Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
jason
They really didn’t save on the heating in the library. I wished I hadn’t put on a hoodie over a T-shirt. The wash of heat made me flushed by the time I reached the large table with a lonely figure that couldn’t be mistaken for anyone other than a Stats tutor.
A slim guy with sharp features, all angles and lines, reading glasses perched high on his nose, and light brown hair in an adorably disheveled state.
He sat behind a pile of books, a laptop screen lighting up his face.
He wore an oversized brown sweater and an expression on his face that didn’t inspire confidence.
He lifted his gaze and met me squarely, life leaving him a little. Not really the impression I often left on people, but I wasn’t around nerds that often. Not my fault. They were all hermits, hiding behind the walls of their house just down the street from mine.
“Oh,” he said.
“Oh?”
“No, I mean…hello.” He took off his reading glasses. His eyes were sharp and brown, narrower than mine, slightly slanted. “You must be…”
“Jason,” I said. “And you look like you swallowed something inedible.”
He waved at the chair across from him, not commenting on the joke. Oops. “You’re late.”
“I didn’t know what to wear,” I said.
Crickets. He only glanced at me like I was serious. Then, so quietly that I might have imagined it, he said, “I suppose anything’s an improvement.”
I pulled the chair and sat down, putting my backpack by the leg of the table. “You from the Thinkers’ House?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“I’ve seen you around,” I said.
“I pass by the Bel House every morning,” he said. I wondered why it sounded defensive. It wasn’t like I was going to charge him a toll for using the public street.
“What’s your name?” I asked. Professor Colby never said. He only promised someone brilliant.
“Bennet,” my uninterested tutor said. “Bennet Marlowe.”
“Nice to meet you, Bennet Bennet Marlowe.”
“It’s…only one Bennet.”
Why was I still trying? I laughed it off. “Right, I imagined it might be.”
Bennet swallowed and hid his hands on his legs under the table. “You need help with Intro to Statistics.” It wasn’t a question, so I nodded without saying anything else. “Um, why Statistics?”
“Oh, classic. Cute professor, you know?”
He looked at me blankly. There was a tremor in his flat, dark eyebrows. “I think you’re mixing up the professors and the assistant.”
I laughed. “I think I know the difference between a nice woman and a hot guy who packs a million-dollar butt in a pair of chinos.”
Bennet’s eyes widened a little. “Oh.” He closed his mouth and looked down.
I embarrassed him. Great. Why couldn’t I just be a normal goddamn person? I could have just said the truth, that I wanted to get into sports management, and statistics was an important course to pass.
“Did I shock you?” I asked, folding my arms on the table and leaning in. There was still plenty of room between us. This table was fit for banquets. Bennet still pulled back a little as he looked at me. “No. It’s just…” He shook his head. “You’re very blunt.”
“Some call it a sense of humor,” I said.
“Do they?” he asked casually, opening a textbook.
A laugh broke out of me. “Is that a joke?”
“You tell me. You know about the sense of humor,” he said.
I still laughed. “Yeah, you made a joke. Funny, too.” And I swore his cheeks turned the palest shade of pink after that. “Professor Chinos said you’re really good at statistics.”
Bennet gave a noncommittal shrug. “Child’s play.”
“It’s a matter of life and death over here,” I muttered.
He inhaled a deep breath of air, rising a little.
He wasn’t as short as I’d thought. I’d only ever seen him from a distance, and he had been slouching when I arrived.
As he straightened now, he pulled his shoulders back.
They were broader than I’d given him credit.
His fingers were still very bony and slim, but long.
They trembled a little as he turned over the pages in a chewed-out textbook.
“It’s a tool like any other. Most things these days can be quantified.
And if you can quantify something, you can break it down into columns.
And if you can break it into columns, you can compare things. ”
“Easy,” I said, sarcasm flying over Bennet’s head. Or not? I was starting to think he knew the difference, but he just didn’t want to engage.
“Yes,” he agreed. “If you understand the instruments, you understand the data. And if you understand your goals, you know how to read the number.”
“That all sounds fun, but I don’t even know what the goals are,” I said.
Bennet sank a little in his chair. “It depends on what you want to say. How can we tell how many stars there are in our galaxy? We didn’t count them.
It’s simple statistics. We count a little bit, decide on the average, then multiply that to get the number that’s relative to the size of the galaxy.
We could be wrong, so we factor in the margin of error, and we give ourselves the statistical lenience. ”
I stared at him blankly. “Please don’t make me count the stars.”
The corners of Bennet’s lips trembled for a moment.
He had almost smiled. But then he looked at the textbook with mild frustration instead.
“Okay. Imagine there’s a football player who can score two goals in the first minute, four in the second, three in the third, and this repeats evenly for an hour.
We’d say he scored three per minute on average. ”
“Rookie numbers, but do go on.”
He shot me a look so sharp it could have skinned me alive.
“Rookie numbers,” I repeated under my breath, waiting for some kind of reaction from him. Nothing. He moved one of the books a little closer and gave his full attention to the table like it might suddenly solve my course for me.
“We work with patterns,” Bennet said. “That is the simple version. Books make it sound complicated because books enjoy their own importance.”
“I enjoy your importance,” I said.
He didn’t blink, which should have counted as a crime. He only adjusted a page with the tip of his finger. “Statistics is a lens. It makes fuzzy things clearer. It reveals a structure you can’t see at first glance.”
“Like when a guy looks like he hates you, but actually, he only hates your jokes?”
His eyelids lowered a fraction of an inch. “That is not a statistical problem. That is a taste issue.”
I tapped the table. “So you do hate my jokes.”
“I never said that,” he replied. “I said they require a certain taste.”
“That sounded like an insult.”
“It wasn’t,” he said plainly. “I’m only saying they are unique.”
“That’s worse,” I said.
He allowed a tiny pause before he turned another page. “Then I apologize for being accurate.”
I slumped a little in my chair, hoping the sympathy of the furniture might cushion my ego. It did not.
Bennet glanced up again. “If you prefer, I can use a sports example.”
“That might help,” I said. “My brain stops working when books get involved.”
He tapped a pencil lightly on the table. It seemed like he needed the noise to think. “Fine. Suppose you want to know if a quarterback performs better in home games or away games. You gather the number of completed passes from both situations over several weeks and compare them.”
“That sounds fine,” I said.
“You then consider the number of attempts, because success without context is empty.”
“That still sounds fine,” I said. “So we just eyeball which one is bigger.”
Bennet stared at me again. A slow stare. “That’s…not how statistics works.”
I leaned forward. “I knew that. I was testing you.”
“You failed your own test,” he said.
I pressed my lips together, fighting a smile. He was lethal.
Bennet kept going. “Averages reveal trends. Standard deviations reveal consistency. Significance tests reveal whether any difference is meaningful or random. You need all three if you want results that matter.”
“That’s a lot,” I said.
“You want to start with the basics.”
“That was the basics?”
“Yes,” he said.
I sat in silence for a long moment, trying to keep up with the shape of the words if not the content.
Bennet looked back at the book, and something about the way his hair fell near his eyes made it impossible to stay annoyed.
He looked careful. He looked focused. He looked like he lived in a world where everything stayed neat as long as you categorized it correctly.
“So if I want to pass,” I said, “I need to think in columns.”
“You need to think in goals,” Bennet said. “If your goal is to pass, then we reverse engineer the steps.”
“So you’re like my personal GPS.”
He blinked. “I’m a tutor.”
“Tutors can be GPS.”
“I am not a GPS.”
“That sounded GPS-like,” I said.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Jason, we need to stay on topic.”
“Right,” I said, lifting my hands in surrender. “Columns. Goals. Stars. Rookie numbers.”
He gave me a long, flat look. “If you took any of that seriously, the universe would collapse.”
I grinned at him, hoping to catch the hint of a smile again. It almost appeared. Almost. His lips twitched once before he hid the expression behind another turn of the page.
“Okay,” Bennet said. “We start with random variables.”
I groaned before he even finished the sentence.
Bennet ignored the groan and pushed a notebook toward me. “Write down what I say. Trust the process.”
“That sounds intimate,” I muttered.
“It’s math,” he said in that same careful voice. “Nothing intimate about it.”
I leaned over the notebook anyway. My pen hovered over the paper, and Bennet guided me through the first steps. His voice settled into a steady rhythm, and I tried to follow the words instead of the quiet way he breathed between them.
I wanted to make him laugh. I wanted it more than I expected. It bugged me.
But for now, I copied the numbers, because the room felt warm and close, and his focus pulled at me in a way that made everything else fade a little.