“Stat 215?”
“Stat 215.”
She exhales hard into the phone. I hear her sit down on something. Through the wall, I can hear Stanley laughing at something.
“G, it’s two hours a week. We’re going to be talking about math.”
“I cannot do this again.”
There it is. I close my eyes and inhale. She’s terrified that I’m going to fuck things up like I did in high school. Funny thing is that was four years ago. You’d think she’d move on by now.
“G. Nobody is doing anything.”
“You don’t get it.”
“I do get it.”
“You don’t, Benson. You don’t. You walk into rooms and people — you do a thing. You don’t even know you’re doing it. I’m not letting it happen with Lucy.”
I stare at the ground in disbelief. She’s making this big of a deal out of this. It’s tutoring for crying out loud.
“She’s had a hard year. I’m not going to be the person who hands her to you and watches her get—” She stops. She does not finish that one either. When she speaks again her voice is smaller. “Just promise me you’ll tone it down.”
“Tone what down?”
“All of it. The captain thing. The voice. The whole — the whole Benson Reeve thing. Bring sixty percent.”
“I’ll be normal, G.”
“Listen to her. She’s really good at math. Let her teach you. Don’t — don’t make it a thing.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it.”
She is quiet for a long stretch, and I let her have it. Stanley is still laughing downstairs. The white wall in front of me has a small chip in the paint near the doorframe that I have been looking at for the last three minutes.
“I’ll talk to you later, G. It’ll be fine.”
“Don’t be weird.”
“I won’t be weird.”
“Don’t captain her. I’m serious. Love ya.”
“Love ya too.”
She ends the call.
I stand in the living room with the phone in my hand. My sister has spent three years keeping her roommate as far away from me as possible, and I have been on the other end of every one of those years watching her do it and not knowing how to fix it.
I make my way back to the kitchen, catching the framed photo that Rowan put up last year — all of us Hawthorne House boys at a tailgate before it got cold. Stanley has Blue in a headlock. Percy is looking at the camera like he is being forced to be there, which he was. I am in the middle, not laughing, but doing the thing my dad does in photos where his mouth is closed. Rowan took it on a timer and ran into frame at the end and got there exactly one second late, so there is just a blur of him on the right that is, I think, the funniest part of the picture. I look at it for a second, knowing these are the best years of our lives. Hence why Stanley is passionate about keeping our house rules. He’s trying to preserve these times.
“Reeve.” Stanley’s voice comes from the kitchen. He walks to the TV and grabs a remote controller. I can hear the FIFA menu music starting up.
Rowan says, “No, I’m not playing. I have to do the dishes.”
