Skid

Skid - Chapter 6

Chapter Six

At eight thirty-six in the morning, the tutor shows up. It’s not the usual one, who is off sick due to her children getting sick and catching it off of them, but instead it’s a middle-aged man who introduces himself as Jeremiah and stands there awkwardly at the door until we invite him in.

He’s not much on the social side of things, but he’s scarily good at maths, which is what he’s hired for. I don’t know where the hell Sanctuary manages to find these guys, willing to teach snotty teenage superheroes-to-be. It sounds dangerous, to be honest. Imagine an increasingly pissed off student who keeps getting marked down until finally one day he loses it and uses his super-strength to throw you through the bulletproof glass and then down thirty stories. Yeesh.

Matty sits on the couch with him, nodding through the equations he gets given and generally looking blankly at things, because maths is his weak spot. Next to him, Jason scribbles notes.

I take the long way around the lounge to get to the kitchen, to avoid any unnecessary eye contact, and slot two pieces of toast into the toaster.

Riley is up on the roof, flexing her wings, getting ready to push off. She gave up on any chance of a normal education, learning the bare basics before throwing in the towel. Basically she’s in my position, putting everything on becoming a paid superhero when we come of age, which everyone tries to gently advise us against.

Jessie’s not around, so she’s probably lying down on the slowly warming cement, watching Riley’s wings furl and unfurl as she gets ready. She’s one of the gentle advisors, but she stopped after one reminder to each of us, which surprised us both. She got her GED a few months ago, and is thinking about taking online courses at NYU. I wouldn’t put it past her to graduate with top marks doing that.

Sitting down on the chair opposite the couch, I push my toes deep into the carpet. Jeremiah is explaining about vertices, whatever the hell those are. They sound like some kind of foreign crayfish.

Jeremiah’s fingers follow what he’s been drawing on a pad of paper. “We can either follow A down to C and then to G to D, or go from A to E to D, or we can take the one I’ve underlined. Which one is shorter, if we consider we don’t want to make it a circuit?”

He might as well be speaking Latin. Christ. I make a face, peeling my lips up into a smug grin when Matty catches me looking, like, ha, fuck you, you have to learn this shit, I don’t know or care what a circuit is and I’m almost certain neither of you will need to know what it is, ever.

“You know what?” Jason is still half asleep, blinking the sleep sluggishly out of his eyes. He raises a hand, scrubbing at his eyes with the back of it. “I miss when the alphabet was in order.”

“I miss it when the alphabet stayed out of mathematics,” Matty says, eyes on the paper, the crease in his forehead getting steadily deeper.

Jeremiah laughs sort of nervously, like he doesn’t know how to act around us, like he doesn’t know if we’re joking or not. He clears his throat. “Okay. Uh, do either of you have an answer?”

Matty says, “Give me a minute,” making lines with his finger on the paper. My teeth connect through my toast. Jeremiah is angled in such a way that he could make it out the door in five seconds, if he ran fast enough.

The photoshoot will be coming out in a few weeks, Rose had told me earlier on the phone. They had to do the obligatory touch-ups and chose which photos they were going to screen and where and when they’re going to be, etcetera, and then she started explaining the business side of things.