Changing the Rules (Richter Book 1)(60)
She pulled a book from the shelf, plopped it on her desk, and wandered over to the pictures of previous track and cross-country teams that were tacked on the walls.
“How did you feel after your workout with the distance team?” was how Coach Bennett greeted her.
“Not bad, actually. You should try it sometime.” She found the picture that had Marie Nickerson in it.
“Are you always a smart-ass?”
She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “I save it for you and Mr. Eastman.”
He full-on laughed. “So you’re giving Mrs. Wallace a breather.”
She groaned. “That woman should move to Stratford-upon-Avon and call it done.” She searched out Brianna and then looked for the previous year to see if she recognized her. The image of what Marie looked like in her mug shot kept flashing in her mind. The woman looked thirty now and not nineteen.
“Are you going to open that book?”
“Hmm, yeah, sure,” she said, distracted. “Hey, Coach. Do you remember all of the kids in these pictures?”
“Most,” he said.
“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.