! COLLATERAL DAMAGE ! | percent AU | creek/crenny/more stuff???

Chapter Four - quick maths

"Okay, this is an easy one." Wendy smiled and push a string of black hair behind her head. "Ben kicks a football 160 meters with a max height of 40 meters. How high is the football when it is 145 meters from Ben?"

Stan's lips were sitting gingerly on the tip of his pencil. He groaned, "I don't know. Five?"

"Five what?"

"Five meters."

She raised her eyebrows. "Are you just guessing?"

"How could you tell?" He leaned back in his chair and concentrated on spinning his pencil between his fingers. Wendy rested her arms on the table.

"Look, Stan. I came here to tutor you and if you fail your next test, that's on me."

"I don't see why. I'm a lost cause."

She groaned and slapped the table, causing Stan to leap out of his skin. "You're so frustrating! The least you could do is pretend to care."

"Okay, okay, okay... What was the question again?" He sat up quickly and tugged on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. He glanced down at Wendy's nails resting on the table, which were painted purple with little white flowers on the ring fingers.

"Ben kicks a football 160 meters with a max height of 40 meters. How high is the football when it is 145 meters from Ben?"

"Uhh..." He pulled out his pen and huddled over his piece of scrap paper. After a minute, he twisted his face and narrowed his eyes. "It's a... parabola, right?"

"Yes, Stan."

"And the vertex is... 80, 40."

She nodded.

As Stan wrote out the problem on his piece of rough graph paper, Wendy slid her chair from across the table to next to him to get a better angle. Her head was a few inches from him and her hair was almost touching his paper.

"You forgot to factor the 40 for 'k'," she interjected, waking Stan from his lavender-perfume-scented stupor. He scribbled out his problem and rewrote it. She nodded again. "So now we know 'a' equals 1\16, so we can plug 1/16 back into the formula." Wendy pointed to the formula again and her hair nearly swept against Stan's wrist. "Are you getting it now?"

"Uh, yeah, I think so."

"So now you substitute 'x' with 145."

He glanced at her, puzzled. "Why 145?"

"That's how far he kicked the football."

"Oh, right."

She was close to him now, pointing to the page and talking about something important, but all he could concentrate on was her perfume. It was so aromatic and pungent that he felt like he was swimming rather than breathing. By the time he had almost come to his senses, Kyle walked into the Pre-Calc room.

"Why are you guys still here?" He pulled up a chair and sat across from them, putting his head in his hands.

"I'd say the same to you," Wendy smiled, moving away from Stan. Now she wouldn't be able to hear his heartbeat. "You went to see Kenny yesterday? Is he okay?"

"Yeah, he's fine. There's something going on with his family, I think."

"Oh. That sucks. I hope he gets it worked out," she said flatly, turning back to Stan's paper. "I swear, it almost seems like you don't go to class."

"I do! Ask Craig."

Kyle interrupted their thrilling conversation, twirling a pencil between his fingers. "What are you guys working on?" He leaned forward to get a better look at the problems. Whatever it was, he did it last year.