Chapter 16

I squished my way into school Friday morning. Mom said she could get my clothes clean, but there wasn’t much we could do about my shoes, which were still pretty wet the next morning. We’d washed them with dish detergent, so they didn’t smell, although I’m sure they would after a day of me walking in them.

The whole day sucked. I was uncomfortable thanks to my feet being wet all day and Coach Bryant had decided it was the day to lay into me about ‘poor preparedness’ because I hadn’t been able to rewrite the worksheet he’d handed out. Most of the other work had been just on notebook paper, which wasn’t a problem, but this had been a printed-out map that we had to fill in information and a timeline on, so I had to turn in the one with the muddy footprint on it. We wiped it off as good as we could and I tried to use whiteout to cover up some of the damage, but it was still a mess. He decided it was damaged enough that he couldn’t accept it and gave me a zero on the grade.

If I could have ditched the rest of the day without Mom deciding that meant I couldn’t play that weekend out of town, I would have just left as soon as his class ended. I was, however, certain she would have done just that, so I stuck out the rest of the day.

The only high point was at the end of Math class when Ms. Seidel asked me to stay behind after class. Since the last time she pulled me aside was last semester when she recommended I get tutoring because I was struggling so badly in her class, I was a little concerned that she’d want to talk about my being behind again.

“Yes, Ma’am?” I said, walking over to her desk.

“You’ve made a lot of progress since we talked last semester and I’ve been watching your progress so far this semester, and I wanted you to know I am very pleased with how you are doing. I was a little concerned when I heard you were being pulled out of the tutoring program, but it seems it didn’t affect you at all. Did you find some other way to get tutoring?”

“Uhh...” I said, not sure how to answer.

When Kat had offered to keep tutoring me at lunch, after school, or on weekends, I hadn’t even considered if it would be a violation of whatever she agreed to when she joined the tutoring program. If it was just her helping out of the goodness of her heart, it might be fine, but I knew she was getting some kind of work/study credit for it, which would probably complicate things. The last thing I wanted to do was get her in trouble or have her kicked out of the program by telling anyone it was happening.

“I’m going to hazard a guess and say that your tutor in the program agreed to keep tutoring you on the side, and you’re worried about getting her in trouble?”

Maybe it was because of the bad luck I’d had with the administration, but this felt like a trap, so I did what Mr. Eaves had recommended I do whenever anyone asked questions I thought might get me in trouble. I shut up.

“Charlie, I know Katherine Moore was your assigned tutor and I know she’s your friend, and her still tutoring you is the only thing that explains how there was no dip in your performance at all when you left the program, since I remember you being concerned about not being able to afford a tutor on your own. I assure you I am not trying to get either you or Ms. Moore in trouble.”

I remained suspicious, but Ms. Seidel had always played fair and didn’t seem like the type to bait me like this. I did decide to remain vague, however.

“Okay.”

She rolled her eyes at how cagey I was being, but I guess that was enough of a confirmation for her to get to her point.

“Right now, your work is good enough that, if you keep it up, you can move out of the remedial class at the end of this semester. However, although you’ve caught up to where you should have been at the beginning of the year, juniors usually move into algebra II. Most students going into junior either took algebra I in freshmen year or took pre-algebra freshman year and algebra this year. Either way, you’re still going to be behind for algebra II if I just send you there next year. While I have a set curriculum I have to follow for this class that you’ll have to follow, I would like for Ms. Moore to work with you on the curriculum that this year’s algebra I class is working on, to get you ready.”

She handed me a sheet that had a breakdown of all the skills I would have learned if I was on level this year. Some of it was familiar to me from the stuff Kat had been teaching me, but a lot of it I didn’t recognize.

“I know it seems like a lot, learning what everyone else has taken a year to learn, but I think if you work hard this semester and, honestly, probably through the summer, you’ll be ready. Do you think this is something you’re going to have time to do and still be able to keep up with all of your other classes?”

I considered it. I was already studying with Kat, although if we added this on top of everything else, I’d need to study a couple more days a week with her, and it’d have to be during school most of the time, since she was on lockdown as long as her dad was in town. On the flip side, my schedule was packed as it was and I still had my normal classes that I’d need help with.

My initial reaction was to say ‘no.’ I had my first solo gig coming up and a talent scout was coming through in a few months. Even if that didn’t go well, I felt confident I’d have other shots. When I started this last year, it was on a lark, but I was starting to feel like I could actually make it in the music industry. Because that was going so well, school just didn’t feel that important, although that was probably because I just enjoyed it. I wasn’t like Kat or the other kids destined for honors and a good college. I just wanted to do enough to get by and get on with my life.

Of course, that is probably what my dad thought too, and look where that landed him. Besides, I’d promised my mom. I might be able to get by with doing the bare minimum, getting into a community college and getting an associate’s degree, but that wasn’t what she had meant when she said she wanted me to go to college, and I knew it. One of the things Chef always drilled into me, when we talked about the tenets of kung fu was discipline and respect. Trying to slide through on the bare minimum would break both of those, and I’d started to think about how the ideas he was teaching me applied to everything else in my life, and could help me stay focused on what I needed to accomplish.

“I think I can manage. Is there more stuff than this that we should be looking at?”

“That’s most of it, but I do have a few more things I’ll make sure end up in Ms. Moore’s hands, so she can give it to whoever’s currently tutoring you.”

Kat surprised me the next morning by showing up at my house early, well before I had to be at the Blue Ridge.

“Is everything okay?” I asked, immediately worried that she was there because something else had gone wrong.

“No, my dad flew out this morning for Hong Kong and he’ll be gone for a few weeks, so I can go out again. I talked to Ms. Seidel and she gave me the syllabus for this year’s algebra class and said you needed to be able to cover all of this by next year if you were going to start algebra II. It’s a lot, so I figured we’d get a start on it sooner rather than later.”

While I was happy her dad wouldn’t be bothering her for a while, that did not sound like how I wanted to spend my Saturdays. When I’d agreed to working on the material from algebra II, I hadn’t imagined that happening right away.

“Really?” I whined. “Can’t we just hang out or whatever and start like, next week?”

“No, we can’t. For one, I don’t know if Dad has any trips after this one, so we might not have a lot of time after this couple of weeks and for the other, there’s a lot of material here. You’re going to have to cover a year’s worth of stuff between now and August. That’s doable, but only if we start now.”

She had on her serious voice that she only used when she was tutoring me, and I knew there was no point in arguing it. If I pushed too hard, I might manage to break past her determination to do a good job being in charge, and make her start second-guessing herself again. She was learning to get comfortable being more assertive in a limited and safe way, and I didn’t want to undo the progress we’d made because of that. Plus, it would make the tutoring sessions a lot less effective.

“Fine, you’re the boss. Let’s just not spend all afternoon on it.”

“We won’t. I figure two hours on the new material and an hour to go over everything from school this week and make sure you didn’t have any questions and then we’ll head up to the Blue Ridge. Hanna said she was picking up a lunch shift since she was driving you to your thing tonight, so we can hang out for a bit when she gets off before you have stuff.”

I’d groused about working on everything, but it wasn’t that bad. Since we were essentially following the regular algebra I’s full-year syllabus, the first little bit was a review of previous materials. I’d suggested we skip it, since a lot of that was the same stuff we’d been going over for a while, but she thought the extra review would be good, just to make sure it was cemented in my head, and she’d planned it out so we had time for it.

The little new stuff we did cover was confusing, but she did a good job of explaining it. It would probably take a few more times of going over everything, but I had faith that Kat could get me through it.

We got up to the Blue Ridge right as Hanna got off work. There were still enough customers in the restaurant that she had to eat her lunch in the storeroom, but she said she was starving and didn’t want to wait. I thought it was probably because Vinney had made the family meal, which was always that rice and chicken thing. It was amazing. Most of the kitchen hadn’t eaten since the tail end of lunch was still going on, so I didn’t ask for any, although I wanted to. I’d had a bologna sandwich before we left just to get some calories in me for working out with Chef, although Kat looked at it like it was some kind of experiment. After the first few weeks, I figured out that Kat was used to a much different class of food than I was and, although I always offered, she’d politely refused any offer to make her something.