Wonderland

❄B13❄ Heather's "Advice"

Chapter Thirteen

Brayden's POV

Heather's "Advice"

 

October 19

"What else should I add to my notes?" Berkeley wondered, as she crossed off a problem from her practice midterm. Neither one of us had mentioned yet what went on yesterday morning nor did I think that either one of us would bring it up. I, for one, didn't want to bring it up because I thought it was awkward. I think Berkeley was thinking the same thing.

"You should add a list of instructions on how to find the point of a tangent line that crosses through another certain point," I pointed out.

"Right," she murmured, drawing a little box and waiting for me to explain to her what I was saying. Honestly, I don't think she was going to get a good score on her midterm; I have a feeling she hadn't studied much—that, or she just plainly sucks at math.

"You pick a point the curve and give it a random variable, like a for x. Then, you plug that a in to the original curve function to get your y."

"Ugh, no," Berkeley moaned, slamming her head down onto the table. We were sitting in one of the ABC rooms, a study area on the first floor of our dorm. I was coming here more often now to help Berkeley with her homework. "I'm fucking dumb."

"Yeah, you kind of are," I blurted, frustratingly, without meaning to. I mean, I had covered over this topic just about a bazillion times now and she still wasn't getting it. Okay, fine, maybe it was rude of me to say something like that to her, after all, not everyone's good at math, but you have no idea how frustrating it is to have to explain something to someone over and over again.

A look of hurt crossed her facial features as she lifted her head up to look at me.

"I'm sorry," I apologized. "You're not dumb. I was just joking."

"That didn't sound like a joke," she muttered.

"If it did sound like a joke, then would it still be a joke?" I asked, in a teasing manner.

"You're mean." She turned her body away from me and scribbled something down onto her notes again.

I mentally pictured myself elbowing her shoulder, causing her to smudge her pencil against her notes. That'd be mean of me to do that; I know Berkeley's been working pretty hard on her notes...

I barely wrote anything on my notes. Notes don't do shit on midterms; only your knowledge about the concepts of the math do. I only scribble down basic formulas on my paper before taking the test, and then rely on my head on everything else. Ryan, my friend since we were kids, was the complete opposite: Back in high school, he'd literally copy down chunks of text from his math book before taking the test. As expected, he ended up nearly failing every test, because he never got the mathematical concepts down.

A few minutes passed where neither Berkeley nor I spoke to each other. Finally, feeling like I was only wasting my time here sitting beside her doing nothing, I started to get up, wanting to ask Tyler if he wanted to chill with me. I was basically caught up on all my homework, and had nothing more to do but to just study for midterms. I felt confident about acing all of them, though—everything except for CSE. CSE was kind of kicking my butt right now, seeing as we're halfway into the quarter already. Even though I find coding fun, it still took me a few hours sometimes to figure a code out, let alone having to write three or four different codes in under fifty minutes on an exam without using Eclipse (the program the class uses to write Java).