“Mel,” I sighed. “He won’t want to tutor me.”
“He personally told you that?”
“Well, no,” I said. “But like he has his job and everything. Also, I’m not just a little bad at this. I’m pretty bad.”
“Sounds like you need a tutor,” she said smugly.
“Notthattutor.”
“And why not?” she asked, a challenge in her voice. She started to beat her egg mixture again. I stared at her for a second, trying to figure out what she was doing.
Clearly, my feelings for Luke were one of the few things we never spoke outright about, and after that weird afternoon when Mel and Naomi were high, I didn’t see this changing. Mel had never done anything to discourage my crush, but she had also never done anything toencourage it. Unless that stuffed polar bear from the Dog Days Fair counted. Did it?
That one moment of distraction resulted in flour blowing in my face, and I used my hand to fan it away.
“Why does it have to be Luke?” I asked now, using his name for the first time in our conversation.
“Oh! That’s who you meant? Luke?MyLuke?” She was in a theatrical mood today.
When I rolled my eyes, Mel cackled. “Why does it have tonotbe Luke?”
Because he was easily the smartest person I knew. Right from the moment I’d met him, a then-bespectacled eight-year-old, I’d always been so aware of how much he knew that I didn’t. About the water cycle and grubs and why thunder always came with lightning.
“I’m not trying to look stupid,” I admitted.
Mel’s expression got serious then. She took my chin and forced me to look at her. Her thumb brushed something I assumed was flour off the tip of my nose. “Not being the best at something doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you human.”
Growing up, Mel would let us get away with saying almost any word, butstupidhad always been off-limits.
“Fine, then I’m not trying to lookunintelligent.”
Mel sighed. “Anybody who thinks you’re unintelligent is stupid.”
Done with the flour now, I hopped on the counter and watched her continue to work. “Moms have to say that, even if it’s not true,” I said.
“Only to their own kids,” Mel argued. “So when I say it to you, I mean it.”
I laughed. “But not when you say it to Ro and Luke?”
One of the things I loved best about Mel when I first met her was the way she rarely distinguished between me and the boys. We were “you kids” or “the gang.” Little reminders that I wasn’t one of them used to feel like a punch in the chest, and as if she knew it, Mel made sure to steer clear of them. She made nothing of the fact that our skin colors were different. She didn’t even acknowledge some of the odd looks we got in Winchester, which wasn’t the most diverse of towns. It didn’t matter that we didn’t share the same genes. If anything, I was specialbecauseI wasn’t Mel’s child. She’d chosen me. Ro would sometimes even jokingly call me just that—“the chosen one.”
Now Mel smiled. “Pleading the Fifth on that. So, Luke will tutor you, okay?”
I sighed. “What if he says no?”
“Who said anything about asking him?” Mel said. “If I ask, it’ll be a Thing. Mom made me do this, blah blah blah.” Her deep barrel-voiced imitation of Teenage Boy sounded nothing like Luke, and I burst out laughing.
“It’s better to just put it out in the universe and see what happens,” she said.
I didn’t understand what she meant until a few minutes later, when Luke got home. I thought he’d been at work, so I expected him to be in his blue polo and black slacks, but he was in a pair of jogging shorts and a T-shirt that clung to his chest, his curls wet with sweat.
He raised his hand to us in greeting, went to the sink, and gulped down a glass of water. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and I tried to act indifferent under Mel’s watchful eye.
I shouldn’t have worried, though. She was preoccupied with her own plans.
“So, what’s the thing you’re struggling with the most right now?” she asked me out of nowhere. We hadn’t talked about math for several minutes, but by the look she gave me, I knew what she was referring to. “Derogatory units? Derivements?”
“Derivatives?” I offered, confused. Like Mel didn’t know the wordderivative.
