AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A smile tugs at me, and my heart aches a little. Sometimes, I really do miss Sadie and the way she lights up any room she’s in. Maybe this won’t be that bad. She hasn’t mentioned Ethan yet, and as long as she doesn’t, we should be fine. It’ll almost be like old times.
She cracks the book and pushes it toward me, lowering her head. “Please teach me your ways, oh queen of the mathematical realm.”
I squint, meeting her eyes. “Are you going to take this seriously? Or are you going to goof off the whole time?”
She sighs, straightening her posture. “I wish you could just use a mind meld. That would be way easier than trying to teach it to me.”
“Did you just reference Star Trek?”
She shrugs. “It’s your fault for making me watch it so many times.”
“But you never paid attention when I watched that stuff. You always played games on your phone.”
“And yet, here we are with me referencing it.” She smiles. “I guess you could say I’m good at multitasking.”
A laugh slips out of me. “Since when? Don’t you remember that time you almost walked into a wall because you were listening to a podcast?”
“Hey, that wasn’t my fault. The wall moved.” She laughs.
“Oh really?”
“Duh. I have the coordination and poise of a royal heiress. In fact, I bet if I did one of those ancestry searches, I’d be related to some king of Scotland or something.”
“Why Scotland?”
“No reason,” she says, twirling her red hair on her finger as her eyes dart around the room. “Just a feeling.”
It’s weird to talk to her like this. It makes me want to smile, and the fog that follows me around and suffocates me doesn’t seem as thick.
“We should probably start,” I say. “What do you need help with the most?”
“Mmm. Not much. Only the math related problems.”
“They’reallmath related questions.”
“Exactly,” she says, giving me a strained smile.
I take a deep breath. “Okay, then.”
“I know,” she says, pulling a loose piece of paper from her bag. “Why don’t we start with this?”
I take the paper. It’s the assignment from today, and the scribbles she has underneath the first few questions are all wrong. I set it down and scratch my head. “I think we need to backtrack a little bit. I’ll help you with these, but I don’t think it’ll make sense until we go back to the beginning of the section and start from square one.”
She tries to hide her smile. “Square one? Did you mean for that to be a pun?”
I chuckle. “No, it just slipped out.”
“You’re right. Theprobabilityof you doing that on purpose is pretty low.”
I laugh. “We need to focus,” I say, flipping the pages back in the math book until I get to the beginning of the section.
“Yessir,” she says, buckling down and hovering over her math book. “Which page?”
“83,” I say.
She finds the page and grimaces.
“Quadratic functions aren’t as bad as they look. I promise.” I open my notebook to a fresh page and sketch a graph with a problem next to it. Before I know it, I’m rambling about what formula to use and how to solve it with factoring.
