Quinn's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 20
Katherine sent her friend Amy Kowalski to him.
Quinn had seen through her right off. He’d been tutoring long enough now to recognize the types, not unkindly, just accurately. Amy hid her intelligence behind a wall of helplessness. She was seventeen, pretty in a pixyish kind of way. The helpless act had been a part of her for so long that she probably didn’t fully notice herself doing it anymore.
He’d built her geometry program the way he’d built Katherine’s: the foundation first, proof before practice.
This was the approach that got the most resistance because every kid he’d worked with had been trained to learn the what rather than the why, and changing required them to recognize what they didn’t know.
Amy’s resistance had been elegant. She’d used her face, her body, and her helplessness. Quinn ignored that and patiently pointed to the theorem on the whiteboard, saying, “Try again, look closer; you’ve almost got it.” He spoke with the absolute confidence that she could do it.
She’d gotten it the second time.
He’d seen the moment it clicked — the involuntary straightening, the expression of a person who had found something they didn’t know they were looking for. He’d said nothing, just moved to the next theorem, and she’d been six inches further forward in her chair for the rest of that session. Now, eight sessions in, she was doing the flashcards.
He held them up one at a time — each one presenting a problem that required the application of a theorem — and she worked them out in the notebook with the focused, excited attention of someone who had finally understood it. She got seven in a row and tapped her pen on the table once, hard, in celebration.
“Okay,” Quinn said.
“I hope you’re not going to say ‘good job,’” she said. “I hate when people say ‘good job’ like I’m a dog who sat on command.”
“I wasn’t going to,” he said. “I was going to say the next one is harder.”
She looked at him. “Bring it.”
He was aware of Keiko and Katherine at the other end of the table.
They had arrived twenty minutes into the session with their homework. Keiko was engrossed in what appeared to be a Japanese novel. Katherine had her history homework. They’d both registered Amy with precise assessment and had then returned to their books.
Amy was aware of them in the way that she was aware of most things that might be relevant to her presentation. She’d glanced at Keiko once with the particular attention that a new face received in this school, especially a new girl who was friends with Quinn. She returned to the flashcard with a slightly increased focus that he figured had a competitive quality to it, though he kept this observation to himself.
He held up the harder card.
She worked it out. It took four minutes, and she went down one wrong path and corrected herself without prompting, which was the important part — the correction coming from inside the system rather than from him, which meant the system was now running on its own.
When she finished, she sat back and looked at the answer with the expression he’d come to recognize as her real face, the one that arrived after the performance had run out of material — unguarded, pleased with herself.
“When’s the test?” he said.
“Friday.”
“You’re ready,” he said. “You’re going to do well.” This was their last session.
She started packing up her notebook.
She looked up at him; then her expression changed. She looked wistful.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome. Good luck on the test,” Quinn said.
She left.
“She likes you,” Katherine said, without looking up from her book.
“She’s a client,” Quinn said.
“These are not mutually exclusive states,” Katherine said. “You’re looking at this wrong, according to Sheila, who is the foremost expert on you.”
“Sheila needs to MYOB.”
Katherine turned a page. “Amy Kowalski has mentioned you on three separate occasions. All you have to do is ask her out, something even an idiot like you can do.”
Quinn looked at her.
“I’m just saying,” Katherine said. “Keiko, do you want to weigh in?”
Keiko looked up from her novel. “She arrived ready to be charming,” she said thoughtfully. “She left disappointed but knowing the material.”
“Thus,” Quinn said, “the point of the tutoring.”
“Well, there are other girls you could date. You’re not tutoring everybody.”
He thought, not for the first time, about dating. No driving, no dating. He had two months before he’d be eligible for his license.
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