SHOUT - Adopted by Lin Manuel Miranda

TUTOR ME NOT

Thanks to the wrath of Rishanki, I have lost my seventh period study hall. I will now be held hostage in the library for forty minutes by a shorter, female, blue-uniformed reincarnation of Albert Einstein.

Gracie Rosenbaum is the mother of all Precious Babies. She's smart. More than smart. She has telepathic abilities. The moment I step into the library, she hears me thinking about how much I don't want to be here, then spins around in her chair to yell across the room about how happy she is that I'm here. The librarians don't shush her. She's so smart, even the librarians are afraid of her. Gracie has probably read each book in this library and can identify them by Dewey-decimal.

When I sit two seats away from her, she jumps over to the seat next to me and leans in to look at my crumpled math homework. She's so close that I feel her breath on my arm.

She jabs the paper with her finger. "Put your name on the line at the top."

I slide the worksheet toward her. "Get to work, Einstein."

"Oh, no, no, no." Gracie slides the sheet back to me. "I don't do the work for you, silly, I do it with you."

"I'm sitting right next to you. I'm with you." I slide the sheet to her again. "Chop, chop."

She takes off her glasses and cleans them with her sweater. I rip off my thumbnail with my teeth. The boy at the table across from us flips through To Kill A Mockingbird faster than you could say Atticus. Gracie puts her glasses back on and slides the worksheet to the middle of the table. "Let's start with number one. 5X equals 250. What is X?"

"A letter in the alphabet. Are we done here?"

"Vidya, you have to apply yourself. Otherwise you won't graduate with the rest of the class."

I slam my hands on the table and turn to face her. "Listen up, Rosenbaum. I don't want to be here. You want to be here, because you're a nerd, but that's not my problem."

The librarian shushes me. I ignore her. "I don't care if I don't graduate, because I'm not going to be here much longer. So you can save your brain power to find the cure of cancer, or solve some dumb math equation that hasn't been solved. Got that?"

She stares at me and takes that in. For a moment, I think she might cry. Instead, she takes a deep breath and grins. "Ms. Rishanki told me you can be moody. I get that. School can be a lot of work."

"That silence you hear? That's the sound of me not caring."

"Maybe we could eat lunch together, tomorrow. You eat alone, I see you on the blacktop. Why not have a friend?"

I draw a daisy beneath the first math problem. "What, are you spying on me, now?"

"I wasn't looking for you, I just saw you out the window."

I give her a once over. Looks like she tried to cut her own hair and failed miserably. She sports old lady glasses and flaunts her post-P.E. B.O. "You're one desperate little prick."

She takes my hand and pulls it away from the paper to stop me from drawing mehndi on my math homework. "I have lots of friends," she says. "I hang with the guys from the newspaper club. You know, Matthew and Olivia and Jade."

I didn't even know Wilmington had a newspaper. I'll tack that onto my list of things I won't read, right beneath The Yearling.

"I actually don't know them, Gracie Rosenbaum."

"They're just so boring." She stabs the table with the bottom of her pencil. "All Matthew talks about is schoolwork, Olivia is super shy, and Jade doesn't talk to me because she is just plain rude."

I run my finger over the jagged surface of my bitten nails. "That's unfortunate."

"I only talk to them because the four of us were paired up to write an article about the new display case in the science hallway. I invited them over to my place in a few weeks to work on it. I don't even know if they're coming."

I could be climbing Mount Everest, right now. I could be stuffing my face with baguettes in Paris, or saving lost tribes in the Amazon Rainforest. But here I am, listening to Gracie Rosenbaum's newspaper club sob story. I flick the unhealed skin on my scab back and forth, back and forth.

After a moment, Gracie gasps. "Oh my God. I just had an amazing idea."

"Did you figure out what X is equal to?"

"Maybe if you came over, the guys from the newspaper would see how awesome and nice I really am."

"I don't think that's the reputation you'd get if they saw you hanging with me, Rosenbaum."

"That's just it," she says. "Maybe if you came over, the guys wouldn't think of me as such a loser, since we're friends, and all. We're friends, right?"

"I'm not coming to your house." I smack the worksheet on the table in front of her. "Do my homework."

"But why-y-y?"

I look her dead in the eye. "Because I don't like you, Gracie Rosenbaum."

She looks at her lap and thinks of something to say. When she can't come up with anything, she tries again. "I'll make you a deal."

"Give me a break."

"I will do your homework for you--" She slides the worksheet to the middle of the table. "--if you come to my house with the guys from the newspaper club. Just once."

Didn't know Precious Babies could bribe, either. If I do this, I'll get an A in math and get Rishanki off my back. Plus, The Mirandas would probably be impressed if I had proof of a living, breathing friend. Alas, the con of the situation is too brutal. I will have to spend extra time with Gracie Rosenbaum.

But a free A. No more Rishanki. How could I say no?

"Okay, Rosenbaum." I stick out my hand. "Deal."

We shake on it. I do my best to grin. Gracie grins back, but I can hardly see her teeth beneath her braces. She takes off her glasses and re-wipes them on her sweater. "Are you moving or something?" She asks.

"What?"

"You said you won't be here much longer."

I get to work biting the thumbnail on my other hand. "Someone like you wouldn't understand."

"What do you mean, someone like me?"

Someone with a future. Futures don't happen to people like me. Between seventh and eighth grade, I forgot how to read. Words and numbers used to be crisp and clean. Now, I can't separate words from numbers, and I'm stuck making deals with Precious Babies. There's a wall of smog between my brain and the paper. Going to school in Mid-Manhattan is the culprit. The place should be called Pollution City.

"Someone who's too busy doing my math homework to talk." I slide the paper to Gracie and slip in my earbuds. "Get to it, Einstein."