“Okay, who is this?” she asked, pointing to a random kid in a random year.
He moved from behind his desk and put on his glasses. “Dan Corsaletti. Pole vault.”
“Oh, yeah? What about this little dude?”
“Patrick Durby.” The coach moved to a group shot three years later. “Here he is, senior year.”
Claire looked twice. “Damn. He found a membership at Gold’s Gym.”
“It’s crazy how much you guys change in the four years you’re here.”
“What about her?” Claire pointed to Marie.
He peered closer. “Uhm . . .”
“Aha!”
“No, now wait, it’s coming. Marie Nickerson? She wasn’t on the team long. A year or two, I think.”
Claire shrugged, watched him from the corner of her eye. “You could totally be lying to me.”
“Like the way you lie to me?” he asked.
It took everything in Claire to keep from changing her expression. “What do you mean?”
“You told me you weren’t a distance runner.”
Oh, thank God. “Oh, that?”
“Is there something else you’re lying about?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m the smart-ass, never can tell.”
He tapped her book as he walked back to his desk.
She moved to sit down. “Do you tutor all the track kids that need it?”
He laughed. “This isn’t tutoring. This is babysitting.”
“So if someone needed a tutor, who would you send them to?”
He put his glasses back on and pulled a stack of papers in front of him. “I don’t think you need a tutor. You need discipline.”
“Okay, fine . . . but who tutors?”
He wrote something on the paper in red ink, flipped to the next one. “Dunnan is in charge of the tutors. I’m too busy with track.”
“What does it take to be a tutor?”
He looked up and dropped his hand on the papers, completely annoyed. “You have to pass the class and show the ability to problem solve.”
“Does it pay? Like real money?”
“Yeah. Not a ton, but it’s a good way to work and go to school.”
Claire slapped her hands together and gave them a firm rub. “Okay, then. Let’s do this.”
“Let’s do what?”
“Pass the class. Give me your final.”
He narrowed his eyes, took his glasses off slowly. “What are you talking about?”
“Listen. My aunt said that if I pass all my classes and stay out of trouble, she’d let me backpack through Europe for six months after I graduate. I need to make some cash so I have more than ten euros a day to spend.”
“You’re serious?”
She folded her hands and blinked several times as if a halo suddenly appeared over her head.
“Listen, Claire, even if you did pass my final, which I doubt can happen since we haven’t covered the material yet, I can’t just let you out of the class.”
“I’m not asking to leave the class. But I can skip all this labor.” She pointed to the book. “And take that off your hands.” She glanced at the stack of papers he was grading. “I’ll be your TA and maybe you can leave campus for lunch once in a while and eat more than a soggy sandwich with processed cheese. That stuff will kill ya, you know.”
“You sound like my wife.”
She cringed.
He nodded a few times, rolled his chair closer to his computer. “All right, Miss Smart-ass.” Glasses went back over his eyes, and within a few seconds he was printing out a test.
He walked over to her desk, papers in hand.
She reached for them. He held them back. “You need an A.”
“B.”
“B+. And show your work.”
He put her in a solo desk in the front of the room. She had an hour and a half to complete the test.
Bennett set a timer and sat back down.
Claire went to work.
When the class bell rang, the room filled up, but she stayed focused on the test. The idea to infiltrate the tutor pool had come to her after she and Sasha had returned from the grocery store. The badass attitude got her into the party crowd, but the kickass student gave her access to whatever was happening in that world. So instead of catching up on that sleep she told Cooper she needed, she spent most of the night refreshing her brain on the more complicated math problems she’d see in a test.
Coach Bennett’s voice and instructions to the room full of kids became a hypnotic background noise.
Three minutes before the bell, Claire double-checked her work and waited.
As the kids ran off to their next hour of torture, Claire took her test to Bennett.
“Here.”
“You still have time.”
She shook her head, grabbed her backpack. “I’m good. Those last two bonus questions had me. I took a stab at ’em.”
Bennett flipped to the last page. “I’ll give it a look, tell you how you did after Saturday’s invitational.”
“You can’t tell me tomorrow?”
Bennett stared at her. “Has anyone ever told you that you lack patience?”
“That’s torture.”
“Try meditation. It works.”
Friday morning was met with donuts and Kyle.
Tony didn’t show.
Cooper spent extra time in the teacher’s lounge, talked with some of the staff.
The only employee that drew his attention was Leo Eastman.
Cooper arrived to practice in track pants and running shoes.
He saw Claire walk on the field, noticed the new attention she received from the distance runners on the team. She gravitated toward the sprinters, and smiled when she saw him.
She sat on the field, put one leg out in front of her, and started stretching. She looked him up and down. “What’s this, Coach? You plan on running today?”
“Since practice is minimal, and only meant to keep you limber and ready for tomorrow, I thought I’d run off some of the cobwebs.”
He received a sufficient amount of teasing from the smaller group, but hit the track with them anyway.
He purposely stayed out of Claire’s orbit until the second lap.
“How are you feeling about tomorrow’s meet?”
“I think I’m ready.”
“Should be a good start to the season,” one of the varsity guys said from the other side of Claire.
“It’s my track-meet cherry about to get popped.”
Cooper was pretty sure the kid on her left wasn’t expecting that.
Claire glanced over, grinned. “Sorry, guess I’m a little nervous.”
He found his inner coach. “Just run fast and don’t get hurt.”
“Run fast. Don’t get hurt. Maybe you should have said that before today,” Claire teased and started to run faster. “It’s only four laps, right?”
Ah, damn.
He had no choice but to keep up, even though he wouldn’t mind staying right where he was. Behind her watching her butt as she rounded the corner.
She set the pace, and everyone stayed with her.
With one lap left she went a little faster, but nothing crazy. Watching her was like watching a racehorse stuck on a lead rope.