Friends With Benefits

02. Paying with Detention

02. Paying with Detention:

ALYX GROANED in irritation. She was sitting at the kitchen table with her math homework out in front of her at six a.m. in the morning.

Her cereal had turned soggy and her milk had gone from cool to room temperature. She had attempted to do five equations but all her answers had turned out to be a mile from the ones given in the solution box. There was one that she had gotten right but she'd clearly used some cross dimensional method that doesn't work on earth twice in a row because when she used the method on the next sum, the given answer was x equals negative 51 While the one she got was x equals 2633.

She groaned again. "How is that even possible?" She wasn't stupid. And it's not like she didn't know how to take instruction from a teacher, she just didn't know how to do this, she hadn't attended the lecture in which they taught the methods and for the life of her she couldn't remember the formulas. She put her pen down and rubbed her face.

The soft thumping of bare feet on wood alerted her that she had company heading towards her from the living room.

"You have a book open on the table," came the remark. "A math book." the voice added when he glanced at the book over her shoulder before pulling out the powdered chocolate to mix in with his milk, from the cabinet over the coffee-maker. He usually had to go on tip toes for that but today he seemed to reach just fine, the boy was growing fast. Soon her little brother would be taller than her too.

She sighed and went back to her book, not knowing what to do, but winging it. Mikhaiel had given her his neatly scripted notebook but even though it all looked simple enough she was still at a loss. His working made perfect sense but she didn't understand the premises on which he'd used the different formulas. How did he decide which was to be used where? She found herself thinking the same question again.

"Are you sleep-writing? Lex, you're doing maths!" he told her as though she didn't know it.

"I am well aware of that, thank you, Jamieson." she scowled at her brother as he sat down across from her on the island table with his cereal, his nose scrunched in disapproval at the full name.

"Is it your bank account statement? Are you totalling your balance? Did they not pay you enough for pouting extra at the camera?" her brother shot questions at her like a machine gun.

She huffed, looked at him flatly and blew at a curl that had escaped her tidy pony. Younger brothers were more annoying than older ones. At least the older ones have friends of their own and left you well alone most of the time. The younger ones followed you around the house and hen-pecked at you like a nagging wife.

"First of all, I'm an amateur, they don't pay me that much. Second, I don't pout at the camera, I pose, with dignity and grace. And third, I happen to be trying very hard to do my homework." she informed the fifteen year old blonde boy before her. He started dramatically choking on his breakfast while croaking cliché, end-of-the-world dialogue from random movies.

She sighed and sipped at her  juice, glancing at the clock on top of the oven to check for the time. First class was History and they were going to show a boring old documentary about Joseph Stalin.

She didn't want to go but her new agreement with Mikhaiel included not skipping any classes unless she was dead in a ditch somewhere. She scowled at the math problem and picked her pen up once again, really hoping to be dead in a ditch somewhere.

She started the next sum, sure that by the end of the hour she would have to call her disturbingly quiet mentor and tell him she was declared incapacitated due to a mathematically induced coma. She could just see it, herself lying on the floor with the letter x in the place of each eye and sine and cosine sums circling her head. Those ones she didn't get even the tiniest bit.