“Next time, write them down so we can go through them afterward,” he said.
“The professor goes too fast,” I complained. “I can’t write quickly enough and then I forget it all.”
“Okay,” Keaton said. He rubbed his chin. “Well, let’s look at your textbook.”
I picked up my phone and started scrolling through the files I’d downloaded. Keaton squinted at me.
“What?” I asked. “It’s here.”
Keaton sighed. “Just wait here a moment,” he said, getting up and disappearing.
I hated the library. It was so quiet in here. Everyone was so serious. And now, with Keaton gone, I felt lonely and bored. I reached out and picked at a corner of the table where the varnish was coming up.
“Right,” Keaton said, blowing back in like a breath of fresh air. He thumped a huge textbook down on the table in front of us. “Econ 101 textbook. This is the one you’re using in class, right?”
I squinted at the cover. It looked like the one I remembered from the download site. “Yeah.”
“Okay, now we can both see the pages,” Keaton explained, opening it to the first chapter. “Right, this is what your professor was talking about so far. The graphs.”
“I don’t know how to read them,” I said, scrubbing a hand over my face and eyes. When I looked at the axes, I felt a headache coming on. Every lecture was the same. It had been the same at school.
“Well, these numbers here indicate the quarter of the year, and these numbers here indicate the total value of sales,” Keaton said. He looked serious. A lock of hair fell down from the top of his head and landed across his forehead. He tossed his neck impatiently to send it back up to where it came from. “So, if you go across from the top of any of these bars, you can see the total value of sales in that time period.”
“I get that,” I grumbled. “I can read the indices. I just don’t get the numbers.”
Keaton stared at me for a moment. I could feel a bad mood brewing. He was looking at me like I was stupid. On top of the headache, I didn’t need that.
“In what sense?” he asked at last. “You just read the numbers on the side and line them up with the top of the bar.”
“But, look,” I insisted, taking the book from him. Our hands brushed and I tried hard to ignore the feel of his skin under mine. “There’s no number here.”
“You have to work it out,” Keaton said. “It falls right between the lines for 2,500 and 2,900, so it must be…”
I blinked a few times. I wasn’t stupid. I could work this out. “Two… two thousand…”
“2700,” Keaton said, finishing for me like he was impatient.
“Right,” I nodded. I would have got there if he hadn’t interrupted me. “That’s what I was about to say.”
“Okay,” Keaton said. He nodded. I wasn’t entirely sure he was convinced. “So, you don’t have to have all the numbers written along the side. You can work out the amount by where it falls between two points on the axis.”
“Okay,” I said. I nodded as if that was the problem I had all along. Like no one had ever explained that to me.
I didn’t want him to look at me like I was stupid again.
“Let’s look at these exercises,” Keaton said. “Have you tried plotting graphs yourself?”
“No,” I groaned. “They’re too fiddly. I don’t want to draw them.”
“Then don’t draw them,” Keaton said with a wink. “Use your laptop. You can draw a graph in a spreadsheet and it does all the work for you.”
I looked away. “I don’t have a laptop.”
“What?” Keaton just about squawked. It was good we’d gone into a study room. Even so, I had the feeling people outside would have heard it.
“I don’t have a laptop,” I repeated stubbornly. First, he looked at me like I was stupid. Now he was looking at me like I was poor. With pity. “Stop it.”
Keaton bit his lip. The movement had me watching his mouth. I was taken off guard – his lips looked soft. Like a girl’s. But not a girl’s. Somehow… better than a girl’s. I had no idea what that meant. “Stop what?”
