donnybrook

eric

Before

December 4th, 2018

Even though he sent Brooklyn to voicemail immediately when he called, Regan still gave him a look. Her brown eyes were put out, a tested half-smile on a round face.
"Sorry."

She ignored him, pointing her pencil down towards one out of many papers, "Do you think you could do this? It's the first thing you're taught."

She was tutoring him, and not because she wanted to. Even Grayson found the coincidence uncomfortable, having not spoken to her since junior year and spending after school hours alone with her, but nobody in their school really got to choose who was going to tutor them if they weren't paying for a professional, only that it was a student the school appointed.

"Yeah. Is.. is the bracket the same as a parenthesis? Right here." He used his pencil to point.

Regan's elbows bend so she leered on the table towards him, "The bracket is basically a parenthesis, but you only use it when the bar under the symbol is there. Here, do you think if you do number six in this section, you'll need me to guide you through it?" She sounded sincere, and at the same time the administer walked by to monitor their section of the library. Not a coincidence, but the nerve. "I don't.." he thought for a second, "Maybe."

He looked down,
6. 2(a -3) + 4b - 2(a -b -3) + 5

He looked at Regan, wanting to scream but smiling instead. God, why the fuck did it have to be her? Why the fuck is math so hard for him, that he had to know nothing about anything in front of the last person he wanted to look stupid in front of? Brooklyn's face popped up on his phone screen then, and again he sent it to voicemail. On again, his phone rumbled against the table,

Brooklyn to: Brooklyn & Riley
Eric just called my work and asked for me. What the hell Grayson?

"We're almost done so, can you turn that off?" She didn't look at him or the phone, she looked down at her own. The administrator was gone, and Regan sounded as she always looked, which was regularly agitated. Even Grayson admitted he doubted she could help it, when her face rested her lip shrunk sullen, and her brown eyes absorbed all the light offered over them.

Even if Regan was beautiful, she never had the look of what made us all human. The girl had cheeks a little too high, eyelids too dark on the rims, like a doll held up by angels, but who's very limbs had strings attached to the devil.
Her hand propped to hold up her head, "Is that Brooklyn? I didn't realize."

"Yeah, sorry." A low murmur.

"Is she mad at you?" Even though she asked, she cut him off after he spoke his first word, "Brooklyn attracts a lot of weird people into her life. I know you're not one of them," Regan gave him a tempered look, and a bird perched by the window flew off, "So if you want to answer her you can. This is your time, anyway."

Grayson realized he wasn't mentally focusing on himself, just on her. In a way where you were being watched, and breaking eye contact would cause the predator to pounce on you. Regan freaked him out, but she wasn't hostile, and he knew he should stop thinking of her as a parent about to beat their kid.
She was a girl he liked last year before he met the girlfriend he loves now.
Regan was nothing, if not a bit menacing.
"I should really get help with this. I'm gonna try to retake the SAT this year."