Page 29 of On His Schedule
She laughs into his chest.
Discomfort has a chokehold on me, so I turn around and walk to the couch.
“Bear. How long has this been happening?” I whisper.
He shrugs at the Switch. “Ah — you made me lose.” He sets the Switch down. “I need help with my math homework.”
“Yeah. Come on.”
His room smells like dog and boy. I go straight to the window and crank it open.
“You need to clean your room, Louis. It smellsbad.” Louis is my brother’s real name, and I abuse it when I’m being serious with him.
He smiles. “Only if you start paying me.”
I look at him. “I paid for your field trip.”
He shrugs. “That was for the field trip. I want cash.”
I roll my eyes. “What in the world do you need cash for?”
He flops on his unmade bed. “I just need it.” He digs in his backpack and hands me a wrinkled worksheet. Fractions. Adding with different denominators. He’s scribbled numbers that make no sense on paper. He’s not bad at math, he just doesn’t care.
“Okay. What do you do first?” I ask, pointing at question one.
“Find the common bottom number.”
I nod. “Lowest common denominator.”
He rolls his eyes. “Lowest. Common. Bottom. Number.” He fidgets with his hands.
“Whatever, Bear, do the problem.”
He does the problem. He gets it right. He pretends to think harder about the next one than he needs to.
“That one’s much easier,” I say to him.
He scoffs. “Because you’re a math genius.”
I shake my head. “Not literally. That’s just something mom says. I just worked hard to understand it, and I swear it’s easy once you get it. Numbers never change.”
He stares at the paper, ignoring me and continuing the problem. He pauses partway through the third one. “Do you think Mom’s going to marry Tyr?”
I look at him, heart racing. “What? I don’t know, Bear. If she did, it would be a while from now.”
He thinks about that for a second. Then he goes back to the worksheet. “He’s been here a lot.”
“How long have you been keeping this a secret?”
“I don’t know.”
He works through the problem. A minute later, without looking up, “Mom said Tyr is a Norse god.”
“A Norse god?” I ask.
He nods. “I looked it up. He’s the god of war.”
“Wow, well, I hope he doesn’t live up to his name.”
