Madison

From everything you know about Madison, she might really need your help, here. You sit down next to her and say, "want to partner up?"

"Oh my god, hi!" she says. "Like...it's Ryan, right? Yeah I have no idea what I'm doing here. Like, what's this first question?"

She is pointing to an addition problem. You are already holding back a sigh.

You help her as best you can. As bad as you thought that she would be at math, she is actually worse. At points it seems outright cartoonish. How could a person have gotten through school and into college being this...well, you don't want to say stupid, but...

This all goes on until you finish simplifying a complex, multi-step algebraic equation, and she frowns.

"What is it?" You ask.

"Like, it's nothing," she says, then. "So...is he like, grading this?"

"I mean, maybe, I'm not sure."

She studies the equation hard. Then she picks up her pencil and whispers, very quietly, "that's not how you do it. You don't want to use remainders, you want to divide into a decimal because this is college math and he will be totally, like, not chill with that."

You almost don't hear her. "Wait, what?"

She speaks even more quietly. As if knowing that you heard her makes her want to speak less. "Also, like...you didn't follow the order of operations correctly. Remember PEMDAS? We need to start over from the beginning, I think."

And she does that. You watch as her pencil runs over the page and she finishes the problem. The answer is completely different. But it looks...right.

"Can you back up, just for a second?" You ask her. "What just happened?"

She says, much louder. "You like, totally got the right answer! Which is good because I'd hate for you to get a bad grade, right? Like maybe me, but you're so much smarter, you shouldn't fail."

You wait for a second to see if she'll answer any other questions on her own. When she doesn't, you slowly take the paper back and start answering all the questions. Halfway through, you feel her breath in your ear.

"Please don't say anything," she whispers.

In a matter of minutes, the time for the test is over. Mister Ketchup has moved on to talking about the syllabus like any other teacher, and class progresses without event.