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It takes me a second to process his reasoning before I explode into laughter. I can feel people looking at me, but I’m laughing so hard I don’t care. Jase leers at me, albeit stifling a chuckle himself.
“Don’t make fun of me,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say, gathering my breath. “Did you not read the course description?”
“Is it that long paragraph that shows up when we’re about to pay for the class?”
“Yeah.”
“Nope, too long.”
“It was just a paragraph! You are so lazy!”
Jase chuckles and shrugs, clearly not ashamed.
“Did you ask me to tutor you because you were expecting me to give you all the answers?” I half-joke, half-mean.
“No,” Jase says easily. I’m relieved he’s not taking advantage of me, not that I’ve been feeding him the answers, anyway. “Actually, I figured you wouldn’t give me all the answers. You don’t seem like the kind of person who would do someone else’s work for them.”
“Okay, now you’re making me sound like a badass.”
“Well, you are.”
I smile at this. “You’re pretty badass yourself.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you signed up for an SAT class without reading the course description, and you didn’t come prepared.”
Jase chuckles. “Okay, I’ll take it. And my mom’s happy that I did. I just need to stick with it until it’s done.” Just as the boy in front of us pays for his popcorn, the butter warming into my nose, Jase adds, “And Emilyn, I asked you to help me because you’re the only one who didn’t laugh.”
It takes a moment to let this sink in. I have a flash to that first day, when everyone but me laughed at Jase for answering that seaweed question incorrectly. I really didn’t find it funny. Guess he knew I could help him without judging, just like I knew he’d help me with my presentations for the same reason.
My heart warms hearing Jase say this. Am I falling for a boy who will probably only like me as a friend?
“What do you want to get?” Jase nods to the menu.
I lift an eyebrow. “I can pay for my own.”
He waves this off. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I’ll Venmo you.”
“It’s all good.”
“But Jase...”
“Really, Emilyn, it’s no big deal.”
We reach the front, and he looks to me to order first. My heart warms again. How is he so sweet? I must be craving sweets because I say, “I’ll have a cookies and cream ice cream in a cup.” I prefer cones because I like how the crunch mixes with the cream. But I’d rather not repeat my first encounter with Jase.
“I’ll have a pistachio ice cream,” he says. As promised, he pays with cash.
Once we get our ice cream, both served in blue cups, a pink spoon as our utensil, we cross through the arcade section to return to the crane game.
“That’s smart,” Jase says, nodding at my cup as we dig into our scoops. “Your ice cream won’t fall this time.”
He must’ve realized that he let this secret, one he’s apparently known for a while, slip. I swallow my ice cream, the coldness blizzarding through my throat.
