Anna let go of her pencil halfway through the second digit. "I give up," she said, defeated. "I just can't with this
shit
."
It wasn't for a lack of effort. She'd tried, she really had. She'd given it her all. It wasn't her fault that her all wasn't really all that much.
It sure as hell
felt
like her fault though. How could it not, when even with super duper math whiz Lauren guiding her hand, basic addition and subtraction was too much for her? When she was entirely dependent on her friend for a thing as basic as managing her monthly budget?
Lauren squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. "Do you want to take a break?"
Anna wanted to say that no, she didn't. That she wanted to beat her head against the wall until her dyscalculia relented and revealed to her the secrets of first grade arithmetic. That she wanted to keep at it until she magically transformed into a functioning adult who didn't need help to figure out what allowance plus salary plus tips minus expenses was.
She said none of that, of course. All she could muster was a dejected, "Okay."
"Come on," Lauren said.
Anna followed Lauren into the living room, and all but collapsed onto the couch. "Maybe I should just give up," she sighed.
Lauren said nothing; instead, she turned Anna so she was sitting sideways on the couch, and sat right behind her. She brought her hands to Anna's shoulders, and began massaging them.
Anna grunted in satisfaction. Fighting against her own mathematical ineptitude was stressful and draining in equal measure, and always left her in a state where she needed exactly what Lauren was doing. She closed her eyes and yawned; she was so lucky to have Lauren as a friend.
Lauren's fingers dug into Anna's tired flesh. "It's alright," she said. "I'll do it for you, and you can try again next time."
Anna felt her cheeks redden in shame. That's how it always ended, with Lauren doing it for her; she'd never managed it herself, not once. "Sorry," she muttered.
"Aww, baby," Lauren said in a sympathetic tone. "It's not your fault that you're stupid."
'Stupid'. That word rang in Anna's head like a tiny alarm bell. She wasn't stupid - she had dyscalculia. There was a difference. And besides, she was trying!
Lauren knew that, of course. She was the number one supporter of Anna's efforts - surely she hadn't intended to insult her.
Anna's sleepy brain settled on the conclusion that her friend must have misspoken. She'd chosen her words poorly, that was all. Still though, she felt she shouldn't let that comment go unchallenged.
"Mmnot stupid," she protested.
"Really?" Lauren asked, a certain smugness coloring her voice. Her thumbs dug into a particularly nasty knot in Anna's shoulders, eliciting a groan. "Because we both know that intelligence is inversely proportional to breast size..."
It was a statement so staggering in its absurdity, that Anna would have been lost for words even if Lauren hadn't massaged her into total relaxation. Half-asleep as she was, Anna could scarcely even begin to decipher it.
Yes, her chest was large, almost excessively so. Yes, she was terrible with numbers, and yes, if intelligence was defined exclusively as mathematical ability, that did make her stupid. And those two things were connected because...
It was those two words: 'inversely proportional'. Those terrible,
frustrating
math words that bounced in her head like rubber balls, refusing to be understood.
"See?" Lauren said, sounding very, very close; Anna could feel her friend's breath hot on her ear. "You can't even understand what I'm saying, and it's all because of
