Great Girls(Victoria Pedretti)

C. 25🕰

I had reached the professor's house when I noticed her red Tesla in the driveway. After I got out of my car, I headed inside the house,  slamming my mother's front door in satisfaction, and lazily dropped my shoes at the foot of the coat rack stand.

"Professor! I'm home! Where are you?!"

"In the kitchen, love!"

"Ugh! Don't even ask me how my day is going! What I need is a drink right now! That is why I bought a bottle of vino from Pak's!" I announced, removing the bottle from the bag while clutching my paper bag with my seaweed chips inside.

I kicked off my sneakers and headed into the kitchen, failing to see that my mother had a guest sitting on a barstool next to her.

My head was solely interested in which wine glass I would put my beverage into rather than who my mother had over the house.

"Oh, I see you have a guest."

From the back of the woman's thin salt and pepper hair, I couldn't tell who she was. All I knew was that she was an older woman hence the shade of her hair and her terrible posture. Moreover, her varicose veins were apparent. When she finally turned around, I became face to face with my grandmother, Sylvia.

"Nanny, hi!" I exclaimed in joy, putting my belongings down on the counter and embracing her with both hands.

"Oh, my sweet Sallie. How are you? How's school?" she asked, rubbing my back as I inhaled her familiar raspberry scent that had the pleasure of blessing my nostrils for twenty-one years now.

"I'm great. My GPA went up by two points," I responded with glee because Lord knows I had been plugging away with math lately ever since last semester. I don't know what happened to me, I used to be a math genius in high school, and now I can't even do a problem without taking out my Ti-84 plus.

With extra credit and office hours, I was able to get a B+ in my Calculus class as a final grade. My grade in Pre-Calc during the spring semester was a C. For most days, I understood the material, but when it came to the homework, I didn't have the faintest clue of what I was doing. I would have to email a male classmate about a problem, and he would send me a picture of his answer.

Judge me all you want, but that class had so many concepts to it, it was hard to keep it up with. Hell, the whole thing was a croissant with thin layers. Besides, I didn't feel bad for not doing the homework on my own because while he was giving me the answers to math homework, I was giving him the answers to history homework.

In my opinion, I believed that Pre-Calculus was harder than Calculus itself. It's crazy when something that's supposed to prepare you for something else is difficult to comprehend.

"Oh, that's good to hear."

When we pulled away, I placed my right arm around her and asked her the millionaire dollar question that I had been floating in my mind mid-hugging.

"So, nanny, what are you doing here? I thought you only leave Florida for Christmas. It's November; remember Thanksgiving, the holiday that should be celebrated to honor Native Americans who died from genocide and the 1600s pandemic."

She rolled her eyes, "Ugh. Don't even remind me of our atrocities. It makes me sick to my stomach. God knows we're paying for it with our wrinkles and sunburn."

"Salinger, your grandmother is here to stay for a couple of weeks. Her apartment flooded two nights ago. Uncle Bobby picked her up yesterday from the airport."

I nodded in understanding. "Oh, nanny. I am so sorry to hear that," I expressed my sympathy, rubbing her back and leaning in to half-hug her.

"It's alright, Sallie. Even I am upset about my things getting submerged; I'm glad that I have insurance on everything I own there. Hopefully, everything should be recovered and replaced."