WHO: Malia Tate and Adam Young WHAT: A talk in the park WHEN: Saturday afternoon WHERE: The Park WARNINGS: Malia? STATUS: Closed/Started in Gdocs, continued in comments
Starting back to school had made Madison Valley all that much worse. It had sucked enough when she hadn’t had to be doing stupid school things, but now, well, the school things were making her feel stupid. People had told her that she shouldn’t beat herself up, that she’d missed all that time while she was a coyote, but the truth was that it just didn’t help. Knowing that didn’t help her to hate the people who snickered at her when she didn’t know the most basic, easy things in her math class. Or make her stop wanting to tear them into little pieces and snicker at their dismembered bodies.
Okay, so she wasn’t a serial killer and wouldn’t actually do that, but it was one of the fantasies she had to keep her from doing something stupid like crying when they did that.
It was just hard, that was all. And she studied, she did. She studied a lot, and she studied hard. There was just so much she didn’t understand, and she hated feeling so...so…dumb. It made her feel out of control, and like she wasn’t in charge anymore. For someone who had lived in the woods since she was nine, by herself, that was a hard pill to stomach.
She’d taken to studying outside, in remote locations where she could get away from people, and back to something comfortable. It made it easier to her, and it was a lot more comfortable and familiar than the library.
Right now, she was in the park, laying on her stomach on a picnic table, trying to work out her math problems. She wasn’t getting very far, but at least there was nobody out here to hear her curse them.
***
Adam had gone for a run. He missed Dog and wished his faithful Doberman had come to this place with him, But Dog wasn’t with him, and there was no use pining away for him He was, by all accounts, safe back in Lower Tadfield, and that was that. He was too old for traveling anyway, adam surmised, and so he didn’t attempt to bring Dog to him. He simply let him be, though Adam missed him terribly.
He had been jogging for a while, and when he saw a familiar head up ahead, he decided he was due for a break. He made his way over to the picnic table, and sat down without asking or waiting to be acknowledged.
“What’re you working on?” he asked her. He could see that it was school work, but he wasn’t looking close enough to see what it was. “Maybe I can help.”
***
Malia looked up at him, then closed her book and sat up, unceremoniously dropping the book onto the ground.
“It’s math. I hate it. And nobody can help me.”
She cocked her head, again getting that weird smell and sense from him, unlike anything she’d ever smelled before. She wanted to say it was evil, but everything about him said that wasn’t true.
“You never told me what you were.”
***
“I’d be happy to try and help you,” Adam told her. And he would. Without using his powers. That was cheating and wouldn’t really help her. She needed to figure it out on her own, but a little help could go a long way. “It happens that math was one of my best subjects.”
Being an architect required a firm understanding of math, after all. He was, for the moment, completely and deliberately ignoring her last statement.