“I am,” he said normally. His black sleeves were rolled partway up, revealing a retro plastic watch. “Is it just chapter three you need help with, or do we need to go back farther than that?”
“No, just chapter three,” I said. “I understand the other stuff from Algebra One. I had Mrs. O’Malley for that and it went A-OK.” I dropped my backpack on a desk, smelling the familiar math classroom scents of dry-erase dust and root beer. I parked my butt on the skinny pink back of a chair, where I could see the hallway through the open door over Kelvin’s shoulder. I was still confused. “Rourke said the tutor was sick yesterday—but I saw you after school.”
Kelvin looked behind him to see if Visible Undershirt was still in the room. “If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have told him I was going home early.” He looked flustered for a moment and I didn’t know why. “You remember you needed me to meet you at the Thunderbird with goat’s blood?”
“Of course,” I said, and then the rest of those events hit me. “Wait a minute. Wait one frikkin’ minute.” I stood up from the chair back. “That wasn’t goat’s blood.”
“Yes, it was. I always get you goat’s blood.” Robot voice: “Kelvin rotate through goats.”
Shudder. “No. This time it wasn’t. Are you sure you told your mom goat’s? Because it was cow’s blood. It messed up my … experiment.”
He looked shifty.
“Kelvin?”
Kelvin lifted his chin and stared me in the eye. “Sorry, Cam,” he said. “We don’t even keep cows. It was definitely goat’s.”
I sighed. “All right, I believe you.” I dug my wallet from my backpack and handed over the remainder of the cash I owed him. “Something sure got screwed up, though.”
Kelvin tucked the bills into some pocket deep in his backpack. From its recesses he said, “So, algebra. You should get this because you’re good at science. You’ve got a logical mind.”
“I used to think math was logical, but this year it seems like you just have to be born understanding it.” I stared glumly around the room at the posters of geometric figures and Escher staircases. “Wait, how did you know I like science? You’re not in biology with me.”
“Your science fair projects in grade school,” Kelvin said, stowing his backpack under the seat. He emerged with a perfectly sharpened pencil, which he pointed at me. “You beat me one year with your project about the theoretical genetics of werewolves. Pounded my ego flat as a pancake. I had nightmares about being attacked by your blue ribbon.”
“I did?” I felt bad for not remembering that Kelvin participated, too. Was I supposed to know that? I hadn’t paid much attention to the other projects. If I’d managed to get something done at all, between all my regular chores, I counted it a win. Besides, I rarely made it to the actual fair, because I was so busy making sure the witch didn’t go.
“Is that what the goat’s blood is for this year?” he said. “‘Because that’s gotta be an interesting project. Maybe you could give me a behind-the-scenes tour. Show me all the blood and guts, so to speak.” Then deadpan added, “No, literally.”
“Er, no,” I said. “I don’t have time for the fair this year. I have to concentrate on figuring out this math.”
“Input received,” Kelvin said, and it sounded like it should have been in a robot voice, but it wasn’t. He looked away from me, down at the textbook. Shrugged his trench coat off and back on his shoulders. “Let’s start with basic algebraic multiplication and build from there. The problem with Rourke’s teaching is that he shows you the steps once and then he expects you to just do them in your head from there on out. So, basics. Show me how you multiply 2(x + 5).”
“Okay, I think that’s 2x + 10,” I said. “Right? It’s just when we get into word problems that I get lost. They have all this misleading stuff and you have to sort through it and … it’s like Rourke expects you to just see where his answer came from. He just naturally understands it, I guess, and I don’t.”
“You will,” said Kelvin, “if we do it our way, which is one step at a time. No leaps necessary. If you can do 2(x + 5), you can do it all.” He grabbed the study guide for the test I’d bombed and worked through the first problem with me (some gawdawful thing about sides of triangles totaling sides of rectangles), one piece at a time.
First we wrote down what we knew. We crossed out what we didn’t need. It almost made sense when I took each step slowly instead of trying to leap to the end like Rourke did. We got through three whole problems before Mr. Visible Undershirt himself came in.
Slouching behind him was Devon.
Devon with the demon-black hair.
I wondered idly how the demon had known that black would look totally hot on Devon. Estahoth must have learned something in his previous trips to Earth.