With more than a little reluctance, I pulled out the GED study guide and started paging through it. By the time I’d leafed through the Language Arts section, I was uncomfortably aware that simply buying a study guide probably wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to enroll in a proper study program with actual teachers and shit. All the faith-in-myself in the world wouldn’t help me teach myself this crap, even with a big, fancy study guide.
Still, I stubbornly made myself read through the guide, though I skipped ahead to the math section.
I was still struggling over the section on fractions when Nick came in.
“Cripes, Angel,” he said with a frown. “Do you fucking sleep here?”
“Yep,” I responded. “Top shelf of the cooler. It’s soooo comfy!”
He hmmfed, possibly not completely sure if I was joking, then tilted his head. “You look nice,” he stated with a frown, in the same way someone might say, “My cat has worms.”
“Um. Thanks…?”
He came to peer over my shoulder. “Dividing fractions, huh?”
“Yeah, and it fucking sucks ass,” I snarled.
“‘Ours is not to reason why, just invert and multiply,’” he intoned. I stared at him blankly. He seized a sheet of paper from the printer, snagged a pencil from the cup by the computer, and proceeded to scrawl numbers. “My dad was a math whiz, taught me all sorts of tricks. See, it’s the same as multiplying, but you have to flip it.” His pencil flew across the paper as I stared. “So, dividing nine by one third is the same as multiplying it by three. See?”
I peered down at the numbers, and suddenly something miraculous occurred.
I understood it.
“Holy shit, Nick. That’s easy!”
He grinned. “You just have to know how to look at it.”
“Yeah, well that’s my problem,” I said, grimacing. “I usually don’t even know where to start looking.”
He plopped into the seat beside me. “I’ll tutor you if you want.”
I gave him a doubtful look. “I can’t really afford to pay—”
He waved a hand. “Nah, I’ll do it gratis.”
I started to ask him why, but stopped myself. Hell, if he was willing to tutor me for free, I wasn’t about to argue. Nick the Prick was getting less and less prickish the longer I knew him.
Then again, I knew that there’d be some sort of catch. After all, this was Nick. Okay, so the number one catch would be that I’d have to spend lots of time with Nick. But for now, I could live with it. I hoped. ’Cause I needed all the help I could get.
Chapter 15
There was a time when I’d liked math and even thought I was pretty good at it. But somewhere around fourth grade someone noticed that my reading speed sucked shit, and I was put into the “remedial” track. It was supposed to be a program where kids like me could actually learn at their own speed, where maybe the teacher could figure out why the hell I read at a snail’s pace. Instead it ended up being a place to dump any kid who wasn’t a well-behaved model student. This meant that the teachers actually spent most of the class time dealing with disruptive little shits and, since at that time I was pretty damn docile, I was left alone. Which might not have been so bad except that they put me in remedial classes for all subjects, including math which I’d been fairly decent in. By the end of that year I was so goddamn bored with being taught math concepts I’d learned two years before, that I stopped paying attention to anything.
Nick could be a pompous ass, but he was a pretty good teacher, with a knack for explaining the math concepts in a way that actually made sense. He was even darn good at the grammar end of things too, and with his help I finally understood the difference between “your” and “you’re” as well as “lose” and “loose,” and “its” and “it’s.”
That being said, I damn near cheered when, after an hour of tutoring, Nick got a call to go pick up a body. Even Nick on his best behavior was a lot to take.
I packed up my stuff—including the study guide, the pages and pages of problems I’d worked under Nick’s watchful eye, and the “homework” he’d assigned me—and headed to NuQuesCor.
As angry as I was at Marcus, I wasn’t stupid enough to ignore what he’d said about violating my probation. I knew something weird was going on at that lab, but any attempt to sneak in would definitely rank up there with some of the stupider things I’d done in my life—and I’d done some hugely stupid shit, trust me.
Therefore I wasn’t going to do any sneaking at all. Well, maybe a teensy bit. But I wasn’t going to break any laws. Or at least I wasn’t planning to break any laws. With my history, it was probably best not to make sweeping statements like, This will be totally legal!
The broad atrium at the entrance to NuQuesCor looked a hell of a lot different during the day when there were people there, all seeming to be walking with great purpose, or clumped together having Very Important conversations, or waiting not terribly patiently in line at the coffee stand.
Panic shimmered through me briefly, but I managed to choke it down and force myself to move forward to the broad desk that dominated the center of the area.
The security guard looked up as I approached. He gave me a quick once-over assessment and apparently decided that I didn’t immediately warrant expulsion since he then gave me a thin, professional smile. “Can I help you?”