Four Of A Kind

Chapter 96: [2.71] Sabrina Knows Everything, Even Things That Haven’t Happened Yet

She pulled the paper back and stared at it. Her jaw tightened. “I had the right setup. I factored it right. But then when I went to find x, the numbers…” she stopped.

“Moved around.”

“Yeah.” She said it low.

“Right. So we’re going to do something different.” I opened my bag and pulled out a sheet of graph paper I’d prepared on the drive over. Grid format, each step in its own box, visual separation between operations. The kind of scaffolding that nobody had ever thought to build for her because nobody had looked at how her brain actually processed information. They’d just kept handing her the same ladder and acting surprised when she fell off the same rung.

Troublesome? Yes. Worth it? The seven problems on that first sheet answered that.

I put the graph paper in front of her. “Each box is one operation. You don’t move to the next box until the current one is finished.”

She looked at it. “This looks like something you’d give a ten-year-old.”

“It looks like something that works.”

She opened her mouth.

“Seven out of ten,” I said.

She closed her mouth.

We worked for an hour. She got loud twice, once when she made the same sign error three attempts running, and once when she got problem six correct on the first try and actually made a noise that startled both of us.

She clapped her hand over her mouth immediately. I looked down at my notes and said nothing, because if I acknowledged it, she would spontaneously combust with embarrassment and we’d lose the momentum.

“Don’t,” she said, muffled behind her hand.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking something.”

“I’m always thinking something. It’s called having a functional brain.”

She dropped her hand. Her face was flushed. She pointed at the next problem instead of addressing any of what just happened, and I moved on, because that was the job.

By the time we finished, the sun had moved and the library was dim at the edges, the light concentrated in the center of the room where we sat. Cassidy had the chips spread in front of her. The gap between our totals had shrunk. Not closed, but shrunk.

She counted hers. Then she counted mine.

“You’re still winning,” she said.

“Yes.”

“By less.”

“Yes.”

She leaned back in her chair, arms crossing, studying me with those purple eyes in a way she’d probably perfected on people she was trying to intimidate. It didn’t really work on me anymore, which she knew, which I suspected annoyed her more than most things.

“Why are you good at this?” she asked.

“At math?”

“At people.”

I looked at her.

“Seven tutors,” she said. “Seven people who gave up. You’re still here and you changed how you work instead of blaming me.” A pause. “Why.”

Honest question. No edge on it, no trap. Just Cassidy without the armor for approximately four seconds.

“Because the seven tutors were trying to solve you,” I said. “I’m just doing the job.”

“That’s a non-answer.”

“It’s the true answer.”

She looked at me for another moment. The library was quiet. Outside, somewhere in the house, I could hear Harlow’s voice and then Vivienne’s, talking about something down the hall.

“The test is in ten days,” Cassidy said.

“I know.”

“If I win the bet, you have to do everything I say for a full day.”

“That was the deal.”

“I’m going to make it very unpleasant for you.”

“I assumed.”

She gathered her pens into a neat row, which was a new habit, something she’d started unconsciously over the past week. Color order. Red, blue, green, black. She’d started treating her study materials with the same care she gave her tennis rackets. I noticed. I didn’t say anything about it.

“Same time tomorrow?” she asked. Very casual. Very careful.

“Calendar says four-thirty. Vivienne moved it to fit the brand call.”

“Of course she did.” But there was no real heat in it.

I started putting my things away. Across the table, Cassidy picked up the graph paper format I’d made and looked at it once more. Then she folded it and slid it into her own notebook.

She was going to practice tonight. Without being asked.

Troublesome. The whole situation was troublesome. Spending this much time building something for a girl who threw pillows and staged elaborate Manhattan decoy missions and made me stand in an ice cold shower fully clothed.

And yet.

The seven problems. The folded paper. The way she’d said same time tomorrow like it was just a logistical question and not the first time she’d ever voluntarily asked for a tutoring session in her life.

Terrible return on investment. Completely worth it. I couldn’t explain that math to anyone, including myself.

I was halfway to the door when she spoke again.

“Isaiah.”

I stopped.

“If I actually pass this test.” She didn’t finish the sentence immediately. I waited, hand on the doorframe. “What happens after? For you, I mean. Does the contract just… keep going?”

“Until the end of the semester, based on the performance review.”

“And then?”

“And then I graduate. Collect a reference letter. Move on.”

A pause. I heard her shift in her chair.

“Right,” she said. “Okay.”

I turned around. She was looking at the poker chips, not at me, arranging them by color. Red and white and blue in separate groups, something to do with her hands.

“You’re not going to make me say it,” she said.

“Say what.”

“That this has been.” She stopped. Tapped a chip against the table. “Whatever. Go away.”

I looked at her for a second. The window light had gone gold and it caught in her hair, the wine-red and the black streaks, the loose pieces around her face. She was still looking at the chips.

“Four-thirty tomorrow,” I said.

“Obviously,” she said. Very hostile. Very pink around the ears.

I went.

In the hallway, Sabrina was leaning against the wall with her book open, which meant she had either been there for thirty seconds or the entire hour. With Sabrina, both were equally possible and equally unsettling.

“She asked about after the semester,” I said, because there was no point pretending she hadn’t heard.

Sabrina turned a page. “Did she.”

“You knew she would.”

“I suspected.” She glanced up. Her purple eyes were level and calm, reading me the same way she read everything, all the way down to the subtext. “What did you tell her?”

“The truth. End of semester, I move on.”

Sabrina looked at me for a moment longer than necessary. “And you said that as though it were simple.”

“It is simple.”

She turned another page. “Mm.”

I waited. With Sabrina, the ’mm’ was never the end of the thought.

“You’ve been here three weeks,” she said. “Cassidy practices voluntarily. Harlow has a functional calendar for the first time in recorded history. Vivienne said ’adequate’ to something you did, which, for her, is practically a standing ovation.” She paused. “And you think you’re going to leave at the end of a semester and it will be simple.”

I didn’t have a good answer for that.

“Troublesome,” I said finally, which wasn’t an answer at all.

Sabrina’s mouth curved. Very small. Very deliberate. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

She went back to her book, and I continued down the hall, and somewhere behind me the library light was still on, and Cassidy was probably still sitting there rearranging chips by color and telling herself it meant nothing.

It probably meant nothing.

I’d stop thinking about it by dinner.

Probably.