Quinn's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 16
The tutoring was a happy accident. Someone needed help. Quinn happened to be nearby.
The someone was a kid named Derek Paulson, a sophomore. He was a kid with wealthy parents who had high expectations. He was smart enough; he just had poor learning habits.
Derek had been memorizing theorems for the geometry test the way you memorize lines for a play—by repetition. When the test asked him to apply and solve rather than recite, he was lost. He had been sitting in the library after school with his test paper and the expression of someone staring at their doom when Quinn sat down across from him to do his own work.
Derek hadn’t asked for help. Quinn looked at the test paper, saw instantly what was wrong, and said, “You’re memorizing the wrong layer.”
Derek looked at him. “What?”
“The theorem is a conclusion. You memorized the conclusion. You need the logic that produces it because the test doesn’t ask you to state the conclusion; it asks you to use the logic. If you understand why the theorem is true, you can produce answers on demand.” Quinn turned back to his own book. “That’s your problem.”
Derek stared at his test paper. “Can you...” He stopped. Started again. “How long would that take? To actually learn it like that?”
Quinn thought about it honestly. “Depends how far back we have to go. Maybe an hour, maybe three.”
“Three hours?”
“To actually understand it. But that means you’ll still understand it in six months.” Quinn looked at him. “How long did you spend memorizing it the wrong way?”
Derek was quiet for a moment. “More than that,” he said.
“Right.”
They worked for two hours in the library that day, Quinn taking Derek back through the underlying logic of what he’d been trying to memorize. Not doing it for him but asking the questions that made the structure visible. Derek was not dumb. He’d just been shown, at some point, the wrong model.
At the end of the two hours, Derek looked at the material with an expression of annoyed recognition, the look of someone who now understood and was simultaneously pleased and pissed that it was so simple and self-evident.
“How much?” he said.
Quinn looked at him. “How much what?”
“How much do you charge? To do this.”
Quinn thought about spending money, how nice it would be to get a soda and a burger when Peter suggested they go somewhere.
“Fifteen an hour?”
Derek said, “Make it twenty.”
Quinn looked at him.
“If you charge fifteen, everybody will think you’re too cheap and not take it seriously,” Derek said, with the matter-of-fact authority of someone who has grown up understanding the theory of value pricing. “Charge twenty. Twenty is a nice round number and shows that you know your worth.”
Quinn thought about this for a moment.
“Twenty it is,” he said.
Word got around. By the third week of October, Quinn had four clients. By the end of November, he had seven. He’d set a cap at eight because going above eight was pushing the time he had available. He had his own studies that he didn’t dare let slip, not to mention the Colonel’s assignments.
If he was going to do it, he was going to do it right. He kept the tutoring professional. He was helpful, patient, and direct. He showed up on time, worked the full hour, and produced good results.
He was careful about one other thing. He did not hit on or flirt with the girls he tutored. This required more care because several of them were genuinely hot and they were aware of this and operated accordingly. Quinn was fifteen and not indifferent to pretty girls. But he had thought about it and concluded that it was a bad idea.
He’d grown up in places where you learned how people operated when they were afraid, when they were using, or when they just wanted something from you. He had been around girls in all these states and had learned things that most boys in this place were woefully ignorant of, even the popular jocks.
He was not a virgin. He hadn’t been for two years. He’d had a relationship with a girl named Rosa when he was on the street. She was matter-of-fact about the whole sex thing. They had offered each other comfort during a week of long winter nights.
Katherine Gallagher arrived in the library in the second week of November with the resigned look of someone who had been forced to admit she needed help but really hated that she had to ask for it.
She was, objectively, hot. Added to that, she had the social sophistication of a girl who had grown up wealthy in the same city and same schools. Like many beautiful girls, she had the unconscious expectations of a person for whom every environment had been arranged to serve her.
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