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“No prob.” He actually stood. Something his dad had taught him a long time ago.
“Sit, sit.” Waving him back to his chair, she swept around the desk and stopped on the far side to eye her chair.
Jesus, he’d forgotten to push it back under the desk.
Her neatly plucked brows puckered as she sat, scooting it closer to the computer monitor.
She knows! She can feel you were there.
He tried to keep cool as she adjusted her reading glasses onto her nose and typed quickly onto her keyboard. Beth2018Anne. At least that’s what it looked like.
That was her daughter’s name. Beth Anne! Now he remembered. And if the school required her to change the password every so often, he bet she just put in a different year or something and kept the letters the same . . . 2018, the year after Beth Anne had graduated? Who knew? And really, who cared?
She pressed her palms to the desktop. “How long have you been waiting?”
He lifted a shoulder, attempting to appear bored. “I dunno. Maybe a minute or so.”
“Hmm.” She didn’t believe him. But she kept typing. And now he could feel his shirt sticking to his back. “Okay, let’s see . . . I’ve been going over your records.” She glanced at him. “Not attendance, we’ve been through that, but performance.”
He felt a little tingle of dread raise the hairs on the back of his neck. What was this all about?
She eyed the screen, as if studying it for the first time, but Dylan figured this might be for show, that she already knew what she was going to say. “Since you started at Edgewater High last year, your grades have slowly declined.”
So what else was new?
“But your test scores? Not at all. They’re above grade level, especially in math and computer science.” Her eyebrows knit over her glasses and her mouth turned down. Another practiced look. “In fact, your schoolwork doesn’t come anywhere close to where your tests indicate you should be.”
She looked at him and he lifted a shoulder again. He got it; she was saying he was a slacker.
Turning away from the monitor, she leaned across the desk. “You know, Dylan, you have tremendous potential.”
Yeah, yeah, he’d heard it all before.
“In fact, Mr. Tallarico has requested you to be his TA in computer science next year. That’s a spot usually reserved for a senior.” She paused, waiting for a reaction, but he just slouched in his chair. “So why the disparity?” she asked, though he thought it was a rhetorical question. She really didn’t expect him to answer and he didn’t. Leaning back she asked, “How’re things going here, at school?”
“Okay.”
“No problem with friends, other than with Mr. Schmidt?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“What about at home?”
“What?”
“You live with your mother.” Not a question.
So here it was. The big D word. His parents were divorced. Which wasn’t a big deal; lots of his friends’ parents had split up.
“Most of the time, yeah.” He looked up and held her gaze.
“But you see your dad.” Another too-kind smile.
“Oh, yeah.”
She frowned a little. “Everything okay at home?”
“Yeah.” He said it with a little more enthusiasm. What was she getting at? He added, “We’re good. Real good.”
