Chapter 3
Benson
I check the time. Two-thirty. It’s my time to go. The second my foot hits the living room, Stanley pauses the FIFA game on the TV.
“Where are you headed?” he asks, scratching his balls.
“You know where I’m headed.” I look at his pajama pants that have small pucks on them. I have asked, in the past, where he got these, and he has refused to tell me. “You’re getting your ball sweat all over the controller, man. Wash your hands.”
He wipes his hand on his knee and says, “I don’t actually know where you’re going. The store?”
Christ. “I’m going to the library.”
He chuckles, “What the fuck for?”
“For my tutoring session.” I hike the bag higher on my shoulder. “So I don’t get benched. Remember?”
“Already?” he asks.
Blue, on the other end of the couch with the second controller, hits play. The FIFA crowd noise comes back. Blue’s player runs unattended down the right wing.
“Stan,” Blue says, “I am about to score on you.”
“Score on me. I need a moment with Reeve.”
“I need to go, or I’m going to be late,” I say.
Stanley flings himself up off the couch. “I need you to repeat the rule.” He points at the whiteboard. In the corner, he has written rule number one in big letters: NO FALLING IN LOVE BEFORE THE DRAFT.
“I need to leave—”
“You are not going to be late. It is a twelve-minute walk. You are early like a Catholic. Repeat the rule.”
Rowan, on the floor doing his hip mobility thing in shorts, does not lift his head from the carpet. “Stan, leave him alone.”
“Et tu, Laurens?”
“Stop saying et tu. You don’t know what it means.”
“I absolutely know what it means.”
“Tu means you,” Percy says, from the dining table, eyes on his book, “in Latin. And et means and.”
“I knew that too.”
“So et tu means and you.”
“Pers.”
“It’s not as flexible as you’re using it.”
Stanley turns back to me with both arms wide, like this betrayal is just one more weight he must carry. “Reeve. The rule. Please.”
I mutter quickly, “No falling in love before the draft.”
He ruffles my hair. “Good boy. Now go fail Stats.”
“I’m not going to fail.”
He smirks, walking back to the couch. “I was talking to your dick.”
Blue, who is in the middle of swallowing water from the giant Hydroflask he carries everywhere like a small child, snorts and chokes. The water goes the wrong way. He coughs into his elbow. The on-screen striker scores anyway.
“Stanley,” Rowan says into the carpet, “his player just scored on you.”
I open the front door. The afternoon comes in — warm, smelling like cut grass from somebody’s lawnmower.
Before I can shut the door, Stanley calls out, “Reeve, report back on if she’s hot or not.”
I shake my head. “No.”
He shouts, “Hot or not.”
I pull the front door shut on him saying something else. Behind me, faintly, through the door, I hear Rowan say, “Stanley, your goalie isn’t even on the field.”
The walk is twelve minutes if you take Hawthorne to State and cut behind the math building. It’s fifteen if you take the long way, which I’m not taking, because I am not going to be late.
Late August Michigan keeps doing its thing.
The leaves on the maple in front of the dean’s house are committing — three of them have gone yellow — and a kid on a bike with a backpack the size of his torso almost takes me out at the corner of State and Birchwood.
Across the quad, somebody is playing a speaker that is too loud.
Sorority girls are out in clusters on the grass, some of them smiling my way.
I think of what my sister said before we got off the phone yesterday. Don’t captain her. And I am suddenly, twenty feet from the library doors, deeply curious about what that means exactly. I have a feeling it means don’t enter the tutoring room and re-arrange it.
The library doors are heavy. I push through, and the air conditioning hits me. I cut left to the stairs because the elevator takes forever, and I climb to the third floor two at a time. The teaspoon of caffeine from this morning’s coffee is still doing something for me, and my body wants to move.
I reach the third floor and round the corner. The row of glass-walled study rooms is at the end of the hall. They are lit from inside like a row of small aquariums. 3A, empty. 3B—
She’s already in there.
She is sitting on the far side of the round table, facing the door, with a full cup of something deep red.
She has a notebook open in front of her, a textbook, and a row of pencils I can count from here.
Her hair is dark and pulled back. She’s biting on a pencil.
I push the door open before I can do a double-take.
She places the pencil down next to the others and stands up immediately. Her chair pushes back two inches with the backs of her knees. She extends her hand across the table.
“Hi. Lucy Moss.”
I take her hand. “Benson Reeve.”
Her soft fingers are cold. The handshake is firm and brief, two pumps and clean.
It tells me she means business. She sits, and I sit across from her.
There are exactly two seconds where neither of us says anything.
The clock above the whiteboard ticks once, audibly.
Her phone is face down by her left hand.
“So,” she says. “Stats 215. I have your syllabus pulled up. Your professor is Markham, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t look up at me, but I notice her bottom lip is naturally plump.
And her eyes are a deep shade of brown. She’s not wearing any makeup.
She opens her notebook, distracting me from observing when it slaps the table.
“Markham’s fine. He moves fast. His midterms are notoriously rough.
Can I see what you’ve gotten back so far? ”
I have my notebook in my hand already. I unzip the front pocket of my bag and pull out the loose graded pages.
The first quiz, which I got back on Friday, says 71 in red ink at the top.
The first homework, which I got back yesterday, says 64.
I am, briefly, considering not handing them over.
I could tell her that I forgot them and request a new tutor.
After all, there’s clearly a reason my sister has been hiding this girl.
I look at the papers and then hand them over. She takes it and looks at the quiz. Nothing in her face changes, and I don’t know why I expected it to. She turns it over, and then she looks at the homework. She’s looking at each answer quietly.
It’s forty seconds of silence. I don’t know what to do with my hands.
I wipe them on my pants, stare at the table, and then look back at her.
I shouldn’t stare, so I look at the paper in her hands.
Shit, that’s still staring, isn’t it? If I can notice that her sweater is made of wool and hangs on one side, then yeah, that’s fucking staring.
I glance down at the pencil she had in her mouth, noting the bite marks on it. My knee starts bouncing.
“Okay,” she says finally. “I see what’s happening.”
I stop bouncing my knee. This is good news. “Yeah?”
She says, “You understand the concept. You don’t understand the notation.”
I am, briefly, dumb. “Okay.”
She slides the homework paper across the table to me. She points with the eraser end of her pencil, and I can’t stop staring at the teeth marks.
“This question. You answered the joint probability. The question is asking for the conditional probability. You did the math right. You did the wrong math right.”
I look at where she is pointing. The problem says, Given that the patient tested positive, what is the probability that they have the disease, and underneath it is my work, which is — I can see it now, looking at it with her finger near it — the probability of a positive test and the disease, calculated correctly to four decimal places.
Wrong question. Right math. I read the problem one more time.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah. You’re answering the question you think it’s asking. The question it’s actually asking is not the same question.”
“I — okay.”
She touches the blue notebook to her right and slides it across the table toward me. It has a piece of blue tape with my name written in Sharpie across the front. She has good handwriting.
“This is yours,” she says, like it’s not a big deal, but I didn’t know tutors buy their students supplies.
I stare at my name written on blue tape.
“We’re going to go problem by problem. I’ll read each one out loud, and you’re going to tell me what you think it’s asking.
Then I’m going to tell you what it’s actually asking.
Your problem is not the math. Do you have your textbook? ”
I pull it out and place it in front of me.
“Good. Open your notebook to a fresh page. Number the lines one through five. We’re starting with the homework you just got back.”
I open the notebook and number the lines one through five. I pick up a clean pencil.
The first problem is a conditional probability problem about whether somebody owns a dog given that they own a cat.
The numbers in the problem are slightly insane — sixty-one percent of households surveyed own at least one pet, of which forty-two percent own a cat, of which — by the time she has read it aloud once I have already lost track.
“Read it again,” I say.
“Sure.” She reads it again. Her voice is the same flat, even, professional voice she has been using since I sat down.
“Okay,” she says. “What is the question asking for?”
“Probability of a dog given a cat.”
“Right. So which probability is that?”
“Conditional.”
“Yep. So what do we need?”
“P of dog given cat.”
“Which is?”
I have to look at the textbook. She waits.
“P of dog and cat over P of cat.”
“Yep. Do the math.”
I do the math. I do it carefully. She watches me do it.
“Twenty-eight over forty-two,” I say.
“Reduce.”
“Two-thirds.”
“Yep. That’s what they want. Now — read the question they actually asked you.”
I read it.
“Oh,” I say. “They want the percent.”
“They want the percent.”
“Sixty-six-point seven percent.”
“Yep.”
“That’s annoying.”
“It is annoying. I suggest that before you do any math, circling the words what percent, or what proportion, or the probability that. Different language, different output. Always.”
Hell. “Circle the words,” I repeat and start circling.
She pulls the textbook closer and tabs to the next problem. Her hair has fallen forward over her shoulder, so she pushes it back behind her ear without looking up.
“Second problem,” she says.
I pick up my pencil and work the problem.
She doesn’t look up at me. It’s unsettling to be ignored like this, but it’s better this way. The light in the study room is the kind of fluorescent that doesn’t flatter anyone, and somehow it doesn’t matter with her.
I get the answer and write it down.
She glances at my page, upside-down, from her side of the table, and nods once.
“Good. Keep going.”
For twenty more minutes, we just work. I get one wrong.
She corrects it without making it a thing.
I get one right, and she doesn’t applaud me.
She just nods and turns the page, and the absence of praise for getting a problem right is, weirdly, the most respectful thing anyone has done for me academically in three years.
She’s just teaching, and she’s good at it.
I am, slowly, getting it. The trick is, exactly like she said, in the question.
The question is the whole problem. Once you read the question correctly, the math is mechanical.
I have been doing the math correctly all along.
But the trick questions had me jumbled up.
I don’t need tutoring anymore, I realize. That’s all that it was.
Halfway through the next problem, I see the setup. Easy. So when she finishes reading and looks up at me, I am already saying, “Conditional. P of A given B. We want this one. We use this one.”
She looks at me for the first time since I sat down. She’s not reactive to my good looks or the blank expression on my face.
“Have you seen this material before?”
“No,” I answer honestly.
Her face softens. “Okay.”
I stare at her. I am not — I don’t know what to do with this.
I am, in some way I cannot trace, pleased about her surprise.
I’m also, in another way, mildly embarrassed because I can see in her face — in the half-second pause, in the slight tilt of her chin — that she has just realized she has been teaching me at half speed.
She has spent thirty-five minutes of this hour reading me problems slowly, the way you read to a kid.
I didn’t push back because I assumed that’s what tutoring was.
And now we both know she’s been babying me.
“That’s good. Bring out your homework.” She flips through the syllabus near her, pointing with her finger. “Do the work. and I’ll check it.”
I nod. “You think I’m ready?” I tease.
Her eyes meet mine for a brief moment, and then I grab my folder that holds my next assignment, unable to sustain her eye contact.
I don’t bother apologizing for my sarcasm as my folder and planner fall in front of me, echoing through the room.
I flip open my planner and look at the week.
I have my schedule and assignments written down in here, except for this tutoring session.
That’s only written on the wall in my bedroom.
I am going to have to add a column to the schedule.
She watches me for a moment and then turns to the textbook, flipping to the page on the syllabus.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. It starts buzzing back-to-back.
“Excuse me for a second,” I say, pulling out my phone. I look up at her, and she looks down at my phone. “Just one sec.”
Stanley: Report back.Stanley: We need a status update.
Stanley: Hot or not? Rowan: Leave him alone.
Stanley: Hot or not, Reeve? Percy: He is at a tutoring session, please for the love of God.
Blue: I’m up 5-0. Stanley: Reeve is ignoring us.
Rowan: He’s doing math.Stanley: HE IS IGNORING US. Rowan: Let him learn from the girl.
I switch the thread to silent and put the phone back in my pocket. “Sorry,” I mutter, shaking myself from Stanley’s bull crap. “It’s on silent now.”
Her eyes flick down to the textbook. She slides it over to me and then grabs something from her bag while I start working on the problems.
Hot or not.
I don’t want to answer that question.