Chapter 21. Midterms (6/7)

"Remember, I only stay over if you can get everything I quiz you on correct at the end. If you don't I might be stabbed by a crackhead. My life is in your hands."

I used that as the new carrot on the stick. Me spending the night at her place.

"I'll do my best."

"Then I'd like you to solve this problem first."

I picked up her pencil, scribbled down a math problem for her, then returned her pencil to her. Our hands brushed against each other when she received it. She started working on the problem but got stuck after a few steps in. I took the pencil from her again while touching her hand in the process. I wrote out a similar problem and did the same steps she'd just done and the next step that followed. When she saw that she caught on quick.

She looked a bit eager just to retrieve her pencil and study. No, rather, too eager that her intentions were all but too obvious. However, I was the one who'd intentionally brushed our hands together the first time rather than dropping the pencil on the desk for her to pick up.

Over the time I'd be teaching her, I'd reprogram her brain on a subconscious level by taking advantage of her love. Put a nicer way, you could say I was using the power of love to solve the problem she had with studying.

I'd associate a feeling of eagerness and excitement with the simple act of her receiving her pencil back from me. It could be thought of as me handing off a baton to my partner in a race.

With the example I provided, she successfully solved the rest of the problem I initially gave her.

Using this process we gradually worked through more and more different types of problems that she could expect to show up on the math midterm. It was a bit slow at first, but as she did more and more problems she began to get the right without any sort of help at all. In fact, she was getting much faster at solving them.

Seeing her own progress over the course of only a few hours studying with me, she couldn't contain her happiness. She was constantly beaming with a radiant smile more than ready to take on the next problem I'd give her.

It seemed I was right, she really was abnormally smart after all when she was able to dedicate her full concentration to a single task. It's just none of her teachers before had been able to draw out her true academic talents to the surface. If she got genuinely interested, it was a piece of cake.

Finding a good stopping point I set up a small quiz for her for each of the types of problems we went over. I handed them over to her and asked her to solve them all.

With a determined look in her eyes, she received the papers and began going through them. They were a bit more difficult than the ones we'd gone over but her hand moved like lightning across the paper methodically solving through them all.

I thought it would have taken more time, but in a short fifteen minutes she confidently slid her paper over to me for me to check her answers.

I went through her solutions one by one and verified they were free of any careless mistakes. Once I verified the last problem was correct, I confirmed there was a checkmark beside every question.

She'd actually gotten them all right.

"Well… this is a bit unexpected. I even intentionally made them all harder than the ones we went over."

"So they were harder. I had a feeling they took a few more steps to solve than the other ones."

"Are you sure you're not pretending to be bad just to scam me?"

"I'm not pretending, you're just really good at teaching me." She looked strangely happy when she got to compliment me.

"Rather than my teaching, I'd say you're sharp and quick to catch on when you really pay attention to what's being said."

"By the way, aren't you one to talk?"

"What do you mean?"

"Pretending to be bad. Isn't that like the pot calling the kettle black?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, based upon how you missed all those days of class and still managed to maintain the same average as always, along with how easily you're able to teach me the material, I'm 100% convinced now. The note you casually tossed over to me during the first midterm, you weren't bragging when you said I could get any score I wanted with it. I thought maybe you'd gotten ahold of the answer sheet or something since you said you weren't against cheating. If anyone's pretending here, it's you who's pretending to be bad academically. Actually, not bad, but rather, average. But… I just don't get it though, why are you doing something so pointless like holding back when you could easily ace all these tests?"

"Aren't you just imagining things because you selfishly want to feel good about your boyfriend?"

"I'm not imagining it, but even if I was being selfish by imagining it, so what? I'm fine with being selfish over something like this."

"Let's say I did extremely well academically, my popularity rose through the roof and I suddenly had a bunch of girls lining up for help with their studies. Could you say the same thing?"

She froze when she thought about it and bowed to me, "Please don't change and keep doing whatever it is you're doing."

"Haha. Anyway, sure I could ace tests, but at the end of the day getting high scores on tests isn't something that makes me happy. The sort of thing that would personally make me happy is seeing my precious girlfriend doing her best with a smile on her face."

"Aren't you a bit sly? Indirectly forcing me to do my best while you get to slack off and take it easy?"

"It's not my grades that are in trouble though. Mine are consistent, they're neither particularly good, nor are they bad. I'm content with keeping it that way. Striving for academic excellence, I'm not interested in that sort of path."

"You mean you're not going to go to university?"

"No, I'll go. But I won't be a student there."

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"Well… I actually quite like university. There's a spot on campus that I'm particularly fond of, in fact. It's a place I can go to that nobody really visits. It's sort of like a second home to me."

"You'd go to university just to pass the time in the day?"

"Yeah."

"How carefree."

"Indeed."

"But… you're in high school, right? How'd you find yourself going to university? Actually, how would you even find such a spot to go there?"

"Hmm… if I said I was a time traveler from the future would you believe me?"

She raised a brow and looked at me like I'd lost my mind.

"I'd think you're just trying to play with me if you said that."

"Haha, I would too."

"Well, I guess you could say one day I had a dream of the past. I'd visit this place all the time. Every day in fact. It was a place I could go to relax."

"Then it's somewhere you used to visit a lot when you were a child? Like a place your parents used to take you?"

"Maybe."

"By the way, what about your parents? What do they do for a living? It sounds like they went to university and brought you there a lot as a child, so shouldn't they be pretty well off? If that's the case, why do you even need a part-time job? Do your parents know you're working?" It was an easy misunderstanding to draw.

"Hmm, I'd say they wouldn't know." One abandoned me at birth while the other died long before I had it so it's highly unlikely. My father, if I can call him that, could very well be dead as well for all I know.

"They don't know? So you're hiding it from them?"

"No, I'm not hiding it from them."

"You're… not hiding it from them… but they don't know?" It seems she got hung up on my words. She looked like she was trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

"Yeah."

"You live alone as well… right?"

"Yeah."

"Then… are they-"

"Pretty much."

"And you're fi-"

"Yes, I'm doing just fine. It's something I'm used to."

"When did th-"

"My mother at twelve. The other abandoned the two of us when I was born, as far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't consider that person a parent. So when you say parents, it's parent for me." Since I already knew what her questions were, I didn't bother to let her finish them. I kept the answers curt and short. By this point, I'd realized there wasn't much of a reason to hide these sorts of matters from her. It would only give rise to more problems later on if I didn't reveal these things to her early on.

"I see, so that's why you live alone and are working. Have you been doing this… all alone… since you were 12? Isn't there any family who would take you in?"

"I don't have such people in my life, but it hasn't been since I was 12. Rather, it was since I was 14. I'd been left to a friend of my mother's who raised me for some time, but she died of a heart attack. When I noticed her health was in decline, I pleaded with her to assist me with getting a job so I could help alleviate some of her financial burdens. After much effort, she was able to pull some strings with a good friend of hers who owned a convenience store to hire me for part-time work off the books since I couldn't legally be hired until I turned 16."