by Don Aker
His mom let him work off some steam before she spoke again. “It’s not like you have a choice, you know.”
Jared turned to her, a pleading note in his voice now. “I’ll get extra help from Mr. Keaton every day from now on,” he said. “I’ll do extra homework. I’ll…I’ll…”
His mother shook her head. “I’ve heard all those promises before, and look where they’ve gotten you. Right here, my friend.” She sighed. “Look, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. All kinds of people have trouble with math. Your father did.”
Jared shot her a look that would have wilted flowers, then kept walking. A dead-beat dad who had run out on them when Jared was four wasn’t an example that would make anyone feel like cheering. He scowled even more darkly.
His mother seemed to realize her mistake and tried another tack. “Mr. Keaton didn’t say it was for all year. Just until you get a better handle on things.”
Jared grunted. Nothing she could say was going to make him feel better.
“Okay,” she said, “I didn’t want to do this, but you’ve forced me into it. No tutor, no tryout.”
Jared whirled to face her. “You can’t do that!”
“Just watch me, buster. Remember when you wanted to join soccer? Cornwallis students need a parent to sign a permission form if they want to join a team. And the last time I checked, I was the only one still around.”
Jared’s mother kept walking, her head held high. Jared recognized that walk. Once his mother squared her shoulders and straightened her back like an iron rail, there was no swaying her.
For the very first time, a part of him hoped he didn’t make Jamieson’s team.
Steve couldn’t have been more sympathetic. After he’d stopped laughing, that is. Two seconds after Jared shared Mr. Keaton’s news about who’d be tutoring him, Steve was on his back on Jared’s lawn, rocking back and forth, holding his stomach as he cackled and snorted. Even Cal was looking at Steve like he’d lost his mind.
“Thanks a lot.” Jared scowled when Steve finally choked back his laughter and crawled to his feet.
“Sorry, Jared. Really.” He wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, managed to make a couple more chuckles sound like hiccups, and then shook his head. “Out of all the people who are in that tutor program, why’d Keaton have to match you up with her?”
Steve was right. In a school of over five hundred sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders, surely there had to be at least one other tutor Jared could have worked with. “That’s what I wanted to know,” Jared grumbled. Since he hadn’t heard much else that Mr. Keaton had said during the meeting, he’d asked his mother that same question on the bus ride home. “Keaton says it’s because she’s the absolute best math student he’s ever had,” Jared told Steve. He shook his head, self-pity settling firmly on both his shoulders. “Which, I guess, means I’m the absolute worst math student he’s ever had.” He kicked dispiritedly at the grass, which had yellowed during one of the driest falls on record. Apparently, he thought, there were records for everything. Including bad luck. And the winner is…
“But you’re still tryin’ out for the Cougars, right?” When Jared didn’t answer, Steve moved around to face him. “Look, this is a rotten break, but you ain’t gonna throw away the tryouts, are you?” He waited another moment. “‘Cause that’d be the dumbest thing ever, right?”
Jared stared at the ground. Hadn’t he already proven to everyone just how dumb he was? Now the idea of getting tutored by Ellie Brejovic cranked “dumb” up a couple of notches to a whole new level. He could just imagine the looks on people’s faces when that piece of information got around, could see Rafe Wells and his buddies sniggering about it, making stupid remarks loud enough for Jared to hear.
Like Jared had done last Saturday in the deli.
“Yeah,” Jared replied, almost to himself, “that’d be pretty dumb all right.”
Steve clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Cheer up. It could be worse.”
“How?”
Steve’s smile faltered. He had no answer for that question.
CHAPTER 6
“Look,” Jared muttered the following afternoon, “I figure we gotta do this just till the basketball tryouts are over. But as soon as Jamieson posts the roster and I ain’t on it, we’re quits. You got that?”
Ellie Brejovic shrugged. “Look, I’m only doing this for my extracurricular credit.”
So that’s how you’re gonna get it, Jared thought. At my expense. Just great.
“So the sooner we’re through,” Ellie continued, “the better.”
Jared raised his eyebrows. Those were the most words Ellie had ever spoken to him at one time, even counting last year, when they were in grade five together and had been assigned to the same group to research volcanoes. Except everyone in the group just sat back and let Ellie do all the work. Along with typing a five-page report (complete with footnotes), designing a detailed poster illustrating the life cycle of a typical volcano, and recording an audiotape with sounds of volcanic activity she’d downloaded off the Internet, Ellie built a scale model of Mount St. Helens, showing what the mountain looked like before and after its surprise eruption in 1980. All by herself. Jared and the other three group members chatted and fooled around and pretty much just enjoyed themselves. And accepted the A+ their teacher gave to all of them.
“Yeah, well, just so you know, okay?” He’d agonized the whole day about their after-school meeting, dreading that Ellie might turn around in her seat in class and make some comment to him about it. Fortunately, she hadn’t, and he wanted to make sure she knew the ground rules for these sessions. His ground rules.
He stepped back and opened the kitchen door wider to let her in. He poked his head out just long enough to see whether anyone had noticed her, then ducked back inside. Not, however, before he saw Steve flash him a thumbs-up from his kitchen window. Jared saw the tip of Cal’s tail wagging beside Steve. After promising he’d never breathe a word about Ellie coming to Jared’s house, Steve had offered to keep the dog out of their hair during the tutorial session. Unlike normal dogs, who growled at people they didn’t know, Cal tended to slobber over strangers.
“Where do we do this?” Ellie asked. Straight to the point. She was still holding her bookbag (loaded, Jared suspected, with tutor torture-tools), waiting for him to tell her where she could put it.
He ignored the temptation to say what sprang to his mind. “There,” he said, pointing at the kitchen table.
Ellie took off her jacket, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
Jared’s mother was in the spare bedroom. Although it was little more than a closet with a window, she used the room as an office, where she kept important papers and files. She’d been in there nearly half an hour balancing her bankbook and writing cheques to pay at least some of their bills, and Jared now heard her close the drawer of the small filing cabinet. A moment later, she appeared in the doorway. “Hello, Ellie. I’m Jared’s mom.”
“Hi,” Ellie said. Nothing else. It was as if, knowing the arrangement was temporary, she didn’t need to bother being friendly. Or didn’t know how.
But Jared knew her abruptness wouldn’t faze his mother, who had told him half a dozen times how grateful she was—as he should be—that Mr. Keaton had set up the tutoring. And the fact that it was free was a welcome bonus for her bank account. “I want to thank you for doing this,” his mother said. “Jared can really use the help.”
“Right,” Ellie said. A silence followed, during which Jared sadly contemplated Ellie’s large bookbag.
“Mr. Keaton speaks very highly of you,” his mother continued, and Jared groaned inwardly. He knew his mother all right, had heard from her co-workers, who stopped by now and then, how she could thaw even the most aloof patients. She wouldn’t give up until she’d made some sort of connection with Ellie.
This time it worked. Ellie softened. “He’s a great teacher,” she said shyly.
Apparently satisfied at l
ast, Jared’s mother said, “Well, I’ll leave the two of you alone. If you get hungry, there’s fruit on the counter, and juice is in the fridge.” She returned to her tiny office.
Jared expected Ellie to make some comment about the fridge, an ancient flea-market purchase that shuddered each time the compressor kicked in and wheezed constantly until it shut off, but Ellie said nothing. Instead, she reached into her bookbag and pulled out the math binder Mr. Keaton had everyone keep. Unlike Jared’s, Ellie’s binder was up-to-date and organized. And neat. She opened it to page one.
Jared glanced at the clock on the wall and sighed.
“Hour’s up,” Jared said, nodding toward the clock. He’d been watching the minute hand crawl toward five o’clock while Ellie played with bingo chips.
Jared had never seen bingo chips before, only those daubers that people marked their game cards with, but somewhere Ellie had found a package of small plastic discs that apparently were used in pre-dauber times. Some were red and some were blue, and Ellie had been using them to show Jared how to add positive and negative numbers, which Mr. Keaton had done a lesson on that day.
Jared had understood since fourth grade how people needed something besides positive numbers to show things like below-zero temperatures and overdrawn bank accounts—he’d certainly seen his mother’s negative bank balance enough times to know the significance of that. But he’d gotten confused when he tried to combine both positive and negative figures. Mr. Keaton had shown the class how to use a number line to do this, but several times Jared got lost making his pencil jump back and forth on the line he had drawn in his binder. After he’d done almost the entire page of homework wrong, Ellie had pulled bingo chips out of her bookbag and told Jared to think of the blue ones as negative numbers and the red ones as positive. Then she’d shown him how one blue and one red combined to make zero. He’d felt like an idiot moving the plastic chips around on the table, and he was so bored he’d tried to use mind control to move the clock’s minute hand ahead faster. It didn’t work, and their first sixty-minute session had seemed like six hours. Finally, though, it was over.
As if on cue, Jared’s mother reappeared. “Would you like to stay for supper, Ellie?” she asked. “The least I can do is make you a meal for all your help.”
Jared frowned at the prospect of spending even more time with Ellie, and once again tried mind control, this time to make the girl voice the words he wanted to hear.
“No, thanks,” she said.
Yes! thought Jared. It worked!
Ellie gathered up her materials and began packing her bag. She seemed to want to leave as much as Jared wanted her out the door. A couple of the bingo chips fell to the floor, and Jared reached down to get them. Ellie stooped to get the chips at exactly the same moment, and their heads bonked together with a sound like coconuts colliding. For a moment Jared saw stars, and he was surprised when Ellie didn’t even say “ow.” Thick skull, he thought.
Thankfully, minutes later she was gone.
His mother reached into the fridge and took out a package of boneless chicken breasts while Jared cleared away his math homework and set the table. “So, how’d it go?” she asked as she began slicing the chicken into strips. The question seemed casual, but Jared could tell she was dying for details.
He sniffed. “Okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Mom!”
“All right, all right,” she said. “This is me minding my own business.” She finished slicing the chicken and placed the pieces in a baking pan, then slid the pan into the oven. “I’m just glad you’re taking this tutoring seriously.” He could hear her humming as she got carrots and potatoes out of the crisper.
Taking this tutoring seriously. Yeah, right. Like it would do any good anyway. He spied another bingo chip on the floor and scowled. Reaching down, he scooped it up, looked at it for a moment, then tossed it toward the wastebasket on the other side of the kitchen. It landed squarely in the centre and, for the thousandth time, he wished he could do math as easily as he could sink a shot. Then he wouldn’t have to put up with Smelly Ellie Brejovic and these after-school sessions. She’d have to find some other math victim to earn her extracurricular credit with.
He smiled grimly. At least Coach Jamieson’s tryouts began in two days. Once they were over, he’d put an end to this tutoring crap for good.
CHAPTER 7
“So, how’d things go with Ellie?” Steve asked under his breath on the bus to school the next morning. “Learn anything?”
“That they didn’t always use bingo daubers,” Jared replied.
“Huh?”
Jared shrugged. “Nothin’. It was a waste of time. Just like I knew it would be.”
Steve shook his head. “Sorry, buddy.”
“Don’t be. At least I won’t have to do it for long.”
They rode in silence for a while before Steve spoke again. “So, what was it like workin’ with her? She hard to talk to?”
“As long as she was talkin’ math, she was fine. Believe me, we didn’t talk about anything else. She’s a walkin’ textbook, man.”
“But she didn’t help you any?” Steve asked.
Jared sighed and turned toward the window. “When it comes to math, even a walkin’ textbook can’t help me.”
The bus pulled to a stop in front of the school. Before heading off in different directions toward their homerooms, Steve and Jared made plans to meet, as usual, on the outdoor basketball courts at lunchtime.
The main entrance of Cornwallis Middle School, the one closest to Keaton’s classroom, reminded Jared of a lighthouse. The architect had created a three-storey atrium with windows from floor to ceiling that captured both morning and afternoon sunlight. On fine days, light flooded the entrance and the corridors that stretched beyond it. Last winter, Jared’s mom had bought a million-candlepower rechargeable flashlight that, she once joked, could sear the retinas of an eagle. Stepping inside the atrium on a bright day was like suddenly being trapped inside that beam. It always took a few seconds for Jared’s dazzled eyes to adjust.
“Hey, Jared.”
He turned to see Samantha Solomon and Erica Long-mire standing next to their lockers. They were in 6C, the class across the hall from his, and although Jared didn’t know them well, they always made a point of saying hi. They giggled and blushed a lot and usually talked about things he wasn’t much interested in—clothes, hair colour—but at least they could talk about something besides math.
“Hey,” Jared returned.
“I heard you’re gonna try out for the Cougars tomorrow,” said Erica.
Jared nodded. “Don’t imagine I’ll make the cut but, yeah, I’m gonna try.”
Samantha lightly brushed his arm with her fingertips. “Oh, I think you’ve got a great chance, Jared. You’re a natural. We’ve watched you on the courts at lunchtime.”
It was Jared’s turn to blush. “Um…thanks.” He hadn’t realized he’d had an audience.
“And you’ve been playin’ some great soccer, too,” Samantha continued. “I’ve been to all your games.” She touched his arm again, this time letting her hand linger a moment before pulling it away.
Jared felt his ears turn pink He might be a natural on the soccer field and basketball court, but he was a novice when it came to talking to girls. He groped for something to say.
“Geek alert,” Erica said.
For a moment, Jared thought she was talking about him, and he flushed again. But then he turned in the direction she was looking and saw Ellie coming down the hallway, her bookbag seemingly twice as heavy as everyone else’s. He stifled a groan.
“Pu-leeze,” said Samantha behind her raised hand, “how many books does a person need at one time?”
Erica snickered, the sound thin and brittle in the near-empty hallway.
They watched as Ellie came toward them, her eyes focused on some spot just in front of her face. She didn’t even glance at the three as she passed by and turned into Mr. K
eaton’s classroom. But there was no way she could have missed hearing Erica’s next remark. “That one takes nerd to a whole new level.”
Jared snorted along with Samantha at the comment, anxious to show the girls that, while Ellie Brejovic and he might be classmates, they certainly weren’t friends. He’d worried all night about what this morning might bring. He’d worried that people might somehow find out about the tutoring. He’d worried that Mr. Keaton might ask him in front of the others how things had gone, even though the tutoring was supposed to be confidential. He’d even worried that Ellie might expect him to talk to her about it at school. He hadn’t slept much.
Well, at least now he didn’t think he had to worry about Ellie talking to him about it.
Jared stayed chatting with the two girls until the warning bell rang, pretending to be interested in the fake fingernails Erica had just gotten at Top-to-Toe, a new beauty boutique at the mall. Jared actually thought the nails looked a little creepy—he couldn’t imagine Erica being able to brush her teeth with them on, let alone play her flute in band or take part in gym class—but even listening to her ramble on about fake fingernails was better than going to his classroom any sooner than absolutely necessary.
He slipped in the door just as the final bell rang. Sitting at his computer, Mr. Keaton glanced at his watch and frowned. “I almost recorded you as absent, Jared. Two more seconds and I’d have e-mailed your name to the office.”
“Sorry,” Jared said as he moved quickly toward his seat.
Ellie, sitting at the desk in front of his, didn’t look up as he passed.
“Negative five?” Jared offered tentatively. He hated being put on the spot during math period, and he’d kept his face down and pretended to be calculating when Mr. Keaton asked for volunteers to evaluate the integer question on the board. But Keaton didn’t always wait for students to volunteer, and Jared was the first person he’d called on.