“Are you sending your mom money again?” Gianna asks, peeking at my screen.
I look up from my phone and then turn the screen off. “It’s for Bear.”
“For what?” she presses.
“A field trip.”
She nods her head but doesn’t say anything more.
When I get up, she gets up too. We walk out of the dining hall and across the south lawn to the library steps.
“Text me after,” she says.
“I will.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce you to him before. He tends to take all my friends, and I didn’t want that to happen with you.”
I offer a sympathetic grin. “That’s not going to happen, G.”
She grins. “I know. You’re not his type.”
I shake my head. “Nope. My skirts touch the ground, so definitely not.”
We both laugh at that.
“Hot pink,” she whispers, rolling her eyes. She makes a disgusted sound, and then she hugs me. It’s brief and one-armed, the I-will-see-you-later hug.
Then she’s walking back across the lawn in her Wolves polo, and I am turning toward the doors of the library. I push through them, and the air conditioning hits me like a wall. The silence of any library is the only silence on earth that lowers my heart rate.
I walk through the bookstore first and find a fresh notebook for him, college-ruled, blue cover. I have washi tape in my bag that I will label with his name, and for a moment, I consider it might seem inappropriate. I have done this for most of my tutoring students, but it’s going to be different this time since he is Gianna’s brother. I quiet that thought and buy it anyway.
The third floor of the Camden U library is my second home. I know which study room has the projector that works and which one has the dry-erase markers that have all dried out. I know that Study Room 3B has a window that faces north, which means it doesn’t get hot in the afternoon, and that the chair on the door side of the table has a wobble in the back left leg if you lean on it.
I have tutored in 3B at least a dozen times.
I sit down in the door-facing chair at 1:04 p.m., and I unpack my bag on the table. I spread the materials out in the order I need to study. I had to dig for my sophomore-year Stat 215 notes this morning, which are, I will say without modesty, immaculate.
I pull out the fresh notebook for him. Two pencils. Not one. Always two. Athletes Camdenk pencils. A calculator. Not the cheap one. The TI-84. Highlighters in pink, yellow, and green. Sticky tabs. A printout of the syllabus, which I downloaded from the public class page. I know I’m not supposed to have it, but noone polices. I look at it all laid out before me. I am profoundly overprepared. I know I am, but I don’t care. Overpreparing is, and has been since I was small, the way I move through the world without falling over.
I look at the clock above the whiteboard. I have two hours and forty-nine minutes.
I let myself, briefly, recall the athletes. I do this in part to reassure myself. Coach Kowalski’s football kid sophomore year, who could not, in the most fundamental sense, read a graph. He could see the lines but couldn’t determine which axis was which, no matter how many times I labeled them, even after I got out the colored pencils. The basketball forward who got it after twenty minutes and was, after that, frankly delightful, asked good questions, sent me a thank-you email at the end of the semester. The wrestler who flirted, whom I told, mildly, please stop, and was professional after that. The soccer midfielder who, at our fourth session, in March, looking at a problem about limits, started to cry — not sobbing, just leaking quietly, because he was so tired and he didn’t understand and he hadn’t slept. I sat with him for ten minutes. He aced the final. He sent me flowers. I cried about that one in my room.
Athletes are, in my professional and considered statistical opinion, as dumb as socks. Some of them. Most of them. Many of them. I am a mathematician, and I am allowed to make bounded probabilistic claims.
I am bracing for Benson Reeve to be the same. I’m putting on the patience-armor I don’t actually have but have to force upon myself.
At two-thirty, my hands aren’t quite shaking yet, but I can feel the twitching in my bones. I hate that the past three years have done this to me. I don’t endorse this kind of reaction ever, if at all. And I hate that my body’s reacting this way, like I don’t have enough on my plate.
I decide to go get another coffee. I tell myself it’ll help. Coffee has never, in the history of my life, helped. And I know coffee Camdenth isn’t the best, but I don’t want to be stuttering over my words. Plus, it’ll give me something to do with my hands when he comes here.
I leave 3B unlocked, which is fine — the library knows me, and the swim team girl who tutors out of 3C waved at me earlier, she’ll keep an eye — and I take the stairs down.
The student union is across the quad. The walk is not helping my nerves. A group of girls go past me laughing about somebody named Chris. A kid is selling something out of a folding table for a club I cannot see the name of. The dining hall has its vent on. The smell from the vent is institutional macaroni.
The coffee place is full. The line has six people. I get behind a girl in a sorority sweatshirt who is on FaceTime with her mom. I think about leaving, but I’m already here, so I have to commit. The girl in front of me tells her mom that she can’t wait to receive her things in the mail, thanks her mom, and then hangs up. The line moves.
When I get to the front, the barista smiles at me. His name is Matty. “Lucy, hey. Usual?”
