Page 19 of Student Next Door


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He didn’t see it himself. He applied the Band-Aid to the now-clean cut, but he didn’t want to move away. He didn’t want to stop touching her. Jaxson had an overwhelming need to take care of her.

Sure, Bethany had called him and asked for him to keep an eye on her daughter. From the looks of it, Teal wasn’t too concerned to be spending time alone at her parents’ house. For all intents and purposes, she was quite stable and taken care of.

But he couldn’t help but feel she was being dumped in all these situations against her will.

“Have you talked to other teachers?” he asked. “About this?”

“They think I don’t understand the work.”

“Do you?”

She smiled. “I, yes.”

“Then what do you think the problem is?” he asked.

“No one has ever asked me that before.”

“We can continue to do practice exams, but if the main bulk of the problem is retention or even understanding, then it doesn’t matter how many exams I give you, you’re going to fail them all.”

Teal sat back and ran her fingers through her hair. “Did you ever have a problem taking exams?”

“No.”

“I never used to. I don’t know. It’s like I’ve entered this funk. I get it. Even when you told me to go through the papers alone in my spare time, I can see where I’ve gone wrong.” She growled. “This is so frustrating. What good is having aphotographic memory if I can’t use it?”

“You have a photographic memory?”

Teal nodded. “Yeah, not that it does me any good. I can recite the entire textbooks, word for word. Recall equations.”

“Interesting.” He’d never known that about her.

“Don’t say anything,” she said. “It’s not something I tell anyone.”

“How do you know you can do it?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I’m curious.”

Teal licked her lips and tilted her head to the side. “Then test me.”

Jaxson got to his feet and moved toward his bag. He pulled out the math textbook he’d been working from for their class. Opening it up on a random page, he told her the page.

Teal described word for word what was on the page.

He moved to another page, taking random pages for a good ten minutes, and Teal described them all.

“So I know I can do the work.”

“Ah, but you see, being able to recite everything you see is one part. Putting it all into practice is another.”

“I get that. It’s why I retook the test at home, without anyone around.” She turned toward her bag, pulled out a paper, and handed it to him. “Here you go.”

Jaxson took the paper and started to flick through, working out each question and seeing that she was indeed retaining and understanding each element of work.

“This is very good.”

She smiled. “Thanks.”

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