“The
Tutor”
I first saw her
perched on a stool near the back at Patrick’s on a late Tuesday morning,
sitting across the table from some other girl, a friend of hers I guess. She
had long, tanned, muscular legs dangling off the edge of her chair, chestnut
hair swept back with a headband, and green eyes, I noted, when they flicked to
mine. I would say she was middlingly pretty. Not an Aphrodite you know, more
like an Artemis, or perhaps a Persephone, if you know what I mean. Truthfully I
hardly noticed her, but her gaze kind of lingered on me with a quiet intensity.
Of course nothing should have come of it. It was a chance meeting between
strangers, an unspoken desire, a compliment easily accepted and quickly
forgotten. This kind of thing happens every day, or even several times a day as
it sometimes occurs in my case. It would seem, however, that my evaluation of
her was wrong. She turned out to be more like the nymph Echo, and the Fates saw
fit to cross our paths once more.
A
few days later I was at the athletic tutoring center, waiting for my 8:45
chemistry appointment to show and catching up on some poly sci reading when she
walked in, plunked her backpack down and asked if I was available to help. Now,
normally if you want help from a tutor you have to set up a regular
appointment, but the clock was pushing nine and my knuckleheaded lacrosse
player still hadn’t shown, so I said yes. Immediately she started digging
through her backpack and babbling about how hard her class was and how she desperately
needed a good grade, typical of a student athlete.
Going over the
paper she’d thrown onto the table I could see that she’d picked the toughest
professor in the department, so I asked her why. She stopped rooting through
her pack and looked me in the eye, and then she froze, like someone had hit the
pause button. In retrospect, I guess that she hadn’t seen that it was me at
that table. It was pure chance that she came to me, which I would later take
for serendipity, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m a good enough tutor that
the instructor didn’t really matter so I told her as much, and we went over her
homework together.
It became clear
as we worked through the problems that she was a sweet girl, but didn’t have
much of a head for numbers. Even the simple, non mathematical questions she
struggled with and I started to wonder if she had a head for anything at all.
Still, I felt my sympathy for her growing as she scrunched her brow and
puckered her lips in concentration. She was trying so hard, and getting
nowhere. I’d hoped that my gentle suggestions would help her to understand and
calm her down, but they only caused her to wince and grunt in frustration. It
was clear by the time she walked out the door that the poor thing was about to
cry.
It
took me a moment to decide what to do. On the one hand, she was just another
struggling student-athlete. They come through the center all the time, whining
about their training schedules and how the Profs just don’t understand and
don’t we know what will happen to them if they can’t make their grades? Please,
like I don’t have my own problems. But this girl was different. She didn’t come
to me crying or pleading, and she didn’t complain about the difficulty of her
class. She just tried to wrestle her way through her homework while clearly not
understanding any of it, but never giving up. I found her plight somehow noble
and tragic, that she could try so hard and yet fail so spectacularly. I decided
I couldn’t just let her go like that, so I followed her out the center and
chased her down.
“Wait,”
I called out, “I can help you out.” She stopped and looked at me with those big
green eyes, saying nothing but chewing her lip in a blatant plea for rescue. I
looked around just to make sure there wasn’t any faculty around to overhear,
and then lowered my voice. “I have access to certain materials,” I explained,
“to help you study. I can be available to give a little extra help with your
homework, too.” She made a face at me, the same one she had when she couldn’t
understand a math problem, but still didn’t say anything. I sighed. She was
going to need me to spell it out.
“Look,” I said, “there are some
athletes, usually the high profile ones in televised sports, who need a little
extra help maintaining their GPA. They get access to some academic amenities
that are closed to the majority. Stuff like advice on the course work and
highly, highly customized study
sheets tailored to specific instructors. You see where I’m going with this?”
You could almost see the light
coming on in her head, but not in the sudden flash of light like your basic
on/off switch. It was more like one of those dimmer bulbs that gradually swell
into brilliance. “I think I can arrange to give you that same kind of push,” I
said. “Does that work for you?”
I could tell she was a little
reluctant, like she thought she was being set up. She was just a track runner, and
in women’s sports to boot; not the kind of athlete that usually gets this kind
of leg up. She couldn’t understand why I would be offering it to her, and
truthfully there was no reason for me to. Honestly I didn’t know why myself.
“It just seems like you could use the help,” I offered for inadequate
explanation. But in the end, she didn’t have much of a choice. It was either
take my offer or fail the class. “Ok,” she said, still sounding cautious. “Great,”
I said, scribbling my address on a scrap of paper. “If you come by my place
Friday evening I’ll have the materials for your first exam ready.” She seemed
apprehensive as she took the paper. “Can’t you just bring it to campus? She
asked, but regretfully the sensitive nature of the materials dictated the
utmost discretion, which she accepted. “As for your homework,” I continued, “that’s
some pretty easy stuff for me to take care of. All you have to do is come by
the center and log into your account for me.” Actually that part was a lie.
Usually the jocks just give me their username and password for the online
coursework and they disappear from my life, but I wanted an excuse to keep an
eye on her. She didn’t outright say it, but I could read the warm relief in her
eyes when we parted ways. Our entwined fates were sealed.
The next day I
found myself thinking of her again. Actually, her face was stuck in my head
like a Ke$ha song, so I spent an hour or so digging up who this girl was. I had
her name now, and I knew she was an athlete. It didn’t take long to dig up the
details; she ran the 1500 meter, was a sophomore, and majored in criminal
justice of all things. I guessed that she was an average student, though there
was no way to confirm her grades.
The biggest
surprise came when I looked for her off campus. Her Facebook account was
public, though it didn’t seem like she’d looked at it in months. She did,
however, have an active twitter account. I was expecting the usual meaningless
drivel that comes from the pretentious, self absorbed type of person who
tweets, but it was something else. I mean, it was drivel, but an unexpected
kind. Post after post was about some guy she had seen and how she thought she
was in love. “I just met him” was the most recent tweet, in all caps, with four
exclamation marks, “So excited I can hardly stand it,” followed by three more
marks, declaring herself a total of five times more excited than the English
language says you have a right to be. I checked back to see if that was the
only thing she tweeted about, and though she’d only held the account for a week
or so, her unrequited love seemed to be her sole obsession. “Well that’s
interesting,” I thought, but not nearly as interesting as when she opened the
account; August twenty first, the exact same day that I saw her in the pizza
joint.
The timing
seemed strangely suspect. “Could it be me?” I thought, and immediately rejected
the idea. She had to have seen dozens of guys that day, maybe even hundreds.
Any one of them could have caught her eye, and it was far more likely that it
was some jock she saw often. Maybe another athlete or at least someone that
worked closely with them. “But you work closely with athletes,” I reminded
myself, and quickly countered, “she didn’t know that.” But the more I accepted
the possibility that I was the object of this poor girl’s esoteric affections,
the more her actions toward me made sense; the sudden blushing, the stammering,
the sidelong glances.
At first this
whole idea struck me as funny. I mean, how desperate would this girl have to be
to do something like this? The way she made it sound she was head over heels
for me, or whoever this guy was. I mean sure, I catch girls staring at me all
the time, some have even walked up to me and asked me for my number. I always
give them a fake one, but this was the first time some strange chick just
started obsessing over me just from seeing me one time. First time I knew of,
anyway. Maybe something was wrong with her? Something that made her feel
undesirable to real men, forcing her into an imaginary relationship? Or maybe
the pressures from her training finally made her snap? Whatever it was, the
longer I thought about it the less humorous her situation appeared to me. I mean,
here’s this unremarkable girl, a student athlete in an unimportant sport with a
struggling GPA. She probably invented this delusional boyfriend just as some
kind of cathartic escapist fantasy, and look at how that worked out. There she
was, enjoying her harmless, quiet little Utopian romance when I dropped into
the picture, and not only had I spent the morning helping her with her
homework, I had offered her private “tutoring” as well. The poor thing had to
have been paralyzed when she was forced to confront the real, actual
incarnation of her professed desire.
All this put me
in a bad position. I had already promised to help her out with her chemistry
class; I couldn’t just bail on her. Besides, at this point I wasn’t even
certain that I should. She was so vulnerable, so fragile. I would hate to be
the man to crush her dreams and break her heart. She would feel like I was
dumping her, even though we had never really been together. Then again, they
say that possession is nine tenths of the law and it looked like I had
unwittingly stolen her heart. I couldn’t see any way out of this where I didn’t
end up looking like a jerk, so I decided that I would go ahead and keep the
date and let the situation work itself out. Maybe I was mistaken, I thought,
maybe she was really infatuated with someone else.
When
she came by the house that Friday evening I was prepared. Being conscious of
her suspected crush, it was easy to see the signs. She was nervous, avoided eye
contact, she didn’t speak much. I invited her inside and she accepted, but declined
to sit down or have a drink, juice, water or otherwise. We made a little small
talk until she asked about the papers. I produced a copy and offered to go over
it with her, but she made some excuse and quickly left. I kept my eye on her
twitter account, and sure enough, thirty minutes later she chimed in about how
she’d just seen her dream guy. “He’s such a gentleman,” she said, “and nice and
helpful. I think he likes me too.”
My
suspicions were now confirmed. Either she had the questionably odd habit of
seeing the object of her affections only after she visited her chemistry tutor
or I was the guy, but how was I supposed to handle that? She was into me, that
much was potently clear, but when she had the time and opportunity to interact
with me as a real live person she just shut down. It was like she had already
invented a personality and dressed me in it like some mannequin, and now she
was frightened to learn that I might be someone else. Not knowing what else to
do, I made sure she was reserved for my morning sessions so I could continue to
help with her homework, and kept an eye on her twitter feed.
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