The next morning, I woke up half expecting an apology text from Ashley for blowing me off yesterday. Instead, a text from an unknown number flashed on the front of my screen.
Unknown: Hi Savannah. This is George. Grace gave me your number. I have a big test on Wednesday that I really need help studying for. Were you serious about being willing to tutor me?
My heart leaped. So he didn’t hate me after the way we left things in the hallway. That, or he was really desperate for some help. Either way, I was ready to make it up to him for all my foot-in-mouth moments he’d been a witness to the past few weeks.
Me: Of course. How about this afternoon? One o’clock? My place?
George: My GPS remembers the way. See you then.
I had a lot of prep work to do if I was going to be entirely presentable for our tutoring session. Luckily, the house was still in decent shape thanks to the film crew’s coming over yesterday. The reminder of the film crew made me cringe a little bit. Mom had been so angry with me, even though I tried to stay as positive as possible. I hadn’t said anything completely awful, had I? She and her friends stayed out late getting drinks, and I decided to spend my wild Friday night doing research for the story Grace and I were working on.
With the help of Mrs. Brandt, I’d learned that all the school’s funding was public record, and we filed to have the records sent to us. We found out they published an “overview” each year to the school’s website, which generalized all athletics into one blanket number. We wanted to see the nitty-gritty.
The tenured salary for the school’s baseball coach was just too high. Something fishy was definitely going on, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it.
I heard a small tapping at my bedroom door, and my stomach tightened. Mom opened my door and peeked her head in, and I closed my laptop, bringing my legs into a pretzel-style position.
“I think we need to talk about the show taping,” she said, sitting down on the end of my bed. I wanted to pull my blankets up over my head and avoid this conversation at all costs, but it didn’t seem like a very viable option at this point.
“Mom, I’m sorry about how it ended up going,” I said. “But I do feel like they got some good footage to use where I was peppier.”
“Do you know how reality TV works, Savannah? They want to sell the most dramatic story that they can. All that footage is going to be fair game for some editor who doesn’t know us or care what the repercussions of our words will be. You’ve just handed them ammo,” she said.
“Well, can’t we ask Arden to look over it for us?”
Mom shook her head. “She can only control what she gets on camera. After that it goes over to the editing team. I just—I really hope that someone had a juicier story and they’re going to focus more on that.”
My stomach dropped to the floor. She rested her head in her hands as she sucked in a deep breath.
“What’s done is done,” she said.
“Mom—”
“I know you’re sorry, Savannah. And I’ll get over it, eventually. Right now I guess I’m just disappointed.”
“How can I make it up to you?” I asked. I could stand Mom being angry at me, but the disappointment hurt me deep down. While anger rips through your body and tears at your guts, disappointment is a slow and painful ache that sits on your chest for much longer. I could deal with the rip and tear of her anger. Her disappointment was agony.
“I’ll have to think on it,” she said, getting up from the bed. I closed my eyes as I heard her footsteps pad back down the hallway and didn’t open them again until I heard her bedroom door close.
* * *
Mom was playing catch-up on a client project for work, so she would be delightfully occupied while I prepared for my study session with George. I’d convinced her to keep Fiyero with her, on the off chance that George wasn’t a dog person.
“George is Grace’s cousin, right?” she asked.
I’d filled her in on some minor details about him, not daring to share the truth about my panic attack the day we met, or the harrowing moment when George almost turned me into a car pancake on the first day of school. I also definitely didn’t tell her about the way my stomach fluttered thinking about him coming over, or the way I’d very vividly dreamed of us winning the three-legged race and him pulling me close after crossing the finish line.
“Yeah, that’s him,” I said, trying to play it cool. She saw right through it.
“Are you wearing eyeshadow?” she asked, smiling slightly.
“I study best when I feel my best, and rocking gunpowder smoky eye just really gets me in the mood for calculus,” I said.
“I see,” she said. “I’ll keep Fiyero up here. Have fun with George.”
Fiyero whined for a few moments as I closed the door to Mom’s room. Once the door was firmly closed, I started on my quest to rid the house of anything marginally embarrassing for George to stumble upon.
It was officially 12:56 p.m. and I sat at our kitchen table, tapping my pencil anxiously. The mystery of not knowing if he was an early person (please, God, no), an on-time person (a little bit more acceptable), or a late person (much more my speed) was aggravating. This was why I very rarely hung out with new people—their unknown reactions made me more nervous than it was worth most of the time.
I meticulously tried to hide each motivational poster and throw pillow that Mom had scattered around the house in an effort to keep the words weight loss and healthy lifestyle out of the conversation in this house for the afternoon. I’d just finished shoving the EAT LESS SUGAR, YOU’RE SWEET ENOUGH ALREADY! pillow into the front closet when I heard a door slam in the driveway.
The clock had just switched to 12:57. An early person. I wanted to be more surprised by that fact than I actually was.
I swung the front door open to find him with his fist balled, ready to knock on my door. He took a step back, startled.
“I heard your car door and beat you to it,” I said. “Come on in.”
Having George in my house seemed strange, like two separate worlds of mine were colliding. As he took in the pictures of me and Ashley as kids displayed around my house, I suddenly wished that I’d picked a more neutral spot to meet. He was seeing a personal side to me that I normally didn’t show the kids I tutored.
“Camp Snoopy?” he asked, pointing to a picture where I was sobbing while being forced to hold a mascot Snoopy’s hand.
“That was back when the Mall of America was especially awesome. We went to Camp Snoopy every summer,” I said.
“I think I have the exact same picture with my sister. Except she’s the one screaming bloody murder,” he said.
“I had a big distrust of mascot costumes. I’m still working on it, to be honest,” I said.
I led him into the kitchen, where I’d set up our space with scrap paper, a handful of pencils, and a timer in case he wanted to take any practice quizzes. I personally work best under pressure, so the timer is always a good challenge to get the math juices flowing.
“So, what do you need the most help with?” I asked, pushing a piece of paper and a pencil in front of him. He took the pencil and started twirling it idly between his fingers.
He pulled out his textbook and plopped it in front of me, pointing to a section on quadratic functions.
“Quadratic functions? But they’re four times the fun!” I said.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’d make the perfect Miss Frizzle in a Magic School Bus reboot?” he asked, smirking a tiny bit.
“Has anyone ever told you that Miss Frizzle is my hero and I take that as a compliment?”
“I’ve honestly never met someone so excited about math,” he said. “Are you doing something with it in college?”
“I’m planning on going to Indiana State to study engineering,” I said. “What about you? What are you planning to do after we break out of Springdale forever?”
“Probably something with music. I want go somewhere where there’s a saxophone conservatory. I can’t decide if I want to try to make it professionally or teach,” he said.
“Ooh, anything to avoid having to teach little kids how to play. Ashley used to play flute back in the day, and that was rough to listen to in the house,” I said.
He smiled. “That’s actually my favorite part. I like helping kids realize that music is something they can work on their whole lives. Like it’s a secret language they can speak with musicians around the world, no matter where they’re from.”
“That’s actually really sweet,” I said. We held eye contact for a few seconds before I looked back down at the textbook. “Okay. So, quadratic functions—”
“Can I have something to drink, before we get started?” he asked.
“Oh gosh, I’m officially the worst hostess ever. Yes. We have water, milk, orange juice, some diet pop—”
“Some diet what?” he asked.
“Pop,” I said, emphasizing the final p. “You know, like Diet Coke.”
“You mean soda,” he said.
“I mean, you live in the Midwest now, George, you have to embrace pop over soda everywhere you go,” I said.
“I’ll have a diet, then,” he said.
“A diet what?” I asked. “If you answer correctly I’ll even pour it over ice for you.”
“Pop,” he cringed out, followed by a big smile. “Diet Coke is my weakness, otherwise I wouldn’t have given in so easily.”
“Sure,” I said, putting on a smile that matched his. I brought the glass back to him, and he dramatically took a sip with a loud “Ahh!” at the end that made me giggle. I shuffled the paper in front of me, actually writing Quadratic Functions, Chapter 3 on the top of the sheet before a very excited Fiyero bounded into the kitchen.
“Fiyero wanted to come say hi,” Mom said, following closely behind him.
Fiyero practically pounced on George, trying his hardest to leave slobbery kisses on his face. George scratched Fiyero behind his ears, just like he loved, and they became instant best friends. It was easy to sway into Fiyero’s favor—give him a table scrap or a particularly good scratch behind the ears and he was in the palm of your hand.
“George, you’ve now met poodle monster Fiyero. This is my mom,” I said.
“Kim,” she finished, shaking his hand.
“Nice to meet you, Kim.” He smiled. I silently thanked the gods that he didn’t say Mrs. Alverson. That always put her in a weird funk when she had to explain that she was no longer, in fact, Mrs. Alverson.
“You’re Grace’s cousin, right?” Mom asked. I sent her a look, as if to warn her not to make it seem like we’d been talking too much about him. I wanted to seem like I at least had the smallest semblance of chill.
“I am,” he said. “We moved here from South Carolina to be closer to family. Plus, my dad got a new job.”
“That’s a bummer that you had to switch schools your senior year,” Mom said.
“Oh, I’m a junior, so it’s a little less dramatic. Besides, I wasn’t a huge fan of the school I went to in South Carolina. I think we all were in need of the change,” he said.
A million questions popped into my brain. What happened at his old school? Why wasn’t he sad to leave? Didn’t he have friends he was leaving behind? It took everything in me to not start blurting them out as soon as I thought them.
“Well, I’m glad to hear you’re having a better time here,” Mom said. She looked between the two of us, and I widened my eyes in the universal teenage signal of “Leave us alone.” She had a crooked smile on the corner of her mouth as she observed the signal.
“All right. I’ll leave you two to it,” she said. So we’d formed some small form of peace since we talked this morning. Nothing had completely blown over, but at least we were talking again. I took it as a step in a positive direction.
She tried to convince Fiyero to go back upstairs with her, but he’d made a comfortable spot under the table, wrapped around George’s foot. It didn’t look like he’d be leaving anytime soon. Mom shook her head and went back upstairs, coffee in hand.
“He’s not usually so comfortable with strangers,” I said, pointing down to the sleepy mess of poodle fur at George’s feet.
“I think he’s probably comforted by our similar hairstyles,” he said. “He must think I’m one of him.”
I actually snorted with laughter and quickly covered my face in my hands. I would have never described George’s strawberry blond curls as poodle-esque before, but now that he brought it up, the similarity was uncanny.
“Well, thankfully for you, it’s a good look on both of you,” I said.
He turned the same embarrassed shade of red all over that he’d turned in the hallway last week. I could feel my own face heating up from admitting that George might be a little, somewhat, kind of good-looking. You know, in a gangly seventeen-year-old boy kind of way.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll have to leave a nice review on the Yelp page for Supercuts, since you like it so much.”
“Appreciated,” I said.
“So Grace tells me that you’re a really great writer,” he said, twirling a pencil in his fingers.
“Have you been talking about me with Grace?” I asked, the smile that I was already wearing, spreading even farther across my face, if that was even possible.
“Only some basic recon. I had to make sure that you’d be a reputable tutor,” he said.
“And my writing skills relate to that how?” I asked.
“I didn’t ask Grace to give me that information. I also didn’t ask for the information that you know all the words to every Eminem rap ever,” he said.
“You’re telling me you didn’t also have a phase where you loved the 2002 classic movie 8 Mile?” I asked.
“I don’t think anyone our age did.” He laughed.
“I am older than you, to be fair,” I said.
“Barely!” he said.
“I’m old for my grade; I was born in September,” I said.
“Well then, we’re only eight months apart,” he said.
“That’s four and a half dog years.”
“Just because I have poodle hair doesn’t mean you can measure our ages in dog years,” he said. “What’s the one song … ‘If you had one shot—’”
“Don’t make me start, this could go all day,” I said, giggling.
“‘Or one opportunity—’”
“‘To seize everything you ever wanted, in one moment, would you capture it, or just let it slip—’ I’m going to stop, it’s too much,” I said, full-on belly laughing.
“I’m impressed,” he said.
“Very few people get to witness Savannah Shady. You should feel honored,” I said.
“Oh, I do,” he said.
I shoved the paper that I’d written on so many minutes ago in front of him. “For real now. Quadratic functions…”