I flip up the corner of the page. In tiny handwriting, he’s written another note, but this one is slanted and rushed, like a quick note to himself.
brown hair
Short
Pretty
I look up and find Jonah staring at his hands. His cheeks are pink and he’s clearly mortified that I saw his note to himself. I hand the notebook back to him and then sit in my chair.
“Thank you,” he says quietly as he reaches for a math textbook. “We can start with math, since that’s often the hardest subject. After this, the other subjects will feel easy.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t let this go,” I say, leaning back in the padded library chair. He looks at me, lifting an eyebrow. “You think I’m pretty?”
His ears turn redder than a stop sign and he looks down at the textbook in front of him. “We should focus on schoolwork.”
“Come on, Jonah,” I say, nudging him in the shoulder. “That note was about me, right? You probably wrote it after Mrs. Reese showed you my picture as a way to remember what I looked like?”
His jaw works but he doesn’t say anything. He also doesn’t look at me, choosing rather to stare at page 312 in the book. “Can we please get started on the work?” he asks, still not looking at me.
“Fiiiine,” I say with a sigh. “I’ll drop it. It’s just that no one’s ever called me pretty before so—”
His head snaps up, his eyes shining with disbelief. “That’s not true.”
“Uh, yeah it is,” I say sarcastically even though this topic makes my chest hurt. “I think I would know.”
Some of his initial embarrassment has faded away, now replaced with pure skepticism. “There’s no way you’ve gone your whole life without being called pretty.”
I nod quickly. “I’m serious. I mean, okay, maybe my mom has said it once or twice, but she doesn’t count. As far as guys go, it’s never happened.”
I cast a glance at his notebook. “Unless you know, you want to admit you wrote that note about me.”
His bottom lip pulls under this teeth. “I bet every guy in this school thinks you’re pretty. If you haven’t heard anyone say it, you’re just not listening. Probably the same way you don’t listen to teachers in class.”
Something in the way he makes this bold statement, all matter-of-factly and with no hesitation at all, makes my stomach flutter. I meant it when I said I’ve never heard those words from a guy before. One time last year I was wearing leggings with a shirt that wasn’t long enough to cover my ass and Jeremy Rodriguez yelled out, “Damn, Natalie! That ass is fine!” But in no way shape or form is that considered being called pretty.
“Well, believe me or not,” I say with a shrug. “No guy has ever told me that, so your note has totally made my day, whether you wanted me to see it or not.”
He clears his throat and focuses back on the task at hand. “So…math first?”
I shrug. “It’s up to you. You’re the smart one out of this duo.”
“Math it is. In two weeks, you’ll be having a cumulative test over the third quarter lessons in the book, so I printed out a few practice exams. I figure we can go over them together and whichever ones you have trouble with will tell us what to focus on studying.”
He talks quickly, his lesson plan already mapped out before we sat down today. After going over his plans for math with me, he moves to chemistry and history, where he’s put together study plans just like this one.
I watch him silently as he tells me all about the lessons and practice exams and gives me insight on how my teachers grade the midterms which are coming up soon. It blows my mind how smart he is, and we haven’t even officially started studying yet.
He’s still talking, reciting several pre-cal equations out loud as he writes them down on a sheet of paper. I try to focus, but I can’t help myself.
“Does it hurt your brain being this smart?” I say between watching him write one equation to the next.
His dark eyebrows pull together. “I don’t know how to answer that.”
“You’re incredibly smart, Jonah. My brain hurts just listening to you talk. Surely your brain hurts, too, doing all that thinking?”
He shakes his head, looking at the paper in front of him. I’ve noticed that a lot about the last half an hour we’ve been working together. If he can look at his paper instead of me, he does. I wonder if he thinks I’mpretty, pretty, or just normal pretty. Just like he wrote the word pretty to mean I wasn’t some hideous monster roaming the hallways.
“My brain feels fine, Natalie.” He covers up the top part of the paper. “Can you recite to me the quadratic formula? Mrs. Mafi gives five extra points if you write it on the top of your test.”
