The Bookshop

Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Calum’s POV

Jessie and I were at a small table in the corner of the small bookshop. All our Math quizzes and tests were piled up on the open pages of the Math book that didn’t even help at all.

Jessie groaned and slammed her head in the table. “I fucking hate Math.” She says. “Sorry for cussing. It’s just that Math is like, my worst subject ever since they added shapes and letters.” She rolls her eyes and pushes a strand of hair out of her face.

I laugh at her and say that everything’s gonna be okay. “What do you find hard?” I ask her. “I could help you.” She looks at me and holds up her Math notebook.

“I find everything hard.” She says with a frown on her face.

“Oh come on, think positive! How about we start with something easy, yeah?” I grab her Math notebook from her and open it to the easiest thing I could explain. Well, since Luke’s mom is the Math teacher, I could just ask her for help any day so it was alright.

“Here.” I say and put the notebook in front of her. She looks down at it and sighs. “It’s just distance formula. It’s easy.” I tell her; trying to cheer her up a bit.

“All you have to do is substitute everything. Which is basically the y’s and the x’s and you do the rest; which is subtracting, squaring, adding and simplifying.” I grab the book and look for a problem that she could solve. When I find an easy one, I tell her to solve and she does it rather quickly. She starts doodling while I solve the thing myself to see if she was correct.

“You got a little mistake in the adding bit. Just remember that if you add two negative ones, you always get a positive.” I say and give her a smile. She smiles back and says. “Thanks. I guess now I know how to get the damn d.” Her eyes widen and she looks at me and we both burst out laughing.

“Alright, let’s continue.” I say and grab my notebook from the messy pile of papers. We continue our little tutoring session and help each other out. I learned that Jessie wasn’t that bad in Math. She just needed a little improvement. And she did really well on the word problems we had to do.

It was 5 minutes until the place closed and Jessie and I headed out. I drop Jessie by her house before heading back to mine.

When I get back home, I eat some dinner before heading up to my room and finishing up a few things.

I hear the doorbell ring and my mom yells, “Calum! Someone’s here for you!”

I hop out of bed and head to the door to find Jessie. “Hey.” I say; shutting the door behind me. “What are you doing here?”

“Your Math book was in my bag.” She says. “I was just going to give it back.” She gives me my book and I smile.

“Thanks.” I say.

“Oh, and um, thanks for helping me with the Math test. Even if I was a total bitch to you today; which I am sorry about because you know, it’s Monday and everybody hates today and I had so much stuff to do. So yeah, thank you for helping me with everything today, actually.” She says. Before I could say anything she turned around and started walking back home.

“Wait!” I say. She looks at me and I say, “Can I like, take you out on Friday? Like, on a real date? Not like, the mall or anything. Like, restaurant type of date, you know?”

She smiles and nods. “Sure. I’d like that. But make sure we aren’t sneaking out of school again, Calum.” I laugh and nod my head. She waves goodbye at me and walks back home and I go back inside my house.

“Restaurant type of date,” I mutter to myself. “Does that even make sense?”