Page 20 of Gingers Can Do Maths

Just like three years ago, I’ve made her relearn the acronyms to formulas. Formulas we’d gone over for the first hour. Then, I’d made her scribble them at the top of her mock exam paper before she even looked at the first problem. Before her mind becomes scrambled.

“I know,” she mutters, her eyes downcast. She’s barely looked at me since our session started.

I know it’s because she’s still beating herself up for her body’s natural reaction to me. I’ll have to show her how much I crave it, and how much more I need from her.

Instead of paying me any attention, she fiddles with the full coffee cup beside her. There are two again. And two untouched chocolate-drizzled croissants.

Once again she swears it’s all for her, but Sin’s one of those people who romanticises breakfast. She likes the aesthetic, the aroma, even the taste, but she barely has an appetite in the mornings.

I’d introduced her to brunch in year six and she’d become obsessed.

So why did she bother buying it at all?

Again?

Maybe for the same reasons she constantly bought me food at school in the mornings. Because she knows I am a breakfast person.

Because she knew my parents wouldn’t bother to make it for me and I barely managed to keep toast edible on my own.

In the mornings, she’d sit cross-legged beside me under a massive oak tree in front of the school’s library pretending to sip her chai while I devoured my croissant, my coffee long gone. Then she’d insist she was full despite not being hungry to begin with and watch me drink hers too.

I’d lavished in drinking off the exact spot that she had. She’d watch me perplexed, wondering why I’d want to taste her sticky lipgloss. Wondering why I just didn’t pop the top off. Once she tried removing the lid before handing it to me and I’d almost soaked us both as I’d stopped her and hastily replaced the cover.

“Then?”

“I know the rules, but the equations just...the numbers, the letters...” I get overwhelmed halfway through. I lose my confidence. I get distracted.”

“There will always be distractions. You need to learn to tune them out.”

“Easier said than done.”

“What will a distraction earn you in the end? Nothing. Not the way completing the test will. Distractions will always be there. The test is only for a blip in time. You know the material.”

She bites her lip.

“You think that clock that doesn’t even audibly tick is distracting? What about when everyone’s rustling papers? Or sharpening pencils? Or bouncing their leg?”

She sighs. “It’s not just external stimulus. It’s internal thoughts too. Intrusive thoughts that I'm in over my head.”

“Past comments?”

She nods.

I remember how everyone’s opinion of Sin always got to her. It was easy for her to tell me how I should tune out comments about my stickman body, or fire crotch, but when it came to her, I couldn’t help her. My words of affirmation constantly fell on deaf ears and I’d watched helplessly as she let the comments affect her.

I couldn’t be so helpless this time around.

“But they weren’t right,” I say. “You’re smart Sin. It’s only idiots who can’t realise that intelligence comes in different forms. I can’t figure out how to build things with my hands as well as you can. I can’t even recreate the hair treatment you gave me. It should be simple enough with a recipe but it isn’t. I’ve tried and failed multiple times. No matter how much I timed the damn beater machine to whip the products. No matter how I measured out the leather essence—”

“You tried to remake the conditioner?” she asks, her voice soft and breathless.

“Only for thirty-one months. One hundred and thirty-five weeks.”

“Almost three years,” she whispers, her eyes falling from my hair to my lips.

“I missed how soft it made everything. Do you still make those products?”

Of course, she does. I put them on nightly when I visit her.

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