“Fine. But this isn’t helpful.” I slid her notebook back to her. “Math is like a bridge, and each stepping stone is an essential component. We have to go back to the place where you were doing well and start there, filling in the gaps until you’re caught up.”
“I don’t know that I was ever doing well. I memorized a lot of trigonometry in order to get by, but it’s all flown out of my head. I barely passed last year with an A-minus.”
“That’s more than ‘barely passed.’”
“A-minus is my dad’s bare minimum.”
Emery peered up to see me looking at her. She was punching holes in my armor: Her father was still as strict as ever, denying her her dream school. Stealing her light. My gaze softened and then so did hers, taking in my heterochromic eyes. I didn’t miss how that anomaly thrilled her all over again. The moment caught and held. She and I, back where we’d been…
Emery gave her head a shake, breaking the spell. “Anyway, I guess we could start at the end of trig.”
I pushed in my chair. “Be right back.”
The library had an entire section of classroom textbooks. I found the one I wanted and returned to the study room. Together, Emery and I flipped through the last chapters until we found where she’d gone astray.
“Here,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t remember most of this stuff, but this is where things got really shaky.”
“Inverse trigonometric functions.”
“Yes. God, I hate functions,” Emery said. “Theworst.”
“Okay, let’s see where you’re at.” I grabbed my pencil and paper and created sample problems not found in the book. I felt her eyes on me again.
“I forgot how good you are at this,” she said. “My turn to ask the obvious question. Why are you here? I’d have thought you’d have a bunch of degrees by now.”
“Three,” I said, not pausing my work.
“You havethreedegrees?”
I nodded. “Biotechnology, physics, and philosophy from the University of Maryland. MIT is waiting for me to do my postgrad.”
“Then why—?”
“Because after my mother walked out, my father needed to be here, and I needed something to do,” I said, setting my pencil down with a snap. “And that’s all anyone needs to know.”
I hated speaking harshly to Emery; it felt counter to every impulse of my heart. But being this close to her… The old hurt was trying to swamp me, and I couldn’t let it. Emery recoiled, and I watched her tighten her armor too.
“Fine. Shall I?”
I pushed the sample problems to her, and Emery got to work while I scrolled my phone as if I had texts from friends or any kind of social media to speak of. Silence filled the room for a few minutes until Emery tossed her pencil down.
“I can’t do this,” she said.
“Sure, you can. It’s an arbitrary value—”
“Not the stupid math. This. Us.” She turned in her chair to glare at me. “Are we not going to talk about what happened?”
Here we go.
“You’re referring to our first encounter, seven years ago.”
“When you broke your promise?” she blurted. The mask of imperiousness fell for a moment, and real hurt touched her eyes. But she bottled it back up. “Never mind. It was just stupid kid stuff. Forget it.”
Another silence fell in which she wrote furiously to solve the equation, making at least three errors. I should’ve let it go. Itwaskid stuff. We were ten. Nothing ten-year-olds say should be binding for life, but something happened between us that day and we both knew it.
“I didn’t break my promise,” I said quietly.
Emery’s head whipped up, her eyes blazing for a fight. “You sure about that?”
