Depending On You

chapter five - pre-calc

Grace was bored as the bell rang, dismissing her from her Pre-Calculus class. It had been nothing short of a nightmare as the teacher was just finishing a unit and she knew that she hadn't paid enough attention to pass the test that would follow.

Usually she didn't care about her grades, but the end of first semester meant that she had to get them up in order to get her credits, because she surely didn't want to repeat her senior year.

Her next class was an elective, and one of the only classes she had a fine grade in, so she decided that she'd skip out on it and look over her math material in the bathroom instead.

She kept her head down as she walked through hallways to avoid drawing in the attention of any of her peers, and her black hair did well to protect her from the spare set of eyes that did catch her.

By the time she made it to the bathroom the halls were nearly empty. When she pushed the obnoxiously bright colored door open, the sound of its creaking was the only noise to be heard as everyone else settled into their classrooms and Grace settled into the same corner she always sat in.

She sat her backpack in front of her and took out her math notes and the battered old laptop she'd gotten years before. She logged into her Pre-Calculus teacher's online classroom to see how many assignments she'd missed.

There were seven for the most recent unit and she knew that she couldn't get it all done and memorized before her next class, but she wanted to try her best to get as much as possible finished before she had to go to her equally despised English class.

She clicked on the first of the assignment and stared at the screen. She wondered how she could've been in class nearly every day of the school year and still not recognize a single equation she saw.

She copied the first question into her notebook and tapped her pencil against the paper as she tried to figure out where to begin.

Her confused silence was interrupted by the bathroom door screeching open. Her eyes widened and she flinched, dropping her pencil.

"Skittish, are we?" Liam smirked, eyebrows raised as he slowly approached her. He sat in front of her, pulling her laptop into his lap when Grace reached to grab her pencil from where it rolled. "Pre-Calc?" he asked rhetorically.

"Yeah, I need to work," she huffed, taking her laptop away from him, but he didn't give up. This time he took her notebook and squinted his eyes as he studied the question Grace had written down. "I'm serious, Liam," she groaned, trying to take the notebook back once she'd noticed.

He pulled it away from her. "Your phone buzzed," he stated, hoping it would distract her. "Check it, then I'll help you with your math," he proposed, looking back at the problem on the paper, trying to recall his knowledge from his Pre-Calculus class the year before.

Grace rolled her eyes but picked up her phone nonetheless. She could've used the help that Liam offered. Despite how much she loved to hate him, she couldn't deny that he was quite intelligent when it came to the core subjects of school. Hence why he was in higher up classes than her when they were both seniors.

She hadn't noticed that her phone had vibrated, but she was so glad that Liam had. The notification had been for a text sent to her by Dean. She bit her lip when she saw his name and anyone could have noticed how she blushed. Her face lit up.

"I'm guessing that was boy toy?" Liam teased her, taking the pencil from her hand with no resistance from Grace. And despite the name that he called Dean, she nodded as she opened the text.

It said, hey, baby, call me when you get this. She got butterflies just from reading the words. Of course she'd seen him that morning when he dropped her off at school, but she already missed him, and she couldn't wait to hear his voice.