You Can Run To Me

Six

"So how about differentiation? Anyone?"

Natalie's hand shot up. She was good at this. It was strange, having a professor who asked for audience participation, but she loved it. With some of the other classes, it was kind of hard to feel involved, but Kate in Math was great.

"Divide the coefficient by the power and the raise the power by one," she said, meriting a smile from the teacher.

A happy glow settled on Natalie, and she relaxed back into the lecture hall seat. She hadn't been very good at math in high school. Not that she was terrible, exactly, just not amazing. Yet for some reason, now she was at college she was doing really well. She understood it, for once. Then again, that could all change when they moved on to the trickier stuff.

Kate, the professor, clicked a button on the projector remote and the presentation changed to a slide displaying a series of differentiation problems. They'd covered this last week, so this was only the starter. Natalie made a start on them and, following the differentiation and integration rules for each question, was done pretty quickly.

She looked around the room, and saw that only a couple of other students had finished the problems yet. Natalie had sat at the end of a row so she only had to sit next to one other person. She wasn't exactly being antisocial, but she was pretty happy sticking with Penryn's circle of friends for now, despite having promised herself in the summer that she'd find her own friends too. The girl sat on her right, therefore, was the only person she was sat next to. She hadn't really bothered to learn many names, so she had no idea what the girl was called. She really looked like she was struggling, and Natalie felt a little guilty, having found it so easy herself. Then again, they'd done this only six days ago, so she should know how to do this.

But the girl's forehead was crinkled up and her page was blank except for the equations she had copied down from the front of the class. Natalie felt pretty sorry for the girl. She worked herself up to it, then nudged the girl gently with her shoulder, causing her to look up at her.

The girl had nice brown eyes, faint freckles over her nose and soft blond hair that fell to her shoulders but no further. Natalie hesitated momentarily, surprised by how pretty she was. For some reason she had expected the girl to be in some way deformed. Whenever she'd seen the girl, after all, she'd been alone. So obviously there had to have been something about her...

"Do you want some help?" Natalie asked, finally.

"Um... Sure," muttered the girl, and Natalie noted that her accent was thoroughly English.

"Natalie," said Natalie, rather awkwardly holding out her hand.

"Oh...Sylvia," mumble the girl, taking Natalie's hand and shaking it.

"So what's the problem, Sylvia?" asked Natalie, smiling politely.

"I wrote down the rules last week, but I keep losing my stuff, and then I forgot to write them down when you said them a minute ago and..."

Natalie shrugged. It wasn't as though she'd never lost anything herself. It seemed like a pretty decent excuse to her. Taking up her pen, she wrote the rules out as neatly as she could along the top of Sylvia's page. Sylvia smiled at her weakly and then got to work on the equations.

The girl didn't seem to have a laptop, and Natalie began to wonder. Perhaps Sylvia was from a poor neighborhood and that was why she hadn't made many friends. Suddenly Natalie made the decision that she was going to try and befriend the girl. She was fairly sure Sylvia shared at least one other lesson with her, so it would, if nothing else, give her someone friendly to sit next to.

At the end of the hour, her mind throbbing from all the strange graphs and algebra they'd done, Natalie saved her work and slid her laptop into her bag. She turned to Sylvia and tentatively asked her if she'd like to join her for lunch. She was certain, by now, that Sylvia was going to say no. She probably did have friends, and would go and eat with them. If she didn't? Well, she probably would see this offer as some act of charity and still wind up refusing.