Go Study with Beatrice

After lunch, you sit through chemistry class, diligently taking notes. Beatrice, as usual, sits by you, and she looks over at you nervously a few times as the lesson goes by. She’s awfully fiddly with her pen, and hardly seems to be writing in her notebook. Finally, when Professor Styles wraps up her lecture, Beatrice clears her throat.

“So… um… want to study together?” she asks.

You were planning on going to lab today, but looking into her anxious blue eyes, you feel like saying no to her would be letting Beatrice down.

“You know what?” you say, packing up your own bags. “Sure!”

A delighted smile crosses her face, and she squeals a “Yes!”, giving you a quick hug, before pulling away, abashed.

“So um… library?” she asks.

“Sounds like a plan,” you answer.

A few minutes later, the two of you have found a private room in the library for yourselves. Beatrice has got all her chemistry notes splayed out with two textbooks open on the side, while she scribbles something on a sheet of lined paper.

She growls in frustration while you poke through your own notes.

“So... have you had much luck with the last couple problems? Stuff on the structure of coordination complexes?” she asks, looking up at you.

“I took a glance at it earlier,” you say, meaning precisely that.

You read through the problems she’s working on from over her shoulder, nodding to yourself as you see the shape of the problems forming in your mind. This is some tricky stuff.

“Have you worked through all the other problems?” you ask, flipping through the earlier pages of the problem set.

“Uh… most of them, but I thought I could check some of the answers with you, since there were a couple I wasn’t sure about,” Beatrice says. “Is it… have you done the earlier problems yet?”

“Okay, let’s go over those first,” you say. “The first couple problems are like a crash course survey in molecular orbital theory, so let’s make sure we have all the concepts from that down solid before we move on to the more complicated applications… let’s see, how’d you go about characterizing methane in problem three?”

Beatrice pulls out her write-up of the problem, and begins to haltingly go through the orbitals and the bonds. She gets through the basics fine, but stumbles a little as she tries to relate them to ionization energies. You gently correct her, heading up to the whiteboard to sketch out a helpful diagram or two, and she listens attentively to your explanation.

“Wow, okay, that actually makes sense now,” Beatrice says as you wrap up your little lecture. “Okay, yeah, I definitely messed up problem five too, but I think I’m fine on four.”

“Should we check those questions too?” you ask.

She shakes her head.

“Let’s try working on problem eight then,” you say. “This one’s on transition metal complexes, and I suspect it’ll require some group theory.”

“Oh god, this is the math stuff the prof went over super fast in class, right?” Beatrice groans, burying her head in her hands.

“Yeah. I don’t have much experience with it either,” you admit. “So this will be a fun one to figure out together.”

You spend a few minutes trying to make progress, but it’s only after you read through your textbook’s section on ligand field theory that it slowly starts to come together. You put pen to paper and begin to sketch out your solution to the problem, consulting your notes every once in a while.

Lost in your work, you don’t notice Beatrice helplessly flipping back and forth between her textbooks, scribbling nonsense onto her paper in frustration.

“I can’t do this,” Beatrice eventually says, quietly.

That finally catches your attention. You look up at her, concerned.

“What are you stuck on?” you ask.

You think you’ve got a pretty good grasp of the problem now, and could probably explain whatever confusions she might have.

“I don’t know. Everything! All of it! I thought it made it sense when you explained it just now, but now I look at this problem and…” Her voice trails off for a second as she balls up a piece of paper in frustration. “It makes no sense!”

“This one’s definitely a harder one,” you say. “Here, let’s take it from the top. Remember how we talked about sigma bonding before? Well, now we have to consider…”

You talk Beatrice through the complexities of the problem, patiently working with her through each bit of confusion as it comes up. She’s not stupid, not by any stretch of the imagination, but you can tell that she’s often unsure of herself, even when she’s right. Oftentimes, all it takes is a simple cue from you for her to put the pieces together herself, and before long, you’ve come up with what you’d consider an acceptable solution to the problem.

“Wow, you saved my ass Alex,” Beatrice says. “There is no way I would have ever figured that out by myself in a million years.”

“You’d be surprised,” you reply.

She hugs you then, jumping out of her seat and putting her arms around you. You’re taken by surprise, but quickly return the hug. With her up close to you, you suddenly notice her cute moon-shaped face, her slender curves, and you lean down, kissing her softly on the lips.

This takes her by surprise, you can tell from the way she stiffens, but then she sighs into the kiss and begins to kiss you back, her hands gripping your shirt tightly. She feels nice and right in your arms, and you could just about—

Her phone suddenly starts buzzing, some alarm-noise ringing.

“Oh crap,” Beatrice says, disentangling herself from you. “I’ve got… I’ve got class now, but I’ll um…”

“I’ll catch you later,” you smile.

“Yeah, that!” she says, scrambling to pack up her books. It takes her a couple seconds to get there. “I’ll see you!”

With that, she runs out the room, rushing off to class.

Beatrice +20