Page 59 of Sublimate
He smiled. “I’m not particularly avoiding my ahhhnt but I don’t ever spend much time with any of them. We could go to Detroit to see my parents instead.”
“Sure, I’m up for that. Do they celebrate the holiday, though? I can’t imagine them sitting down together and sharing a turkey.”
“I don’t remember that the three of us sat together at the table, on Thanksgiving or any other night. They didn’t eat together unless they had guests and were interested in putting on a performance. I usually stayed in the kitchen with my nanny and when she was gone, I ate there alone. But my mom has been asking if I—if we would come,” he answered.
“I’ll go,” I said. The last time I’d seen Madeline Whitaker was after we’d spent the night at his parents’ house. We’d sippedun café(but she didn’t believe in morning food, so we had stopped to eat once we were on the road). Before we’d left, they had a conversation in very fast French that I hadn’t been able to follow at all, then she had done air kisses around his cheeks and nodded at me. She hadn’t said goodbye and as I’d been thanking her for having me, she’d closed the front door.
“Are you sure she would want me there?” I asked him.
“I want you there. I won’t go unless you do.”
Right, because we were in a relationship now. We traveled together. I smiled at him, happy with that security, and he smiled back.
Later that night, when he was in his room, I was back at the kitchen table trying (again) to work on the sheet of problems that made no sense to me. I had gotten the answer key and tried to go backwards, but I still couldn’t figure it out. It felt like being in school, which did make sense since this was actual schoolwork. But it was the emotion of it that I remembered: I would look at the page or the screen, not get it, be afraid to ask, try not to cry, and sit there miserable until the class ended. That had probably contributed to me not attending very much—that, and the fact that my mom had never required me to go and had left us alone a lot. My sister hadn’t made me because she hadn’t liked school, either.
“What are you doing?”
I jumped and screamed, because I was still not over that weirdness of thinking I saw someone hiding at the library. This was Nolan’s house, though, so it was a perfectly normal question for him to ask of someone sitting in his kitchen in the middle of the night.
“Holy bells,” I sighed. “I probably just scared the neighbors with that. I’m trying to do math.”
“What?” He yawned and walked to the table, and he ran his hand over his cheek and down to his bare chest as he did. He liked to sleep mostly naked, only in his boxers, which was fine in a house with such a great furnace. “Math?” he repeated. He leaned over me to look at my paper and I felt the heat of his body, even with that furnace going. It felt good.
“I’m going to try to get my GED,” I said. “Maybe it would help me get a job.” I sighed. “But this stuff is hard. I mean, it wouldn’t be for you, because Cadence told me that you took college courses in ninth grade at your boarding school, but it is for me because I never could understand anything that happened in my classes. Ever.”
“Vivi, are you all right?” He moved around and knelt down next to me. “You sound like you’re going to cry.”
“It’s frustrating,” I said. “I thought I would be able to get it better now that I’m older, but I still can’t. I don’t like feeling so dumb.”
“You’re not dumb. You’re wrong when you talk about how great I was at school, though. I never got good grades.”
“That’s because you never did any work, according to Cadence,” I responded.
“Yes, another bad decision I made. How smart was that?” He touched my cheek. “This is a very good idea and I can help you with it.”
“I don’t think anyone can. No teacher ever could,” I told him. “Most of them were nice but I was a lost cause.”
“Hm. I can’t believe that.” He took another chair and looked again at my paper, which was full of smears from all the erasing I’d done and maybe a tear where I’d cried on it. “What part don’t you understand?”
“All of it. I look at these problems and don’t know where to start.”
“This is algebra. Did you ever take it before?” he asked.
“Not that I remember.”
He started working through the first problem. “We’re solving for X, which means you have to multiply this fraction by this. Right?”
“I’m not good at that. Multiplying,” I explained when he seemed questioning. “Or division. I never really understood it.”
“It makes sense that you’re frustrated. It’s impossible to do this kind of equation without knowing how to do the underlying steps. Let’s work on those, first.”
I looked at him, wondering what he was really thinking. Since this was Nolan, I didn’t have to guess. “Are you surprised by how dumb I am?”
“Again, I don’t think that you are,” he answered. “From what you’ve said about your early life, I’ve guessed that you weren’t a regular in a classroom. That’s not being dumb. You didn’t have the chance to learn, so it’s an opportunity problem.” He stood. “These are skills you can learn now, but we should do it tomorrow when you’re not discouraged and I’m not tired.”
“Are you going to your room?”
“I was planning on it,” Nolan told me. “I only came down because something woke me up. Nothing supernatural, just thirst. Why? Did you need something else?”
