Tyler could faintly hear his alarm clock going off under the Imagine Dragons song streaming through his ear buds. He rolled over and hit the top of the clock. Then he pulled the covers up over his head and curled up on his side. He did the same thing every weekday morning. It was the only thing about the routine that he liked: 

Alarm goes off. 

Hit the alarm. 

Take out ear buds. 

Turn off smartphone. 

Roll over for five more minutes. 

And then quiet. 

Once he got his skinny body out of bed, he would open his window and listen to the songbirds greeting the morning. Then he’d pick up a pad, a piece of artist’s charcoal, and begin to sketch.  

Last year he decided he would draw what he saw outside his bedroom window every day for a year. He mostly wanted to see if he could do it for 365 days. But also he was curious to see how things changed; the things he didn’t usually notice until some big difference occurred. 

Tyler was curious overall, much more so than a lot of his classmates. His friend group was small anyway. Mostly because he had been hiding a secret from everyone and he had yet to find the courage to come clean about it. The down side of it was that he spent a lot of time on his own because he just didn’t feel like he fit in anywhere.  

On the up side, his ability to create was improving every day. Tyler had a knack for figuring out how things worked. He was always coming up with new ideas for inventions that could do things like help the environment. When he was upset about something, he would always fall back on sketching or building something in his dad’s wood shop out back. 

Tyler’s parents knew he was troubled by some unspoken problem. They could tell by how hard he would work on his creative projects. Finding sketches lying about Tyler’s room told them he had something on his mind.

They'd explained to Tyler from an early age that the best way to solve a problem is to talk about it. Usually, Tyler took their advice. But then again, he was a boy. And boys in general seemed to struggle to talk about their feelings. 

As Tyler was pulling his bicycle out of the garage, his best friend, Brody, came riding up. 

“Hey, Tyler!” 

“Hi, Brody.  I thought your mom was driving you to school?” 

Brody shrugged his shoulders. “I got up late and she couldn’t wait. Did you finish your homework?” 

Tyler looked at him for a minute. Then he pulled his homework out of his bag and stuffed it into Brody’s. “You know, you might actually learn something if you did it yourself,” Tyler said. 

“Why? I hate math and I doubt I will ever use it once I finish school.” 

Tyler shook his head, got on his bike, and the two of them rode towards school. 

It was fifth period when Brody rushed into class. He slipped Tyler’s homework onto his desk with the skill of a magician. Tyler looked up at Ms. Stoats to make sure she hadn’t seen Brody give him back his papers. 

“Okay, everyone, listen up!” Ms. Staats said loudly. “Continuing on about how math relates to just about everything, today we are going to talk about Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci is considered to be one of the great inventors and mathematicians of the Renaissance.” 

A young female student raised her hand. Ms. Staats nodded for her to speak. “I thought da Vinci was an artist? Didn’t he paint the Mona Lisa?” the student asked. 

“That’s correct,” Ms. Staats answered. “He is considered to be one of the most gifted artists in history.” 

Ms. Staats tacked a print of the Mona Lisa onto the large cork board at the front of the classroom.  

“Was she da Vinci’s wife?” one of the students i nquired. 

“No, but many people have asked the same question,” she replied. “This is a reproduction, a copy, of the Mona Lisa. It is one of da Vinci’s most famous paintings. But he was also known for many other things. Your job over the next three days is to find what this painting has to do with math. As I said, da Vinci was also a mathematician and an inventor. You have until Friday to come up with your report. We will read some of them aloud in class,” Ms. Staats finished.

After dinner that night, Tyler opened his laptop and did a Google search for Leonardo da Vinci. He saw a photo of a sketch called the Vitruvian Man. The sketch was of two images of a naked man, one image superimposed on top of the other. One drawing showed the man with his feet together and his arms extended out in a sort of T. In the other image, his legs were apart and his arms extended higher, in a V shape. A circle was drawn around them.  

Tyler read on to learn that it was supposed to represent the ideal human proportions. The sketch is often referred to as “The Proportions of Man.” 

“That’s it,” Tyler said to himself. 

He also found sketches of many of da Vinci’s inventions including a drawing for a helicopter, a flying machine, scuba gear, and military inventions like the giant crossbow and the triple barrel canon. Almost all these things were invented in the late 1400s!  

The more Tyler read about da Vinci, the more he understood how da Vinci’s math abilities played a part in his work. But Tyler also felt connected to da Vinci because he shared so many interests with this long-haired, bearded man from more than 500 years ago. 

Then Tyler came across a news story stating that a recently discovered painting of da Vinci’s sold in an auction for 450 million dollars! It was a painting of Jesus Christ called, in Italian, “Salvator Mundi,” or Savior of the World. Tyler wondered what da Vinci would think about his painting selling for so much money. He tried to imagine one of his own sketches being worth that much. 

As he looked through the online images of da Vinci’s art, he came across one that caught his eye. It was called St. John the Baptist. Tyler was struck by the suggestive pose of the model in the painting. He discovered that the model was an artist named Andrea Salai, a young man thought to be da Vinci’s lover. 

“Lover?” Tyler said out loud. “Da Vinci was gay? Wow!” 

Tyler had never heard that da Vinci was homosexual, and it made him wonder who else was. Suddenly an idea came into his head. 

On Friday morning when Tyler’s alarm went off, he was already awake, sitting up in bed and typing rapidly on his laptop. He didn’t open the window, and he didn’t pick up his sketch book. He had a plan; he just wasn’t completely sure he could pull it off.