by K. R. Grace
He scratched his head as he tried to grasp what he thought I was suggesting.
“Go with whatever you think is best.”
“What are you saying? Is this focusing on Implicit Differentiation and Logarithmic Differentiation? Because I don’t think we’ve gotten to that yet. It wouldn’t make sense to do that here, would it?”
He was losing it before my eyes. I had no idea how to undo the mess I’d just made by a few short words and decided to just show him my work. “Here, this is what I did.”
His eyes darted back and forth as he took it all in, nodding and making hmm noises. “That’s what I wanted to do in the first place! Why did you make me second-guess myself?” His pencil flew across the page as he scribbled out his work, a deep scowl on his face.
I gnawed on my lip, trying to figure out how to rectify the situation.
By the time he’d finished, his plaid shirt had come untucked from his pants, and he had pencil smudges on his cheek from where he’d scratched it with the side of his hand that had rubbed over his work.
“Time’s up!” Ms. Ryan called out. “Group one, you’re up.”
“I see what you were doing. You wanted me to walk through the other options before settling on the first to come to mind. Good thinking. Looking ahead while staying in the present. Smart,” he whispered as he wrote something down in his notes.
I nodded absentmindedly as I listened to Aidan and his partner Clarice Quillen go through their problem.
The longer the class went on, the more I was convinced I’d broken Benton. He kept muttering under his breath as he made chicken scratch notes on the front and back of three pages of his notebook. Finally, when it was our turn to go up to the board, I let him do all the writing while I did the talking. Ms. Ryan commended us for doing a flawless job, and the ordeal was over. Or so I thought.
After the bell rang, I stood to gather my things and was surprised to find Benton standing right next to me. “Can I call you tonight to go over this again? Now that I think about it, we could’ve used Implicit and Logarithmic Differentiations in that problem.”
I pondered on his question for longer than I cared to admit before shrugging. “Sure, if you think it’ll help, but I really think our answer was the only possible answer for that problem.”
“I’ll call you sometime between seven and eight.” He nodded determinedly.
“I may be busy tonight. We’ll play it by ear,” I said casually, acting like I didn’t really care whether or not he called.
“Oh, well, I understand. It’s fine. Really.”
The way Benton responded to my attempt at playing hard to get reminded me of a rat experiment I’d seen on television once. Every day the scientist put the rat’s cheese in the same place, until one day he moved the feeding location. The rat showed up at the usual spot and panicked when it found the cheese wasn’t there. It ran around in circles, knocking its head against the side of the cage as it frantically searched for its beloved cheese. It starved itself to death because it was too focused on panicking over the lost cheese to realize the cheese was on the other side of the cage the whole time.
Rather than confess my rotten luck to the gang when I joined them outside in the parking lot around Cam’s SUV, I smiled and acted like I’d had the best day ever.
“So, everyone’s coming Saturday except Reese and maybe Macey, right? I have to give a final list of names to the festival director today.” Morgan asked.
“I’m sorry I messed up your chance of seeing Freesong play in their first music festival,” Reese said as she nudged me.
“I need the money. It’s all good.” I shrugged it off.
“Still, I’m sorry.”
If I was honest with myself, I was bummed I was missing Cam’s big performance. This was what he’d been working toward for so long, and it sucked that I wasn’t going to see his dream come true.
“Hate to break it up, guys, but Mom will kill me if I’m late picking up Clay again,” I said as I tossed my bag into the backseat of Cam’s car.
Those were the magic words, because before I knew it, everyone had dispersed to their rides, and Cam and I were on our way to the middle school.
The rest of the afternoon was uneventful. Cam dropped us off at the house before going to pick up his little sister, Winter, from her after-school program. Clay rushed through his homework before parking it in front of the TV to play FIFA while I worked on my English research paper comparing the levels of hell in Dante’s Inferno to reality TV shows.
On nights like this when Mom and Dad both worked late, I either reheated something she’d put in the freezer for such occasions or ordered pizza. Because I honestly didn’t feel like fooling with the oven, I ordered a large pepperoni pizza and cheese bread. When the doorbell rang thirty minutes later, I heard Clay run through the house and fling the door open like he was a man in the desert and the pizza delivery person held the sole source of water.
I hurried out of my room and down the steps with a twenty in my hand only to come to a screeching halt when I found Benton standing on my front porch, waving off the delivery person.
“I didn’t pay for it yet. Stop him!” I cried as I rushed past him to flag the driver down.
“Don’t worry. I covered it and left a nice tip,” Benton said from behind me.
I spun around to look at him. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Eh, consider it payment for a tutoring session.”
“Tutoring session?”
I followed him into the house, closing and locking the front door behind me. My brain was scrambling to figure out what he was doing here and why he thought a simple phone call wouldn’t have been enough.
“No offense, Benton, but I don’t remember agreeing to meet up tonight.”
“Well, I figured if you are busy here, then I could come to you. There’s so much to do and so little time to do it.”
Clay swept the pizza and cheese bread away from Benton’s grasp without saying a word and charged into the kitchen.
“We were just about to eat, obviously. Would you like anything?” I asked, remembering my manners.
“No, thank you. I ate before I came. You eat your food and I will work on my conversational Spanish homework.”
Clay spun his finger in a circular motion by his ear behind Benton’s back, letting me know I wasn’t the only one who thought Benton was acting strange. It was hard to digest my food properly with Benton sitting at the kitchen table spouting off Spanish to his phone. Clay and I kept giving each other odd looks, and after only eating two slices of pizza, Clay claimed to be full and disappeared back into the living room. I knew my little brother, and the second Benton was gone, he’d be all over the leftovers until there was nothing left but crust.
I wiped my face with a napkin to make sure I didn’t have pizza sauce on my face before turning to Benton.
“So, you think you need some help with AP calculus, huh?”
He dropped his phone on the floor at the sudden break in what had been awkward silence and dived under the table to retrieve it. The table jerked violently as he rammed his head up against the underside of it. I clasped my hands together in front of me as a way to maintain composure and waited for him to right himself. He rubbed at the spot on the back of his head where he’d obviously made contact before straightening his shirt and clearing his throat.
“Yes, since I know you’re ahead of the class, I wanted you to look over my answers and make sure I’m doing it right.”
“No offense, Benton, but you’re probably the smartest guy in the class. Why do you think you need a tutor?”
“This class determines whether or not I’m cut out for med school. Everything rides on this class. You were so confident in your answer, and I need that confidence.”
Did he seriously think a high school class was determinative of what he would be able to achieve in college? From everything Mom and Dad had taught me over the years, the main goal for high school was to do whatever neces
sary to get into a good college, and then undergrad performance determined grad school opportunities and so forth. The only reason he wasn’t in the running for valedictorian was because he’d taken one less AP course than me. Had he not been out with the flu on testing day, he’d easily beat me for the spot.
My gut instinct was to help him through his homework and then send him packing, but if I wanted to land a boyfriend for prom, I needed to play this situation to my advantage. Was Benton the best option out there? Probably not, if the day’s meltdown was any indication, but I never judged a book by its cover.
“Maybe I will help you. Maybe I won’t.” I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest in what I hoped was a seductive move.
“Oh, was paying for the pizza not enough?” he asked as he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet.
He pulled out several twenties and held them up for my inspection. “Will this cover it?”
I uncrossed my arms and sat up straight. “Put your money away, Benton. I was only joking.”
“Oh.” He frowned as he stowed away his money safely into his wallet and returned said wallet to his pants pocket.
“Then, you will help me?”
I nodded and took his notebook from him. He exhaled loudly before falling right into the longest rambling fest ever as he pointed out each problem he’d worked on and went through every step in answering the equation. I studied him, trying to figure him out. He seemed interested, but whenever I tried to string him along, he freaked out. Maybe I wasn’t going at it right.
Where was Wendi Cooper when I needed her?
The talking stopped and I realized I’d completely zoned out there for a minute. I glanced at Benton to see him staring at me expectantly. He’d obviously asked me a question, which I missed, and now I scrambled to think of a way to get him to repeat the question without cluing him in that I hadn’t been paying attention to anything he’d just said.
“I did it wrong. I see it in your eyes. I’m going to fail this class and not get into med school and end up living under a bridge.” He threw his hands up in the air. He sprang up from his chair and began to pace the length of the dining room and kitchen.
I looked down at his work and saw he had the same answers as I did. “No, that’s not what I was saying. You got it right, so there was nothing to say,” I said lamely.
“Sorry, this is just too much. I’m really feeling the pressure because early acceptance letters haven’t come in yet, and if I don’t get into Yale, I might as well kiss my hopes and dreams goodbye.”
He scooped up his things and dumped them all into his bag. I looked down at the table to realize the plate and cup that had been sitting on the table just moments ago was missing and ran after him as he bolted for the front door.
“Benton! Wait!” I called out.
He slammed to a halt at the door and turned to look at me with wild eyes. “Don’t try to tell me any differently, Macey. I know I’m losing it. I skipped out on yoga last night and it’s really showing today.”
I pointed at his bag. “I was just going to ask for Mom’s plate and cup back.”
He opened his bag and pursed his lips when he saw that he had indeed swiped Mom’s dishware. His head began nodding rapidly as he pulled the items out and handed them back to me.
“Yep, no bouncing back from that. Now, if you will excuse me, I’m going to go home and try to figure out how to find my center again.”
I closed the door behind him and made sure both the top and bottom locks were secure before collapsing against it.
“Well, that didn’t go as planned,” I muttered.
“What a whack job,” Clay said as he crossed the hall into the kitchen to retrieve the leftover pizza just like I’d known he’d do.
“Yeah, he certainly wasn’t acting like himself.”
“That’s bull shit,” he said around a mouth loaded with pizza, pausing in front of my with the pizza box in his hand.
“Mom will bench you if she hears you talking like that,” I warned as I yanked the pizza box away from him and followed him into the living room.
He tried to reach around me to grab it back, but I raised it up above my head to where he couldn’t reach. Might as well take advantage of being the taller one while I still could.
“It’s the truth, though. Everyone knows Benton sees Mom twice a week. He’s a nutcase.”
“Don’t call people that, Clay. It’s offensive,” I chastised to mask the fact I didn’t know he was one of Mom’s clients. That he saw Mom didn’t bother me. We could all benefit from time with a psychologist or counselor at some point in our lives. What bothered me was that I might’ve just caused him to have a setback because I’d been oblivious of the signs.
“Whatever,” Clay said before yanking the box out of my hands with a triumphant grin.
I went up to my room and closed the door before plopping facedown into the mountain of pillows on my bed. I sucked at this. Wendi Cooper would be ashamed of me.
Then something nagged at the back of my mind. Something I’d missed before. I flopped onto my back and stared up at the ceiling as I processed the new information.
I was the Leonard Hofstadter of Worthington Academy, which meant I was the nerd who dated the hot chick. Well, in my case, I was the girl nerd who was supposed to date the hot guy that everyone thought was out of my league. I was failing with the nerds because I wasn’t destined to date a nerd.
I bolted into an upright position and grabbed the notebook I had been using to document my progress.
At the top of a fresh page I wrote, “No more nerds. Only Jocks.” Because the quintessential opposite of a nerd was a jock.
There was just one problem with my new plan. I didn’t know any jocks. Needing some input, I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and called the only athletic person I knew: Reese.
Thankfully, she answered on the third ring. “You’ve got five minutes to talk before I’m called back to the floor,” she rasped, sounding out of breath. Obviously, I’d called her during gymnastics practice, which she had all the time these days.
“I need jocks.”
She laughed. “That’s funny. All the blood is pumping in my ears from the uneven bars. I thought I heard you say you needed jocks.”
“No, you heard correctly. I’m Leonard Hofstadter and I need jocks.”
“Do you realize how wrong that sounds?” Her voice cracked, indicating she thought I’d cracked.
“Roll with me here. I’m sort of the cool nerd, which means I need to date above my status. So, I need jocks.”
“Okay. Trace Rodriguez is single now, but you’re not really his type,” she said, referring to her fellow gymnast and openly gay friend.
“Yeah, he’d probably steal my thunder if I used him to go fishing for guys. Who else do you have?”
“Honestly, Macey, I can’t think of anyone who’d click with you. There are several guys on the football team who are always looking for a good time, but none of them are relationship material. I don’t know if there are any single guys on the baseball team right now, and you know I have no life and only socialize with you and the gang at the lunch table!” Which meant everything she’d just said before that last part was fabricated BS.
“I know. I’m sorry, Reese. You’re the only athlete I know, and I guess I figured all athletes traveled in the same circle.”
“I don’t participate in school sports, which separates me from that pack. Talk to Cam. Maybe he can steer you in the right direction.”
I snorted. “As if. He’d steer me off the cliff before helping me out. He wants to see me fail at this.”
“Maybe he has a point, Mace. High school guys are predators, and you’re too good to fall prey to them.”
“Thanks. Sorry I interrupted your practice,” I mumbled before hanging up on her. Why did everyone think I was this helpless little zebra just waiting to be turned into a lion’s dinner?
A heavy fist banged on my bedroom door as
Clay called out, “Coach Price wants me to stay later tomorrow. Mom said I had to ask you if it’s okay!”
“Sure, whatever!” I called back before throwing a pillow over my face to stifle my scream. Just what I needed: to spend another afternoon at the middle school soccer field waiting for Clay to wrap up the extra practice he needed because he sucked at soccer.
Five
3. If a Man Wanted a Parrot, He’d Buy the Bird
It was Friday afternoon, and while everyone else was already kicking off their weekends, I sat in the grass behind the middle school as I watched Clay run back and forth from one side of the field to the other. Colt Price, Clay’s assistant coach, stood a few yards away, constantly blowing into that dumb whistle I wanted to yank away from his mouth and destroy. Colt had been captain of the high school soccer team until he tore his ACL and had to sit out the rest of the season. Well, technically, he was never stripped of his title and attended all the games, but his high school career was over.
Colt was ridiculously tall and had that lean runner look about him. He kept his auburn hair cut short, and a lopsided grin made him look younger than eighteen. Until he kept blowing his dang whistle, I actually thought he was one of the more tolerable jocks.
“He’s improving,” the object of my observations said as he walked over to me, never taking his eyes off Clay. “Has more spirit than any other kid on the team.”
“Yeah, well, he comes by it honestly. Dad played basketball all throughout middle school and high school and never made a single basket.”
“He must’ve been good on defense like Clay,” Colt tossed back before yelling at Clay. “One more time!”
Clay’s shoulders slumped. He looked like he wanted to protest but thought better of it and picked up his pace.
“No, he sucked at that even more. Couldn’t stay upright if his life depended on it. In soccer, that has its advantages, but in basketball, all he ever did was get himself ejected for unsportsmanlike conduct.”