Page 14 of Campus Crush
She glanced at me. “Do the numbers move? Flip around?”
I frowned, my heart starting to race with nerves. “What?”
“Do you ever look at a number and it switches places on you? Or maybe you think it’s one number, but it turns out to be another?”
I blinked at her, caught off guard that she’d actually pegged what happened in my head so quickly. “Uh, yeah…sometimes eights and threes get mixed up. And sixes and nines.” I felt stupid admitting it, but she didn’t react like it was weird.
She nodded and then looked back at her computer screen, asking me another question, like what I’d just told her was completely normal. “What about sequencing? Like, if I gave you a list of numbers to put in order, would that be difficult?”
My gut twisted, and reluctantly I admitted, “Yeah.”
She nodded again, completely unfazed. “What about word problems? Do they make more sense than just numbers on a page, or are they just as confusing?”
I hesitated. No one had ever asked me this manyquestions about how I struggled before. They’d just told me to try harder. Study longer. “Word problems are a little easier. At least then I can try to picture what’s happening.”
“That tracks,” she murmured, tapping her pencil against the paper, her focus still locked on her screen.
I didn’t even know what she meant.
All I knew was she wasn’t looking at me like I was dumb.
She wasn’t frustrated or impatient. She was…thinking. Like she actually cared about what I said and was trying to figure out how to help.
For the first time since I sat down, my chest didn’t feel so tight.
Abby adjusted her glasses and gave me a small smile, the first one she’d sent my way all session. “Okay, I’ve got an idea. We’ll take a different approach next time. Something that might work better for you.”
I stared at her, waiting for the frustration to set in, for her to roll her eyes and tell me I was just making excuses, but she didn’t.
She just looked at me like I wasn’t broken.
Like I wasn’t stupid.
Something in my chest eased, and for the first time in my life, I left a tutoring session without feeling like a total idiot.
EIGHT
BigBear88:
Just died on level 93 of the mines. Again.
PeachyKeen:
BRING FOOD. You can’t just raw dog the mines like that.
BigBear88:
I had algae and a dream.
PeachyKeen:
That is not a survival strategy.
BigBear88:
It was a vibe though.
NINE
