Bitter Sweet ➳ River Phoenix

IV

gonna be tea.

Monday

I managed to get pretty much zero sleep last night, so I had relied on black coffee in a thermo-mug to get me through the day. The rest of the week I was pretty busy, so I knew I had to tutor River today, I just hadn't mentioned it to him yet as I couldn't find him.

At the end of lunch, I spotted him leant up against the lockers with Wil, quietly conversing. I walked up to them, smiling at Wil before turning to River.
"Uh, hi. Yeah, I need to tutor you today as I'm kinda busy the rest of the week," I told him.

"No can do, my moms got her book club over," he said.

"That's fine, we'll go to mine then," I said, he turned to Wil and sighed, "you know where I live," I continued, "I'll see you then." I turned around and made my way to fifth period before he could argue.

When I got home I was silently praying that no one would be in. It wasn't even my parents who were an issue with boys being over, it was my brother. Even though I was only tutoring him, Casey would still have something to say.

"Hello?" I called into the house when I unlocked the door, but got no response. I placed my bag down beside the door and kicked off my shoes before putting them in the closet below the stairs.

River arrived not too long after I got back, he had a cigarette between his lips and his hands buried in his jean pockets.

"Hey," I said, trying to sound as nice as possible, he just tipped his head up slightly in reply and walked in, crushing the cigarette against the side of my house. I took him upstairs to my room, he sniggered slightly at the Rob Lowe poster on my wall as we walked in. He walked up to one of the walls, admiring the records I had put up.

"You're a big Jerry Lee Lewis fan, huh?" He said, turning around to face me.

I nodded, "Yeah, he's one of my favourites," I said, taking out my notes and sitting down at my desk. I had noticed something about River these past couple of sessions, he seemed to do a lot better when I explained things to him but as soon as something was written down, he got confused. I didn't know exactly why but there had to be some reason.

"I'm really confused on word problems, I just get confused on what information to take in," he said, rubbing his forehead slightly.

"Ok. Well what I do is I highlight the info you need," I reached over to my pencil case and took out a yellow highlighter, "so focus on the numbers and the process you're doing, so whether you need to multiply or divide and shit."

He nodded slightly, beginning to solve the problem once I'd finished highlighting. Once he'd finished, he looked up at me smiling slightly sheepishly, "thanks," he said.

It was getting pretty late and my stomach was rumbling violently.
"You hungry?" I asked and he nodded.

"What food do you have?" He asked.

I shrugged, "nothing I can think of," my mom was out and I was kind of mad as she hadn't called to tell me where she was and it had been a couple of hours.

"We could order pizza?" I suggested.

"Eh, I don't really like pizza," he said.

I rolled my eyes, "well what else then?"

"We could go out somewhere?" He shrugged.

I sighed, "Sure whatever."

I grabbed a jacket from my closet and got in River's car and he drove us to the diner, which was where we had decided to eat. It was pretty deserted as per usual, I sometimes questioned how this place managed to stay in business.