~~~~~ Emery’s POV ~~~~~
The library on a Monday night at seven o’clock was almost empty.
Just a scattering of students hunched over laptops in the fluorescent hush of the study floor, the kind of quiet that made every footstep sound too loud.
I got there fifteen minutes early, which in retrospect was a mistake, because it left me fifteen minutes to sit at a corner table and second-guess every part of the plan.
I’d brought two textbooks, a folder of practice problems I had printed at the campus library kiosk, and a stomach full of nerves that had no business being there.
This wasn’t a date.
It wasn’t even a real hangout.
It was a job, the same as my library shifts or grading intro chem quizzes for Professor Alvarez, except this particular job came with a person attached who made my pulse do something inconvenient every time I thought about Friday.
She was seven minutes late.
I had almost convinced myself she wasn’t coming.
That the goal, the deal, and all of it had been some elaborate way of getting rid of me without actually saying no to Coach Marsh’s face.
When the doors at the far end of the floor swung open, Calloway walked in, backpack slung over one shoulder, hair still damp from a shower, looking like she’d come straight from practice and hadn’t bothered to care how she looked doing it.
Which, somehow, only made it worse.
“You’re here,” she said, dropping into the chair across from me without ceremony.
“You’re late.”
“Practice ran over.
Deal with it.” She pulled a battered textbook out of her bag and let it hit the table with a thud loud enough that a guy two tables over glanced up in irritation.
“So, teach me chemistry, tutor.”
“That’s not really how tutoring works.”
“No?”
“No.
First I need to know what you actually understand and what you don’t; otherwise I’m just repeating whatever your professor already said, badly.”
I slid a blank sheet of paper across the table toward her.
“Write out the last problem set.
However far you get.
Don’t skip the parts you don’t understand.
That’s the part I actually need to see.”
She stared at the paper like it had personally wronged her.
“This feels like a trap.”
“It’s not a trap.
It’s diagnostics.”
“Sounds like a trap with a fancier name.”
But she picked up her pen, and for a few minutes the only sound between us was the scratch of graphite and the distant hum of the library’s ancient heating system kicking on somewhere overhead.
I watched her work without meaning to.
The way she chewed the inside of her cheek when she got stuck, the way her handwriting was surprisingly neat for someone who spent most of her life gripping a hockey stick instead of a pen.
She got exactly four problems in before she set the pen down harder than necessary.
“This is stupid.”
“It’s not stupid; you’re just stuck on moles.” I turned the paper toward me, scanning her work.
She had gotten the setup right on almost every problem, which surprised me.
The actual conceptual reasoning was there, buried under something that looked more like impatience than incapacity.
“You understand the relationships.
You’re rushing the conversions and not double-checking your units, which is why everything’s coming out wrong by a factor of ten.”
“I don’t have time to double-check everything.
I have practice at six a.m., film review after morning classes, actual classes in between, and games on weekends.
I don’t get the luxury of being careful.”
Something in her voice had an edge to it that hadn’t been there a second ago, sharper than the situation called for, and I understood, suddenly, that this wasn’t really about moles.
“Nobody’s saying you have to be careful about everything,” I said, more gently than I meant to.
“Just this.
For forty-five minutes, twice a week.
That’s the whole deal.”
She didn’t answer right away.
Her jaw did the thing it had done in Coach Marsh’s office.
That brief, involuntary tightening before she caught it and smoothed her expression back into something unreadable again.
“My dad thinks chemistry is a waste of my time,” she said finally, not quite looking at me.
“He thinks all of this—” She gestured vaguely at the textbook, the library, and the whole concept of a degree “—is a waste of my time.
He wanted me at a development academy in Sweden two years ago.
I picked here instead.
First real decision I ever made without him signing off on it first.”
I hadn’t expected that.
I sat very still, half-afraid that acknowledging it too directly would make her shut the door again the way she always seemed to, fast and final.
“So failing chem isn’t just failing chem,” I said carefully.
“No.” A short, humorless laugh escaped her lips.
“It’s proof he was right.
That’s the part that actually keeps me up at night, if you want to know.
Not the eligibility letter.
Him being right.”
I thought about my own mother, humming off-key over a cutting board after a ten-hour shift, never once making me feel like a decision I’d made was proof of anything except that I was trying.
The contrast sat strange in my chest.
Calloway had money, a recruiting poster, and a father who still somehow made her feel small; I had neither of those things and a mother who somehow never did.
“For what it’s worth,” I said, “you understand the material better than you’re giving yourself credit for.
You’re not failing because you’re not smart enough.
You’re failing because you’re moving too fast to catch your own mistakes.
That’s fixable.
That’s actually the easiest kind of problem to fix.”
She looked at me properly then, something unguarded flickering across her face again, quicker this time, like she hadn’t fully decided whether to let me see it.
“You’re annoyingly optimistic for someone who fell into a hockey net four times on Friday.”
“Three times.
The fourth one was the goal.”
“Barely a goal.”
“Still counts.” I slid the paper back toward her, tapping the third problem with my pen.
“Redo this one slower.
Show me every unit conversion, even the ones you think are obvious.”
She huffed, but she picked the pen back up, and this time when she worked, I noticed she was, in fact, going slower, deliberately, almost stubbornly, like she was proving something to herself more than to me.
It took her three tries to get the setup exactly right, and when she finally landed on the correct answer, she looked up at me like she expected me to be unimpressed.
I wasn’t.
“See,” I said.
“That’s it.
That’s the whole trick.”
Her expression shifted—not quite a smile, but close to it—the corner of her mouth doing that thing it had done on the ice, right before she’d told me to prove myself worth her time.
For a second neither of us said anything, the library humming quietly around us, and I was aware, uncomfortably, of exactly how close together we were sitting, how her knee kept brushing mine under the small table every time she shifted.
“Same time Wednesday?” she asked, breaking the silence first.
“Same time Wednesday.”
She gathered her things slower than she needed to, and just before she stood, she glanced at me sideways.
“You’re not what I expected, Hale.”
“What did you expect?” I asked, looking up at her.
“Someone easier to scare off.” She slung her bag over her shoulder, already walking backward toward the doors.
“See you Wednesday.
Don’t be late.”
I watched her go, the library doors swinging shut behind her, and I sat there for a long moment before I started packing up my own things.
I kept replaying the conversation between us.
I didn’t know what to do with any of it yet.
But I knew, walking out into the cold two hours later with my bag heavier than it should have been from two textbooks and a single sheet of chemistry problems, that I hadn’t thought about rent once the entire time.
And that should have scared me more than it did.