“I’ve heard about him. I’m on the team here.” He put on his own stuffy accent. “Everyone talks about the ‘legendary Brian Landry.’?” Vince puffed out his chest.
“Oh. You play?” She glanced at his body. She should have known he was on the team.
“Yeah. I reckon not as good as Brian, but yeah.” An awkward pause fell over them. “Anyway, I guess we better do these problems.” He pointed to the book and started scribbling some numbers down on his notebook. “So, we need to find the factors of this equation.”
Laura looked down at the numbers, fractions, exponents, and parentheses jumbling together in her vision. But she focused in and began separating everything out on her paper.
“We have a common factor of three right here,” Vince said, pointing the tip of his pencil to the two numbers listed. “So, you—”
“You could make it . . .” Laura said, interrupting him and pointing at her scribble: 3(y2+4y).
He looked up at her, surprised. She could feel her face turning red again. She hadn’t meant to blurt it out, and she certainly wasn’t a know-it-all, but it had felt so good, just for a moment, to figure something out on her own. It had been a while since she’d done that.
“I’m impressed,” Vince said. “You could even take it further, you know?” He began making some notes of his own on the paper in front of him.
Laura leaned in closer to his desk. Her head was so close to his, she could smell spearmint and feel the warmth of his breath.
His pencil began flying across the paper. “Since they both share the variable of y, you could do something like this, too.” He showed her: 3y2+12y = 3y(y+4). He looked at her, his hazel eyes looking into hers to make sure she understood.
“I don’t think I would have caught that,” she said, suddenly feeling defeated after her silly moment of triumph. Had she made a huge mistake, coming back here and trying to catch up with everyone?
“Nah. You got this. What you did was right. Mr. Leblanc just wants to see you thinking about every option. It just takes some practice. Here,” he said as he clicked open his three-ring binder and took out a few sheets of loose-leaf paper. “Take my notes for the quiz tomorrow.” He scribbled across the top page. “There’s my number. Call me if you need anything. But I’m sure you won’t have any problems.”
“I really appreciate it,” she replied, tucking the papers into her bag. Her mom had always told her to use the word appreciate around guys: You can get them to do anything you want with that word, she’d say. Laura didn’t know what she wanted to get Vince to do but figured it couldn’t hurt to say it.
The hour went by quickly as she and Vince raced each other on every problem. “You can’t tell anyone we did this,” he said, after they agreed it’d be funny to time it. “This is about the nerdiest thing I’ve ever done.”
She burst out laughing. “Well, I have a reputation to uphold myself. Secret’s safe with me, I promise.” Laura playfully locked her lips with her fingers and pretended to throw away the key. The bell rang, and the sound of eighteen metal chairs scraping the linoleum floor filled the room. Before Laura could say thank you to Vince, Riley and a couple of the other girls from the cheer squad, Rory and Emma, ran up to her.
“What the hell are you doing back here?” Riley exclaimed, a bubbly smile on her face.
“Miss Cavanaugh . . . language,” Mr. Leblanc called out from his desk.
Riley giggled. “Sorry, Mr. L!” She turned back to Laura. “But seriously, we all thought you were gone for good—at least that’s the way you made it sound.” The other two girls nodded their heads, though Laura caught an almost-unkind glint in Riley’s eye. “Does it have something to do with Brian’s knee?”
Laura swallowed, embarrassed that she’d made such a big deal out of leaving in the first place. “Yeah, we’re back while Brian waits for surgery. It’s temporary, of course.” Laura immediately wished she could take the words back—she sounded so snobby.
Emma crossed her arms. “Of course,” she said, her tone icy.
Riley ignored her and grabbed Laura into a bear hug. “Well, we just can’t believe you came back—I’m so happy!”
“Me, too, actually.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “But I should really get to my next class.”
They followed her out the door. “What lunch period do you have?” Riley asked as they began to part ways in the hall. “I have second. We should talk about you rejoining the team.” She flashed a thumbs-up sign.
Laura twisted her mouth as she pondered what to say. Jumping, tumbling, and cheering for the Toulouse Gators had been a huge part of her high school experience for the past three years. But did she really have time, between catching up at school and working to save money for Brian’s surgery?
“We’ll talk!” she yelled as she turned in the opposite direction.
The next three periods were just as overwhelming as Laura expected. Besides all the history she had missed, the literary classics she hadn’t read, and the French that she didn’t quite know (la catastrophe!), she was also being bombarded with questions.
“When do we get to see Brian?”
“How’s he doing since the injury?”
“You mean to tell me y’all have to stay with his folks right now? Bless your heart.”
Laura tried her best to answer them without sounding super pathetic.
“I’m sure you’ll see him around. You know he’ll be at the games and parties.”
“He’s doing just fine. You know him—he’s strong. Doctor says he’ll be back to normal in no time.”
“It’s just temporary. We didn’t want to go to the trouble of finding a new place, since we’re only here for a little bit.”
When the second lunch bell rang, Laura headed to the bathroom before going to the cafeteria. Just as she was about to exit the stall, three familiar voices came in.
“So, do you really think she’s going to join the team again?” Rory asked over the sound of a makeup bag unzipping. “Can we even have her? I mean, all of our routines are planned out—it’d be kinda hard to add another person.”
“I really don’t think it’s fair to let her back on,” Emma added. “We’ve already done tryouts—what message does that send to the girls who didn’t make the squad?”
Laura listened quietly, her heart pounding so hard she was almost afraid they’d hear it.
“Listen, I know it’s so weird that she came back, but she was one of the best we had.” Riley smacked her lips together, as if she’d just glossed them. “Plus she’s our friend.”
Some of the tension left Laura’s body.
Riley’s voice lowered in a whisper. “Besides, don’t you guys kind of feel sorry for her? How embarrassing to have to come back here after all that ‘I’m going to be a trophy wife’ crap.” She let out a laugh that echoed in the tiled bathroom.
Laura suddenly felt ill.