Four Of A Kind

Chapter 80: [2.55] The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Her Scowl is Her Smile

I stopped.

Her pencil hovered over the page. She bit her lower lip.

“You have to isolate the variable first,” she muttered, more to herself than to me. “Everything else is just noise trying to confuse you.”

She worked through it. Slow. Methodical. Color-coded every part. Wrote each step.

Then she circled her final answer and looked up at me.

I checked it against my answer key.

Correct.

I pushed a blue chip across the table. The one worth five reds.

“Correct.”

Her eyes widened.

Then she got the next one right.

And the next.

Not all of them. She still made mistakes, still lost chips when she forgot to distribute or dropped a negative sign. But the ratio was changing. The pile on her side of the table grew from pathetic to respectable to almost competitive.

That fierce glint appeared in her purple eyes. The one that said she wasn’t just trying not to lose anymore.

She was trying to win.

“This one,” she said, jabbing her pencil at a particularly nasty problem involving fractions and multiple variables. The eraser end left a small indent on the page. “This is the same type as the one from last time. The one you said would be on the test.”

“Good memory.”

“I’m not stupid.” The words came out sharp, defensive. Like she’d been waiting to use them.

“I know.” I said it the same way I’d say the sky is blue. A fact that didn’t need debate.

She paused mid-calculation. Her pencil stopped moving. “You’re just saying that because you’re paid to.”

“I’m paid to tutor you, not lie to you.” I tapped the edge of her worksheet where she’d written out every step.

“If you were stupid, this wouldn’t have taken two hours. It would’ve been impossible.”

She didn’t respond. Just bent back over her worksheet, hair falling forward to partially hide her face. But I caught the smallest hint of pink creeping across her cheeks before she turned away.

The eraser marks on her paper looked a little less frantic after that.

We kept working. The space between us kept shrinking. At some point her knee bumped against mine under the table and neither of us moved away. Her hoodie kept slipping further down her shoulder. I kept leaning closer to point at her work.

If anyone walked into the library right now, they’d get exactly the wrong idea.

Or maybe exactly the right one. I wasn’t sure anymore.

The clock on the wall showed 11:47 when I pulled out a fresh copy of the original quiz.

I slid the blank quiz across the table. “Alright. Let’s try this again.”

The competitive fire that had been burning in Cassidy’s eyes started to dim.

“Same type of problems as before,” I continued, “but you know how to solve them now. You’ve done harder ones in the last two hours. Way harder, actually.”

She reached for the paper. Her hand trembled slightly as she picked it up.

I could see her reading through the problems. Her jaw tightened with each one. The old familiar tension was settling back into her shoulders.

“Deep breath,” I said, quieter than before. “Write every step like we practiced. Use the colors if you need to. Check your work before you move on to the next one. That’s it. Nothing else matters.”

She nodded once. Then she pulled out her colored pens and arranged them in a neat row beside the quiz.

Her pencil touched the paper.

She started working.

I watched her tackle each problem with the methodical approach we’d practiced. She caught herself making a sign error on problem three and fixed it before moving on. She color-coded problem five so thoroughly it looked like a rainbow exploded on the page, but she got the answer right.

Twenty minutes later, she slid the completed quiz back across the table.

Her face was carefully blank. Braced for disappointment.

I picked up my red pen.

Problem one. Correct. I circled it.

Problem two. Correct. Circle.

Problem three. Correct. Circle.

Four. Right.

Five. Right.

Six. Right.

Seven. Right.

Eight. Wrong. Forgot to simplify the fraction.

Nine. Right.

Ten. Wrong. Calculation error at the end.

I wrote the score at the top in large red numbers.

8/10.

Then I pushed it back across the table.

Cassidy stared at the number like it was written in a foreign language she was still learning to read.

Eight out of ten.

Eighty percent.

A hell of a lot better than the 2/10 she’d gotten two hours ago.

Her hands came up to cover her mouth. Behind her glasses, her purple eyes went wide and bright. Then, slowly, like sunrise creeping over a dark horizon, the most genuine smile I’d ever seen from her spread across her face.

It transformed her completely. Made her look younger. Softer. Like the girl she might have been if the world hadn’t spent seventeen years telling her she was broken.

She looked up at me, and that smile turned slightly wicked.

“I told you I was going to win,” she said, and her voice carried that edge of triumph that made my lips twitch despite myself.

“You’re still losing overall.” I gestured at the chip piles scattered across the table. Mine was significantly larger, a small mountain of red, white, and blue compared to her modest stack. “I’m up about thirty points.”

“For now.” She leaned back in her chair, arms crossed over her chest, but the smile didn’t fade. If anything, it got sharper, more dangerous.

More like the Cassidy I’d first met, except this version was aimed at me with something other than hostility. “We’ve got some time still until the actual test. I’m going to destroy you.”

“Looking forward to it,” I said.

She stood, gathering her papers. The hoodie slipped completely off her shoulder now, and she didn’t bother fixing it. Just shoved her worksheets into her bag while humming something under her breath.

At the door, she paused and looked back.

“Angelo.”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.” The word came out quiet. Almost shy. Then her mask snapped back and she added, “Don’t let it go to your head. You’re still annoying.”

“Noted.”

She left.

I sat alone in the library, staring at the scattered poker chips and the quiz with its big red 8/10 at the top.