Page 18 of On His Schedule
I nod. “You think I’m ready?” I tease.
Her eyes meet mine for a brief moment, and then I grab my folder that holds my next assignment, unable to sustain her eye contact. I don’t bother apologizing for my sarcasm as my folder and planner fall in front of me, echoing through the room. I flip open my planner and look at the week. I have my schedule and assignments written down in here, except for this tutoring session. That’s only written on the wall in my bedroom. I am going to have to add a column to the schedule.
She watches me for a moment and then turns to the textbook, flipping to the page on the syllabus.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. It starts buzzing back-to-back.
“Excuse me for a second,” I say, pulling out my phone. I look up at her, and she looks down at my phone. “Just one sec.”
Stanley:Report back.Stanley:We need a status update.Stanley:Hot or not?Rowan:Leave him alone.Stanley:Hot or not, Reeve?Percy:He is at a tutoring session, please for the love of God.Blue:I’m up 5-0.Stanley:Reeve is ignoring us.Rowan:He’s doing math.Stanley:HE IS IGNORING US.Rowan:Let him learn from the girl.
I switch the thread to silent and put the phone back in my pocket. “Sorry,” I mutter, shaking myself from Stanley’s bull crap. “It’s on silent now.”
Her eyes flick down to the textbook. She slides it over to me and then grabs something from her bag while I start working on the problems.
Hot or not.
I don’t want to answer that question.
Chapter 4
Lucy
Helooksathisphone for a second too long before he picks the pencil back up.
I notice. I’m pretending to re-tab a page in his textbook that doesn’t need re-tabbing. The screen lights his face from below. His thumb does the small motion that means he’s reading something, and his mouth does a small thing at the corner — a quarter-twitch — and then he puts the phone face down next to his elbow and goes back to work.
I tell myself I’m not curious about who’s texting him. Unfortunately, I am very curious about who’s texting him.
I open my Real Analysis textbook to where I left off Sunday night. Problem 3.1.4. I read the first sentence.Let f be a continuous function on the closed interval [0,1] such that f of zero equals f of one.
I read it again. Benson Reeve is sitting four feet from me, and I cannot process a single word of Real Analysis. There is something sitting in the air between us. And fortunately, it’s not Axe body spray. Whatever this is, it’s not floral. There’s something in it that’s wood and something in it that’s soap. It’s not loud.
Let f be a continuous function on the closed interval [0,1].
He grips the pencil weirdly. I noticed it a few times in the last forty-five minutes. It looks like a grip that should produce illegible handwriting. His handwriting, when I’ve been able to glance at it across the table, is fine. It’s angled and a little loose and entirely legible.
He doesn’t fidget. I’ve been tutoring athletes for years. I cannot, in that entire time, recall one of them sitting across from me without doing something with their body. The football kid drummed his thigh. The basketball forward clicked his pen. The wrestler folded the corner of every page into a tiny triangle and then unfolded it.
Benson bounced his knee a little at first, but now he’s just sitting there, working. He’s leaning forward over the page with his right elbow on the table and his left hand resting flat next to the textbook, and he’s at peace in his body in a way that is, somehow, worse than fidgeting.
I read Problem 3.1.4 a fifth time. The pen on the table is the wrong pen. I brought a blue pen. I always work in blue. The pen is the green one I sometimes lend out, which means I picked it up by accident in the apartment this morning.
I look up. He glances up at the same time. His eyes are a shade of brown. We both look back down. I read the wordsclosed intervalagain. I write nothing. My entire identity is built on my brain working, but right now it’s not.
He’s your best friend’s brother, I tell myself. He’s your tutee. He’s a Tuesday-and-Thursday standing block in your GoogleCalendar that ends in November. The line connecting now and the rest of your life is straight, and that line runs through a tutoring session twice a week, and that’s all.
I read Problem 3.1.4 again.
He sets the pencil down and pushes the paper across the table.
“I think I got it.”
I pull the page toward me. He’s done all the problems. Problem one, conditional probability, set up correctly, executed correctly, answer correct. Problem two, set up correctly, executed correctly, answer correct. Problem three—
He’s written 0.667 as 66.7%.
The problem is statedas a decimal.
