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Irritation—with Ethan for not mentioning his upcoming absence, with myself for caring—dogs me all the way to math lab and mixes with an increasingly realistic fear of failure in math. Not, perhaps, the best mindset to promote learning.
Noah waits at the same table as last week. “How was the quiz?” he asks.
“Super!” I say, pushing false cheer through my irritation as I open my laptop and log in. “I was nearly perfect!”
His expression lifts like he’s surprised I did so well, which fuels the fire. I pull up the file and turn my screen so he can see the carnage for himself, watching as his brows sink from mild surprise into a deep furrow of confusion. “Perfect? This is awful.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, tightening my grip on the emotional reins as my irritation slides toward anger, “I somehow managed to get the last question right and ruin the perfect zero, but it’s hard to be sure with true and false.”
The furrow stays, though his confusion morphs into something else. He doesn’t say anything.
“That was calledsarcasm,” I say, my voice dripping with it. “I didn’tactuallyintend to get a zero, or I would have answered false on the last one.”
He doesn’t even flinch. “So what happened with the rest?”
“No idea,” I say, my comfortable blanket of sarcasm slipping. “I thought I did pretty well, considering my panic.”
“Why would you panic?” he asks, as if I actually meant to.
“I don’t know,” I say, dangerously close to dissolving into tears as I dig my fingernails into my palms, focusing on the bite of pain. Must. Stay. Mad.
Either he doesn’t notice my instability, or he ignores it. “Well, let’s go through it and see what happened.”
We rework all the questions and find each mistake—stupid things like missed negative signs and transcription errors. It’s ridiculous, and I no longer have to struggle to maintain irritation. Idoknow this stuff.
“The good news is I can see that you understood the concepts. You just need to be more careful.”
I scoff. “And the bad news?”
“The bad news is... you’re out of second chances. You’ll need to average above a C on everything else to pass.”
I’m sliding again, straight past anger and into despair.
“You can give up now.”
My slide comes to a halt. OnlyIam allowed to disparage my abilities. He’s actually beingpaidto help me, and he wants me to give up? I take a deep breath of the math lab–scented air, ready to tell him off.
“Or you can get to work.” He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms, a challenge in his eyes. “Your call.”
I glare at him, but his flat expression holds. Is he using reverse psychology? Appealing to my competitive nature? Or does he really want me to give up and walk out? My opinion leans to the last option, but the competitor in me won’t give up. Whatever his motive, my downward spiral has screeched to a stop, and I figure I’ll have to concede the staring match if we’re going to get anything done.
“Fine,” I say, snatching my laptop away from him and pulling up today’s assignment.
Betraying neither dismay nor satisfaction, Noah sits forward and we get to work, slogging through problems until he’s satisfied I won’t embarrass myself again on the next quiz. My emotions are steadier when we’ve finished, probably because my brain is fried.
“So,” I say, not ready to thank him for his heavy-handed methods but willing to admit they worked with a conversational peace offering. “How was your weekend?”
He looks at me like I’ve asked if I can chew on his shoe. “It was fine,” he says.
“I was thinking about going home,” I say, closing my laptop and loading it into Trusty, “but my brother Kaden—he’s a senior—had an away game and they decided to make a trip out of it.”
Noah doesn’t offer anything in return, just sits there with his mouth in a thin line, which makes mine take off like he’s asked for a full rundown of the clan.
“And then there’s Zach. He’s twelve, and I think he took all the math genes. He could do this in his sleep,” I say, picking up this week’s assignment and tucking it into my bag. “Do you have siblings?”
“I gotta go,” he says, picking up his stuff and bolting out of the room.
Alrighty then.
