Too Much, but Never Enough

Chapter 3- Suck It Up

Monday morning Clyde sits at his desk staring blankly at his worksheet. As much as he tries to understand it, he doesn't even really know where to begin, it feels like the numbers staring back at him are mocking him and calling him an idiot. He might as well have been asked to translate a paragraph of Chinese for how little this all makes sense to him.

Fucking moron, he thinks bitterly to himself. You can't do anything right.

Letting out a long breath through his nose he looks up from his paper, his brown eyes resting on Butters who is sitting across from him, diligently scribbling away at his own worksheet. The classroom is organized into several islands with four desks apiece. Each group has two girls and two boys, except for Clyde's which is made up of him, Butters, Pete Thelman, and Katie Gelson. He can't help but notice that he was probably intended to be the second girl in his group, and the thought leaves a bitter taste inside his mouth.

"Hey Butters, what did you get for number five?" he murmurs quietly.

The blond looks up from his paper, his ice blue eyes meeting Clyde's. "Fifty-eight," he replies. "Whaddabout you?"

Clyde lets out a loud groan, frustratedly running his hands through his hair. "Dude, I'm not even close. I got a hundred and fifty. I'm so screwed. I'm totally gonna tank the test on Friday." He's easily maintaining a high C or above in the rest of his classes, but math has been consistently kicking his ass since he was a kid; there are so many different rules and formulas that always get jumbled up in his brain and he's never been able to make proper sense of them. The first semester of the school year has barely even started and he's already struggling to maintain a D, literally being kept afloat by little five point assignments that were merely graded on participation. There was no way they would hold him up forever, and if Clyde fails this test he's certain he might as well give up on ever passing the class. He feels completely hopeless, convinced that he's going to flunk the class.

Butters leans over to look over Clyde's paper, turning it around to get a better view. He slides his own paper next to it and Clyde watches as Butters follows along with the end of his paper comparing each step of their process to figure out where Clyde went wrong. The blond's brows are knitted close together and he slightly chews at the bottom of his lip as he focuses. Finally, Clyde sees a spark of life in those ice blue eyes as Butters' head snaps upwards and he meets his gaze.

"You were on the right track up until the end," he says. You've just gotta remember: please excuse my dear aunt Sally."

Clyde's face scrunches up in confusion. "Dude, I don't even know your aunt Sally. What does she have to do with anything?"

"It's a mnemonic device Dipshit," Pete mutters under his breath. Clyde's eyes flick over beside him to look at the goth, finding him ignoring his own worksheet in favor of scribbling poetry into his leather bound journal. Pete's dark, heavily lined, eyes flick towards Clyde for a moment as he studies him before rolling and flicking back down to his journal. "It stands for the steps in the order of operations. Aunt Sally doesn't effing exist."

"Oh," Clyde replies, his mouth setting down into a frown. He feels like even more of an idiot now that Pete's pointed out what probably should've been obvious.

"It stands for parentheses, exponent, multiplication and division, addition and subtraction. Everything has to be done in that order or the answer'll come out all funny," Butters adds.

"Oh," Clyde repeats, letting out a dejected sigh. He feels even more like an idiot as he listens to Butters explain it. At first he probably would have dismissed the strange explanation as typical Butters weirdness, but knowing that Pete immediately understood what he meant makes him think that this is some sort of common knowledge that he's somehow been left out of.