He inhaled a deep breath of air, rising a little. He wasn’t as short as I’d thought. I’d only ever seen him from a distance, and he had been slouching when I arrived. As he straightened now, he pulled his shoulders back. They were broader than I’d given him credit. His fingers were still very bony and slim, but long. They trembled a little as he turned over the pages in a chewed-out textbook. “It’s a tool like any other. Most things these days can be quantified. And if you can quantify something, you can break it down into columns. And if you can break it into columns, you can compare things.”
“Easy,” I said, sarcasm flying over Bennet’s head. Or not? I was starting to think he knew the difference, but he just didn’t want to engage.
“Yes,” he agreed. “If you understand the instruments, you understand the data. And if you understand your goals, you know how to read the number.”
“That all sounds fun, but I don’t even know what the goals are,” I said.
Bennet sank a little in his chair. “It depends on what you want to say. How can we tell how many stars there are in our galaxy? We didn’t count them. It’s simple statistics. We count a little bit, decide on the average, then multiply that to get the number that’s relative to the size of the galaxy. We could be wrong, sowe factor in the margin of error, and we give ourselves the statistical lenience.”
I stared at him blankly. “Please don’t make me count the stars.”
The corners of Bennet’s lips trembled for a moment. He had almost smiled. But then he looked at the textbook with mild frustration instead. “Okay. Imagine there’s a football player who can score two goals in the first minute, four in the second, three in the third, and this repeats evenly for an hour. We’d say he scored three per minute on average.”
“Rookie numbers, but do go on.”
He shot me a look so sharp it could have skinned me alive.
“Rookie numbers,” I repeated under my breath, waiting for some kind of reaction from him. Nothing. He moved one of the books a little closer and gave his full attention to the table like it might suddenly solve my course for me.
“We work with patterns,” Bennet said. “That is the simple version. Books make it sound complicated because books enjoy their own importance.”
“I enjoy your importance,” I said.
He didn’t blink, which should have counted as a crime. He only adjusted a page with the tip of his finger. “Statistics is a lens. It makes fuzzy things clearer. It reveals a structure you can’t see at first glance.”
“Like when a guy looks like he hates you, but actually, he only hates your jokes?”
His eyelids lowered a fraction of an inch. “That is not a statistical problem. That is a taste issue.”
I tapped the table. “So you do hate my jokes.”
“I never said that,” he replied. “I said they require a certain taste.”
“That sounded like an insult.”
“It wasn’t,” he said plainly. “I’m only saying they are unique.”
“That’s worse,” I said.
He allowed a tiny pause before he turned another page. “Then I apologize for being accurate.”
I slumped a little in my chair, hoping the sympathy of the furniture might cushion my ego. It did not.
Bennet glanced up again. “If you prefer, I can use a sports example.”
“That might help,” I said. “My brain stops working when books get involved.”
He tapped a pencil lightly on the table. It seemed like he needed the noise to think. “Fine. Suppose you want to know if a quarterback performs better in home games or away games. You gather the number of completed passes from both situations over several weeks and compare them.”
“That sounds fine,” I said.
“You then consider the number of attempts, because success without context is empty.”
“That still sounds fine,” I said. “So we just eyeball which one is bigger.”
Bennet stared at me again. A slow stare. “That’s…not how statistics works.”
I leaned forward. “I knew that. I was testing you.”