Page 3 of Letting it Ride

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ADDISON

To:[email protected]

From:[email protected]

Subject:calculus

Hi Miss Anderson,

Thanks for tutoring Rudy with his calculus. It’s been a lifesaver. Not sure what we’d do if he got kicked off the high school football team. Since there are no classes over spring break, he obviously can’t just stay after school. Can you plan to come to our house to tutor him on those days?

Sincerely,

Karen (Rudy’s mom)

To:[email protected]

From:[email protected]

Subject:Avocados

Don’t want to text you during the workday in case you’re busy. Can you stop at the grocery store for some avocados on your way home and drop them off here? Your sister and her wife are here and too busy with the twins to go out, and apparently that’s all the babies eat. There’s green spit-up everywhere.

Mom

“Idon’t get it.” My student scrunches up his face in confusion. He wears this expression so frequently that his face is probably going to end up in a permanent state of bewilderment.

I pinch the bridge of my nose. Calculus is hard, but he’s a high school junior who needs to learn this to pass my class. And I can’t lose my shit, even if this is the fourth time we’ve gone over this. Rudy’s parents are paying me to tutor him after school, because if Rudy doesn’t improve his grades, he risks getting kicked off the football team.

And I need the money, so I can’t tell him to simply pack up and get the hell out of my classroom, even ifall I want to do right now is take three years off from teaching and drink Mai Tais on a Caribbean island. That would be the life, wouldn’t it? No pile of endless responsibilities piling up from everything that I can’t bring myself to say no to.

To be fair, even if I didn’t need the money, I’d still be here. I can’t exactly say no to a student who’s struggling.

But for now, I’m choosing to ignore the emails from his mother, because I don’t have an excuse to say no. Avoidance is better than direct confrontation. If asked directly, I tend to cave and say yes. I’ve always been a people pleaser.

There are worse vices, though. Right?

I take a deep breath. “So we’re trying to prove this, right? The way we do it is to assume the opposite of what we’re trying to prove. Then you solve the problem with that assumption, and you get the answer of zero equals one, which can’t happen. Does that make sense? That means our initial assumption must be wrong.”

His brows furrow in confusion. “Why?”

Patience, Addie. Just remember how much they’re paying you. Plus—and probably more importantly—it’s not entirely Rudy’s fault. I shouldn’t take it out on him. He’s been passed along by teachers who weremore interested in what the football team needed than what Rudy did. It’s not doing the kid any justice.

And it may be selfish, but tutoring on the side is the only thing keeping me afloat. I love teaching, but the salary isn’t going to make me a millionaire, and with my schedule, this is the only gig I can really swing right now. And just think: With enough money, that island dream could be a reality. Maybe not for years, but possibly for a few days.

Or at the very least, I might be able to make my rent payment without scraping the bottom of my bank account. Yay me.

Rudy looks at me, still confused, and I try to figure out the best way to explain this to him. “Because one can’t equal zero.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because it just… doesn’t.” How does one even explain this? It should be obvious, especially to a high school junior like Rudy, if his prior teachers had done their jobs.

A football analogy pops into my head. “It’s like this. You know how when your team has the ball, they just have one football for the whole team?”

He nods, a spark of something starting to dawn.

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