hold me closer

05

I walked to my first class with Malia. It was math, Malia's least favorite subject. She dreaded it the most. I applauded Malia for her efforts to try and catch up. She had all these different markers to highlight what she knew, what she was working on, and what she didn't know.

Before we got to the classroom, she stopped. I looked at her and she started backing away. I quickly grabbed her arm, pulling her inside.

"I hate math," Malia complained. "It's pointless."

"It's school," I told her. "School is important, and math is... essential."

"To what?" Okay, that was a very good question.

Stiles took a seat beside me in the row and said, "Knowing how much to tip at restaurants."

Lydia looked back at Stiles and then looked at Malia and said, "And other less important things like medicine, economics, engineering."

"Tipping," Stiles said again with a wink.

"All right, volunteers to the board." Miss Flemming started the class. "Lucy, Diego, Malia."

"Um, I didn't volunteer," Malia said.

"You did now," she responded. "To the board."

"Come on," I said, grabbing her wrist.

I started to solve my problem. I agreed with Malia. Math was one of those classes where I found it useless. Well, okay. Addition, subtraction - all of that and maybe percentage was important but the other things? Useless. Unless someone wanted to be in the field of what Lydia had said. But I didn't plan to do anything related to that stuff. Well, I actually didn't know what I wanted to do.

Math wasn't too hard for me though. I was passing the class. Lydia was always a great help. So was Stiles... sometimes. I glanced at Malia who paused.

"Did you go over the notes Lydia gave you?" I asked.

"I didn't understand them," she replied.

I gave her a sympathetic smile. "X equals twenty-five. And, uh, put away the claws."

I finished writing and sat back down. Stiles whispered to me and I looked at him. He pointed to his phone, wanting to show me something. While the teacher wasn't looking, he gave me his phone. Triple homicide developing.

"An ax murderer?"

"A family-murdering ax murderer," Stiles added, walking towards their locker.

"I already heard about it," Scott informed.

"Wait, what? You did? How?" Stiles asked.

"My mom called me," he explained. "She knew we'd see it on the news."

"Perfect! Let's go!"

"Whoa, whoa," Scott said and Stiles stopped. "We've got econ in five minutes."

"All right, did you forget the part about the family-murdering ax murderer?" Stiles said.

"Did you forget your dad's the sheriff?" Scott countered. "They want us to stay out of it."

"Are you guys kidding me?" Stiles said incredulously. "There's a family-murdering ax murderer and we're not going to do anything about it?"

"Maybe we should just let the adults handle it," I told him.

"So, the three of you, you just want to stay here, school, go to class?" he said. "Never heard anything so irresponsible in my life."

"See you at tryouts?" Scott called after him.