“Sorry I’m late,” she apologizes as she pulls up a chair.
I check my watch. The minute hand isn’t at zero yet. “You’re early.” By five minutes. Not that I’m a stickler for punctuality. Sure, I’m here early as well but I got restless.
“This isn’t early for me,” she remarks.
Oh, she must be one of those people. The ones who are critically early to every little gathering and petrified of tardiness.
I know the type a little too well. That used to be my sister before college.
Dusting the chili powder from my hands with a finger, I reach for my backpack to grab my notebook. I pull out an orange notebook and put it back, knowing that my math notebook is red.
Math is red, orange is for the class I’m a teaching aide for, and history is green. All sciences are shades of blue. There’s no other way to do it.
After rummaging through my backpack for a few more seconds, I mutter a curse under my breath as the realization that my notebook isn’t there settles in. How is that even possible? I just had the class yesterday.
I try to remember where I put it and the image of it sitting at my desk back at the house has me groaning a little too loud. Fuck me, why did I do that?
“What happened now?” The brunette across the table asks.
I lift my head back up to her face, those same hazel-green eyes that are usually narrowed in my direction are softened. Not accompanied by the usual yet harsh stink-eye that’s always aimed at my direction.
“I left my notes at home,” I answer glumly.
She rolls her eyes at me. There’s the sass I’m so accustomed to. And the stink-eye. “Way to be prepared, Ryder.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I argue, rolling my eyes back at her.
Diana then pulls out a big textbook from her bag (how she was able to fit it in there, I will never know) and puffs. Her curtain bangs fall right in front of her face and she pushes them away. “Not to fret.” She gestures to the calculus textbook.
“You might be one of the few who actually look at the textbook,” I snort. No one else uses the textbook because our professor doesn’t go by it. He should, if I’m being honest because his teaching sucks. The only reason I’m passing this class is because I’m teaching myself more than our professor is teaching us.
“The textbook isn’t helping,” she retorts.
“Is it because you're also listening to Scott’s lectures?" I ask with a raised brow.
“Don’t you?”
I shake my head. “He says the class is hard but that’s because he can’t teach. I suggest not listening to him and more to the textbook.”
“If you’re so smart, then why don’t you teach the class yourself?”
I scoff. “Because that shit’s depressing.” I don’t want to be one of those teachers who’s all sad, bald, and stuck in a love triangle with sine, cosine, and tangent. Unlike some teachers—cough, Professor Scott, cough—I’m not fucking cut out for it.
“Depressing?” she furrows her brows in confusion.
I wave it off. “Not important.” I point to a paragraph on the page I opened a minute ago. “Let’s start from the first chapter and go from there,” I tell her. “Grab a notebook or whatever. You’ll need it.”
Diana does as she’s told, slowly and surely. “Why from there? I thought we would only go over what we learned this week.”
I shake my head at her. “Starting from the beginning gives us more of a baseline of what you need to look over. There’s no point in going forward if you can’t understand what you’ve already learned.” Math is simply adding onto what you’ve learned before, narrowing every little thing—circles and pi, to name a few. It’s always growing.
She raises a brow at me. Diana does that a lot. “I guess you do know what you’re doing.”
I wink. “I always know what I’m doing,Just Diana.”
She lets out a groan and I begin the session, giving a summary of the chapter and an equation from the textbook. This goes on for a while, stopping at chapter six—where we’re currently at. By then, it started getting a little chilly and the sunset already started to hide behind the buildings.
“So what’s the prognosis, doc?” She asks, rubbing her right wrist unconsciously. I noticed throughout the review that Diana did that often. By often, I mean after every equation I handed her.
