“I don't despiseallphysical activity,” she says, her voice lower, almost teasingly.
I feel my knees buckle at her words and heat rushing to my neck, but before I can respond, she's making her way up my stairs. It's good she didn't let me respond because I don't think I would have been able to.
I shake my head of these thoughts and walk upstairs. When I enter my room, she's already made herself comfortable sitting on my swivel chair with her note book in her hands.
“So, what are we starting with?” I question, sitting down on my bed, facing her. I pick up my bag from the floor and get out my own notebook and pen, ready to actually learn.
“Your exam is coming up soon, so I went over some past papers and I think they'll be repeating the evolution section. That's one of the topics we haven't covered in detail, so let's work on that for a bit,” she says, but my eyes are focused on the way she's biting the end of her pen.
Snap out of it, Juliette.
I need to focus on studying, I need to ace this test so whatever is going on in my head is going to have to wait for the next hour.
“Do you know what evolution is?” she asks me while writing in her notebook.
“Kind of. It's when we turned from apes into humans?”
“Essentially, but you'll be asked about the theory of evolution. Do you know what that is?”
“Well, you put it in the binder, something about… natural selection?” I ask rather than say it as I write down 'evolution' as a heading on my page.
She half smiles and I'm not sure why. “Yeah, do you know what natural selection is?”
“No,” I say, while shaking my head and fidgeting with my pen.
“Okay, that's what I'll be teaching you today then.” Her gentle tone eases me when I didn't even realize I needed easing.
For Pete's sake.
***
Forty minutes, two mini break downs, and three pages of notes later, I finally understand the theory of evolution; props to my tutor.
At first, I was ready to claw her hair out, but she really explained it in vivid detail as time went on.
Anytime we have a tutoring session, I feel like some sort of scientist, as ridiculous as that sounds. She doesn't make me feel stupid for not knowing certain things, instead she insists I tell her if I don't understand something. She must have been an incredible teacher in her past life or something.
Adaline really must care about that commendation letter to be doing all of this; to sit here and tolerate me without berating me and then having to teach me?
Then again, I'm tolerating her too, just so that my mother doesn’t kill me and I can keep coaching the team for the rest of the year.
It doesn’t matter that we’ve finished our final tournament, I need to prep the newbies for next year when I’m not around.
“Before I go, we need to have a mini quiz on the notes I sent you. Did you memorize them?” she questions, fishing out flash cards from her backpack.
Oh. No.
In my defence, I've been really busy with cheer practice and thinking about the fact that I kissed the girl I hate the most in this world.
“No,” I say sheepishly scratching the back of my head.
She furrows her eyebrows and tuts. “I sent you those like a week ago.”
“I've been busy,” I retort, starting to feel irritation creeping up.
“That's not good enough. Do you want to get kicked off the team?”
“No.”
