Jeff, my brother, was out of town for the week. My Dad and I had just made love. In case you're not familiar with my story, my mother had tragically died on my 18th birthday. There was a lot of guilt on my part because she had been attending to last minute details for my birthday party when she ran a stop sign and was killed. This made my grief even worse. My Dad and I grieved together, and alone - my brother had stubbornly refused to sit out a semester of college to help us with the grieving process. This, coupled with my fear that Daddy would do himself harm, leaving me all alone, led to us bonding closer than Dads and daughters usually do - it led to me taking my mother's place, in every way.
When I became involved with Daddy, I had crossed what was, to me, a very taboo line - so when Jeff came home for the summer, it just happened - we crossed the line, too. All of these events are detailed in previous episodes.
I had recently graduated from high school. I was a top scholar in mathematics and had gotten a job for the summer tutoring high school students who had failed their math classes or who just needed to strengthen their math skills. I had 8 students that I was to tutor 45 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for most of the summer.
At the end of the previous episode, I had only completed one day of my tutorial sessions. The only hitch my first day was the insistent flirting of a black athlete, Lewis. For some reason, even though I found his flirting irritating and distracting, he was on my mind that evening.
I had never been fond of pornography - well, let's just say that I tried not to look at it because I believed that it leads to a desensitizing of sex. I had seen it. One of the things that I had found fascinating was interracial sex. I had watched videos with guys like Mandingo and Julio Lopez and some guy that called himself Blackzilla. I didn't care for Blackzilla much, but his cock looked as thick as a sack of sausage. Julio Lopez had the biggest cock I ever saw on a human being. It looked as big as a horse. I must admit that I liked looking at it. My personal favorite was Mandingo. He was generally more tender and loving - as if that's important in porn - than others were. I digress. Suffice it to say that, if I were going to watch porn, I liked watching well-hung black studs. I guess that, when Lewis flirted with me, it made me imagine him in those videos.
The next day, when I went to school to tutor, I wore jeans and a blue, button-up blouse. I rarely ever wear anything that shows much cleavage, and I certainly wasn't going to do so on this job. I wanted to be professional, even though they had informed me that I could dress as casually as I wanted, within reason. Even shorts were permissible, but the building was air-conditioned, and I'm very cold-natured. I don't dress to look sexy, but I have a good body and it's apparent that I have nice breasts. I don't try to accentuate them, but I'm not going to try to hide the fact that I'm a woman.
Lewis was my 4th student - 10:15 to 11:00, right before my 30 minute lunch break. I was a little nervous when he came in, dressed in baggy shorts and a basketball jersey. He had told me the previous day that he was 6-4. I guessed him to weigh around 200 pounds. He was lean, yet muscular. I liked the way he was put together. No fat. Nothing soft or pudgy. He was nice looking and clean shaven. His hair was well-trimmed. I thought he was relatively handsome. He had failed a grade way back in grammar school, he had informed me, so he was 18 years old and just beginning his senior year that coming fall. I knew from reading the local papers that he was a star player in both football and basketball.
He flopped down in the chair next to me. I sat at a large table. We had a computer, should we need it, a graphing calculator, books, and plenty of paper and pencils. I also had an outline of what he needed to work on to enable him to take a test to give him credit in Algebra 2.
"Mornin, Miss Smith, you lookin fine!" he said with a broad grin. "So we gonna be solving the quadratic equation today?"
"Lewis, you can call me Pam, or Pamela, if you like," I told him. "Also, there is no such thing as THE quadratic equation. There are an infinite number or quadratic equations. You mean the quadratic FORMULA."
"Equation, formula - who gives a shit?" He regarded me warily, testing to see if I would allow him to use profanity.
"Lewis, I'd rather you didn't use profanity, but I'm not going to make a big deal of it." I paused, looking into his eyes. This kid made me nervous. "One of the things that can make you better in math is learning to call things by the correct terms. I know that sounds silly, but it's the truth. A formula and an equation are about as alike as a basketball and a pickle!" I smiled.
"A'ight," he replied. "I do know what the quadratic formula is, but I don't know what it does."
A breakthrough! I knew that when someone admitted what they didn't understand about a topic, learning could occur.
"Ok! That's great. Let me ask you this, Lewis. Do you know what a quadratic function is?" I could tell he didn't follow. "Do you know what shape a quadratic makes when you graph it?"
"It make a parabola, right?"
Wow, Lewis did know something. I was excited. I could teach him something. "Absolutely right!" I said enthusiastically. "Do you know what the x-axis is?"
"I ain't dumb! Hell yeah, I know." Then, "I mean, yeah I know all that."
"The quadratic formula tells us where the parabola will cross the x-axis, saving us the trouble of graphing it," I said.
"For real?" he seemed surprised.
We discussed quadratics for a few more minutes, even though that wasn't what I had planned for him that day. He was proficient with the graphing calculator, so I showed him that, using the quadratic formula, he would get the same answers as he got on the graphing calculator. This led to a discussion of irrational and complex numbers. I was pleasantly surprised that he had a vague knowledge of just about everything I brought up.
"Lewis, how did you fail this course? You know so much about this! You're not an expert," I laughed, "but you know way more than I was led to believe."
Lewis looked at the floor, then up at me again. He looked angry. "You don't know what I know and what I don't know," he said. "And you just like everybody else. You don't care. Your job is to get the nigger eligible to play."
I put my hand on his. "But I do care, Lewis. My mother was a math teacher..."
"Wait. Yo' mama was the one that got killed wasn't it? Shit... I just now realized that." He looked genuinely sorry.
"Yes. She was always involved in her students' lives - not just in their academics. I want to be just like her!" I said, realizing that a tear was running down my face.
Lewis reached over and wiped my face. "I'm sorry, Miss Smith. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I won't do that no more."
I smiled and blew my nose. "It's ok. I just don't want you to ever think that I don't care. I do."
"I can't read good, Miss Smith."
"What?" I asked, incredulously.
"That's why I mess up the tests. I ain't bad in math. I can do arithmetic in my head, pretty good. But I can't read the words. Do that make sense?"
"Yes! Yes! It makes complete sense. I can help you with that, too," I said, thinking, 'how are you going to do that, Pamela??'
