“Okay, that sounds fair,” I said, racking my brain. “Who do I need to work with?”
“Full—”
“No way,” I said, waving my hands in front of me before she could finish saying his name. “He’s seriously the worst!”
“Fuller James,” she said, ignoring my frantic gestures. “You’re my top student, and he really needs your help.”
I crossed my arms and stared at Mrs. Brewster. “I’m not tutoring Fuller. I’m literally covered in food because of him.”
Her dark hair framed her face perfectly. “I know he can be difficult, but—”
“Difficult? There are so many words I could use to describe him,” I said, cutting her off. “But ‘tutee’ isn’t ever going to be one of them.”
Mrs. Brewster sighed. “He really needs your help, Wren.”
Wow, I can’t believe Fuller is failing. He’s always so confident. I guess even the King of Magnolia Valley High has a few secrets.
“Wren?” Mrs. Brewster said, tilting her head to the side sympathetically.
“If it was anyone else, I’d do it in a second. Promise.” I shook my head. “Plus, I’m sure there are other kids in class who can work with him. Why not ask Lyla?”
“If he doesn’t bring his grade up, he won’t be able to play basketball,” Mrs. Brewster admitted. “And Coach is really worried.” There it was, the real reason I’d been asked to tutor Fuller. My uncle knew I had great grades and that I used to tutor kids after school.
Too bad for him it would never happen.
“Perhaps you could try today and—”
I held up my hands, knowing my uncle would be disappointed in me. “I apologize for interrupting, but, Mrs. Brewster, I’d literally tutor anyone else in the class. I swear. But there is no way, no how, that I’d ever tutor Fuller James.”
Chapter Two
Fuller
“I’m incredibly sorry, Principal Davis,” I said, hanging my head in apparent shame and dropping my gaze to his desk. He and I were running through the same routine we always did. I’d apologize and he’d respond with something like, “I’m going to give you one more chance, son. Do you understand?” I’d agree, call him “sir,” and all would be good until the next incident.
Normally, being called into the principal’s office didn’t bother me too much. I’d sit in the chair across from Principal Davis, where we’d usually end up talking about basketball and reliving the highlights of his high school career as the star center forward. We’d then move on to his time at the University of Virginia. We’d usually wrap up with how he could see a lot of himself in me.
But, this time, instead of it being the two of us, Coach and Wren Carter were here, too.
Coach Carter shook his head. “Fuller, we’ve been over this before. In order to play, you have to be passing all your classes. We’ve made a lot of exceptions for you over the years, but this is one that you know we can’t break.”
My cheeks burned with embarrassment. It was bad enough Coach knew that my AP Lit grade had dropped to an F, but it was like rubbing salt in an open wound to have Wren find out, too. She was hands down the smartest kid in the entire school. I kept my gaze cast downward, on Principal Davis’s desk. There was no way I could handle seeing a smug grin on Wren’s face or, even worse, a look of pity. I’d never failed a class before. But, between the before school workouts, a full day of school, basketball practice, shooting hoops for an additional hour after practice ended, and hanging out with my little brother, I barely had enough time to eat and get a few hours of sleep, let alone read books and write AP Lit papers. I managed to keep up a 3.2 grade point average by getting most of my homework done and earning decent grades on tests, but that certainly wasn’t high enough to earn any kind of academic scholarship.
I wanted to drop down to regular Lit, but my parents forbade me from doing it. “You aren’t applying yourself, Fuller,” my dad would say. “If you spent half as much time on your homework as you did on basketball and with the ladies, you’d be doing fine in school.” Like he had a clue. He was an emergency room doctor with an eidetic memory. He was constantly at work and, unlike him, my only path to a full scholarship was basketball.
Plus, most people at school, including Wren, assumed I was a dumb jock. Who was I to prove them wrong?
I should have been able to coast through senior year, not have to worry about my spot on the team because of some English class that I’d never need again. Last time I checked, professional basketball players weren’t worried about using proper APA citations when they were tearing up the court.
When I wasn’t training, I spent time with my little brother. We watched Deadpool and read comic books together. Even though he knew the character Deadpool wasn’t real, he always claimed he was going to be just like him when he grew up: indestructible. Instead, he was forced to deal with a diagnosis that had taken that dream from him and left him with an uncertain future.
A lump formed in the back of my throat whenever I thought about him. It wasn’t fair. Here I was, voted athlete of the year by my peers, and my little brother was stuck in a body that couldn’t even handle getting shoved in the hallway.
Fighting back the hot tears that welled up in my eyes, I pushed thoughts of Hudson to the back of my mind. I kept that part of my life private, and I certainly wasn’t going to let Wren in on it. Speaking of Wren, my thoughts drifted to her copy of The Hate U Give. I’d spotted it on her desk today, cluttered with dozens of tabs and about a million notes in the margins. She’d probably already had her topic prepared for Mrs. Brewster and written half the paper. Me, on the other hand, well, I hadn’t even had time to crack open the book.
Not that this or any other paper should even matter. If this basketball season went well, I’d win a scholarship to the University of Georgia to play basketball. That way my parents could focus on my little brother’s medical bills.
A single session of physical therapy cost them ninety-five dollars. He had at least two sessions a week, every single week except during Christmas and one week during the summer when he went to a special camp for kids with serious medical conditions. The cost of those sessions, plus all his hospital bills, appointments with specialists, and trips to the emergency room for accidents, added up quickly. Even if my parents were to offer to help put me through college, I’d decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t accept a single penny of their money when my brother’s life was at stake.
To put it bleakly, if I didn’t get a full scholarship, I wouldn’t be able to afford to go to college.
Glancing up, my gaze fell on Wren. She sat two chairs over with her arms crossed and her lips pursed. She was so uptight she could produce a diamond if someone gave her a chunk of coal.