sense at all. As her eyelids grew heavy, Alice realized not only that there was a tiny hunger pang rising up inside her, but that it was a familiar hunger pang. It kept her awake in her sleep. It brought her through that series of days and nights.

The soothing melody of chalk scribbles quieted, as though Ethan had suddenly remembered that he had forgotten about the problem entirely. “Y-you see, a key fact to remember is that ‘a’ and ‘b’ are equal to each other,” he instructed loosely. “This was established at the beginning of the problem.”

As her head began to droop, Alice strained to see what it was that Ethan had written. There were words on the chalkboard, full words that hadn’t been there before. She sighed quietly, keenly aware of the fruitlessness of her efforts. All she could do was stare at her own scribbling one last time--

Suddenly, it hit her like a flash. There was loss present on both sides of the equation; all she had to do was divide it out! Alice quickly scrawled some fractions into the equation, putting the terms over the loss. Eyeing it with all the carefulness she could manage, Alice recalled what Ethan had told her. The two terms were equal…so what was the point of subtraction? What was there to lose besides an entire term?

“My dear, I do believe you’re looking at it the wrong way.”

Alice cocked her head in wonder. “Looking…the wrong way…”

“Now, I prefer to call it a contradiction instead of a paradox--”

With her fractional lines turned vertical, she felt herself follow them, sweeping past Ethan’s words and tumbling down a path that was familiar in an almost unpleasant way, like a cherished memory devoid of everything worth cherishing. Alice shook her head. There was something more to it. She hadn’t forgotten. She was convinced of it.