I raise a hand in farewell, watching her dodge other students on her way out, some people not even realizing she’s trying to get by them.
I drop back down in my chair, running my palm over my face and review my notes, the diagrams I’ve drawn still making sense miraculously. I glance up once more, but she’s gone from sight already. At least it seems I’ve found my way to a passing grade.
Now to just get her up to par too.
4
Eden
I stare down at Samantha’s text asking how things went with Jake, debating what to say. We actually didn’t do all that much. No discussion of how I can improve, what I can learn. Then again, I obviously sprung a lot on him, I shouldn’t have expected him to have all that info right off the bat.
Me: It was fine. He agreed to tutor me.
Samantha: Awesome! You’ll be dating Michael before you know it.
A swarm of butterflies releases in my stomach imagining myself, cool and confident, casually asking him out for coffee. The two of us laughing on a date, discovering all we have in common, him realizing how perfect we’d be together, a match made in scientific heaven.
Now, I just need to get to that point.
When I get home, I shut myself in my room and lay on my bed, the faded patchwork quilt soft where it touches my skin. I shed my sweater, the temperature in here much more to my liking since I’ve closed the air vents on the ceiling.
I open my laptop, clicking on a new browser window in incognito mode. I don’t even want my computer to know what I’m about to do. I navigate to Facebook and search for Jake Fulton. His profile picture is first and I click on it carefully, as if he’ll somehow find out what I’m up to.
Really, though, it’s just more research, right? I should know the background of the person I’m trusting to tutor me. It says he’s single and there are no pictures of him and a girl alone, but a few of him in a group with his arm over the shoulder of a brunette. She’s pretty, but another guy has his hand on her waist. That seems more intimate than a shoulder hug.
The idea of him being single eases something in me. It would seem, I don’t know, sleazy to do this with someone in a relationship. Not like anything will actually happen between us. I mean, look at him. I stare at his profile pic on the screen, his megawatt smile blinding, brown eyes cheerfully crinkled at the corners, dark hair charmingly tousled in a way that only seems to happen with good-looking guys. Tousled on me looks like I’ve been through the wringer. I inherited Dad’s frizzy hair type. Yay, genetics.
And it’s not just Jake’s face. His body is... let’s just say I never knew I wanted to objectify a man so badly before meeting him. The thought simultaneously thrills and horrifies me.
Darla said he’s a baseball player, so to put it in terms he can relate to, he’s so far out of my league, we’re not even on the same field. While he’s in the pros playing in stadiums across the nation, I’m in some rinky-dink small town junior league hitting tee ball with the kindergarteners.
Maybe it’s because he’s so handsome that it felt easier to talk to him by the end of our meeting. There’s no way he’d see me as anything other than his tutor, which actually takes some of the pressure off. We can keep this a professional relationship. Well, as professional as it can be considering the nature of our exchange.
I scroll further down the page where he’s tagged in photos of last season’s baseball games. Wow, those pants fit... really well. I clear my throat, suddenly embarrassed, despite being alone in the privacy of my bedroom.
I quickly shut the laptop and unzip my backpack, pulling out my Virology textbook. I shouldn’t be ogling Jake. Didn’t I just say we can keep this professional? He’s doing me a favor and he deserves my respect, not my lustful appreciation.
I open to where my bookmark lies in the fifth chapter, where we’re covering gene therapy, and read on, getting a head start on next week’s lesson.
I only hope whatever Jake’s planned lesson is won’t be as difficult.
“THANK YOU, GIRL.” SAMANTHA leans in to hug me, her wild curls tickling my nose. “I have a shift at the shelter tonight so I have to run.” She lets go of me, leaning over the table to high-five Jake. “We’re going to rock that test on Thursday.”
“That’s the goal,” he says warily, closing his Biology textbook. For such a seemingly confident guy, he has little self-confidence in his ability to perform well academically. Maybe it’s a mental block. He thinks he’s bad at school, therefore he is. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps I could devise some kind of experiment to test if we could change that line of thinking.
“I’ll see you for lunch tomorrow with the girls,” she tells me, grabbing her worn backpack. Levi’s come into some money now from what it sounds like, but she continues to use all her old stuff, claiming that it still works perfectly fine.
“See you,” I wave, staring down at the table once Jake and I are alone, then force myself to look at him, but he’s not paying attention to me.
He grabs a folder out of his bag, taking out a single sheet of notebook paper. “So I know you’re like an actual tutor, but check me out. I made a lesson plan.”
He slides the paper over, the list of topics I gave him arranged numerically down the sheet, along with some new ones. I have to squint at it a minute to make sense of it, though, because his handwriting is awful.
“We won’t be covering it all today,” he assures me. “But I wanted you to know I’m taking my tutoring duties as seriously as you are.”
A small smile spreads over my lips at his fervent sincerity. “Thank you.” I wipe the sudden bout of sweatiness from my palms onto my jeans and turn to fully face him. “The first thing you have here is to find a reason to talk to him. Shouldn’t we, um, start with something more simple?”
“Eden, you have to talk to him. You can’t have a relationship without speaking. Unless you just want a hookup. But even that requires asking Wanna fuck? or something.”
My mouth goes dry at his words. Has he ever asked a girl if she wants to fuck, quick and dirty like that?
I shake my head, going back to his question. “No, not a hookup. I- I wouldn’t even know the first thing about that.”
“They’re overrated,” he shrugs, like it’s no big deal. Sharing the most intimate part of yourself with a stranger, vulnerable to them in a way I can’t imagine... no, that’s not for me. How many girls has he hooked up with? It would be rude to ask, right? Even though I specifically picked him because of his expertise?
“I can tell just giving you the order to go talk to him is overwhelming,” he continues, “so we’ll break down each step of it and come up with some solutions.”
I nod, liking the sound of that. I can do that. Split things down into more manageable steps. Easy... right?
“So you need to find a reason to speak with him, discover what you have in common, then use that to ask him out. Wait, are you hoping he’ll ask you out, or are you going to?”
“Well, hopefully the former, but more likely the latter. So, do you use that formula of talking to a girl before you ask her out?”