At the request of readers:
Amanda Green: New girlfriend - petite redhead
Rose Green: Amanda's mom
Betsy Williams: Girl that was involved in David's toss into the bathroom.
Girls from sleepover: Katie Wilson, Roberta, Angela, Jessica
Chapter 8
Eric Whitman was my new roommate. He had already moved in so he helped me haul my stuff up to the fifth floor dorm room. It was a coed dorm, sort of. Each floor was a single sex, and being an engineering college, there were a lot more guys that girls. It was pretty obvious that he thought Betsy was pretty hot looking, barely able to take his eyes off her, not that she was wearing anything particularly provocative, like a tank top without a bra, or anything like that. He was quick to ask if she was my sister or girlfriend or something, to which I had to answer that she was just a friend. He was disappointed when she threw cold water on his advance, though not literally. That came in the form of our goodbye. I gave mom a hug and a kiss on the cheek, while Betsy gave me a full body hug with a long, long, long, wet kiss that left my dick hard in my pants. Yeah, Eric was disappointed, but such is life.
I wanted to talk to Mandy, but had no way to get ahold of her until she was moved into her dorm. She was to call my mom, after they got home in two days, and get my phone number and then call me and give me hers. Those two days, while busy with getting registered for classes and such, was interminably long. I finally heard from her the third night, and spent almost her entire long distance discount card worth of minutes, talking about our trips and what we thought of our campuses. I intentionally didn't tell her about Betsy. It left me feeling a little guilty, but with the distance between us, I really didn't want to give her anything to worry about, and I honestly didn't think there was. What I felt for Betsy was done. Period!
---o---
The first two weeks of class were generally straightforward, except for Calculus. Calculus looked to be the bane of my existence. I'd never had trouble with a class before, but this one, this class that was ever so important to everything else I was going to do here, was kicking my butt. I complained to Mandy on our weekly Saturday night call, and she encouraged me to find someone to study with. That problem was solved for me when Professor Saloman handed back the first exam.
"Mister Roberts." Professor Saloman, my calculus instructor, said as he stood by my seat and set my first exam on it. I looked down and saw the big red D on the top and felt my heart sink. "This course is the basis for almost everything else you do here. Math is the core of engineering. If you don't improve in this course, your time here will be very short lived."
"Yes sir." I responded dejectedly as the girl in the glasses sitting next to me looked over at my paper, trying to look like she wasn't looking.
Professor Saloman continued down the row, making comments to some students, saying nothing to others. He came to the seat with the girl next to me and set her paper on the desk. The A+ was pretty obvious, which made me feel even worse. "Miss Engle. You seem to have this material well in hand. Might I suggest that you take on Mister Roberts as a study partner and see if you can impart at least a portion of your knowledge of the material to him?"
"Study partner?" She asked in surprise.
"Yes Miss Engle. I understand that you come from a rather independent background and that you are considered to be unique in your abilities, however, engineering requires working in teams and groups, you might as well start learning how to do that now. Mister Roberts seems to be someone who could benefit from your abilities in math. Take him under your wing and let's see if you have the ability to help grow another person's understanding of the material. After all, as Albert Einstein said, if you can't explain it, then you don't understand it well enough yet."
"Yes sir." She answered, clearly not happy about being saddled with what she must consider to be a looser.
After class she stood up by my desk as I packed up my notebook. "Alright. Get this clear. I'm not a plaything. I'm not interested in playing footsie or anything else. We study once a day together. Either in your dorm common area or the library. Got it?"
"Um. Yeah."
"Good! Meet me tonight at seven in the second floor library study rooms." She said before turning and walking away. I stared at her as she walked away, wondering if this was actually going to help, or if it was going to be an exercise in having my nose rubbed in my failure. I wasn't used to failing, but at the moment, I didn't see much way around it.
After dinner at the dining hall, I got my calc book and notebook and headed to the campus library. It didn't take me long to find her in a small glass walled study room with a small table and four chairs. She was sitting with the table almost covered with papers and books.
"Knock knock." I said as I stepped into the room and closed the door behind me. "Miss Engel?"
She looked up at me with a scowl. "Patricia. I HATE being called that." She snapped at me. "Sit down and let's see just how stupid you are at math!"
I walked to the table and stood there, looking at her. I dropped my notebook and book on the table with a loud thud. "Look. I didn't ask you to do this, our teacher did. If you don't want to, just say so and I'll find someone else to help me. I can't afford to flunk this class, but I'm not going to sit here and be belittled just because I'm having a little trouble with math!"
She looked up at me almost as if she were looking at an animal in a zoo rather than another person, and a relatively unattractive animal at that. "You're a boy. You aren't capable of thinking past your dick. It's a known fact. At your age the hormone levels drive you toward sex in every situation dealing with the opposite sex. You just can't help it, it's biology, and I'm too busy to have to fend off advances from boys that think they are god's gift to the female gender. Get my drift?"
"Well, you don't have to worry about that. I have a girlfriend already. Unfortunately, she's going to Berkley while I'm here, so I'm not interested in playing footsie with you, or anything else for that matter. All I wanna do is figure out how to pass this class. If you can help me, great. If not, then tell me and I'll go find someone else!" I said feeling my face redden with anger at her condescending attitude.
She sat looking at me for several seconds and then nodded as she started to push a bunch of papers to the side, clearing a space in front of the chair next to her. "Good. We understand each other. Sit down here and let me see your test and we'll figure out what you don't know." She said in a much more civil tone.
I dug out my exam for her and she sat and looked at my paper, humming and hawing, occasionally nodding her head and then shaking it as well. By the time she got to the end of the test, there was no doubt I was confused if I was doing well or poorly. "If you're going to approach math like this, there's no hope." She said as she dropped the test on the table. "You have no idea what you're doing. You miss steps, you make wandering calculations that don't seem to have anything to do with the problem. It's almost as if your mind isn't focused on what you're doing. I can't help you if you can't focus. You have to be able to concentrate on one problem at a time, follow the steps all the way through without skipping or going off on a tangent."
"I don't get it. I've never been bad in math, or anything, actually."
"Well, you are now. Look here." She said picking up my test. "See this problem? Look at this part, see where you start doing the limit? The process is right, but the numbers are all wrong because you used part of the previous problem. It's just a lack of concentration. I can't fix that."
I shook my head and looked at her. "I don't understand. I've never had this kind of trouble."
"Look. Professor Saloman asked me to help you. I don't know how to do that, especially if you're going to take that attitude. Start out believing you suck at math and maybe we can find a way to get you to think the right way. If it was just a mechanical problem, a problem with how you approach the problem, I can fix that. But you don't have a problem like that, well mostly not. You're just not focusing on the work. Look at problem six. See, to here you're fine. Everything is right and then you go off on this tangent here. All you needed to do was to reduce this equation a little more and you'd have had it, instead you added all this drivel that had nothing to do with the problem."
"But it was in the word problem."
"Sure it was. Just because it's in the problem description doesn't mean you have to use it. Sometimes there's more information than you need. Look. Think of it like this. You have headache and there are a hundred bottles in the medicine cabinet. How do you choose what medicine you take?"
"Well, I take aspirin for a headache. I look for the aspirin."
"How do you know you take aspirin for a headache?"
"Because I've done it before."
"Of course. Calculus is the exact same thing. You follow what you did before, and it all works out. You ignore the stuff that doesn't matter, the other bottles in the cabinet, and just use the stuff that does matter, the aspirin. See? Simple!"
"But how do I know what matters?"
"I just explained that." She said with irritation.
