Two Plus Two Is Four; Praise The Lord! (Marnie)

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Brooke was in trouble. Brooooke was in trouble. Though really, when was she not?

Although not quite as much trouble as she probably thought she was but the zany girl had played around too much with grades in order to make her progress reports spell out random things and now she was paying for it right with graduation only a month away and finals just around the bend. Though honestly, Brooke could probably manage a low B in her math class just fine, but the girl was somewhat of a perfectionist when it came to her final grades. She knew she could do better than that! And the final was her last chance to bring it up a letter grade, if she was lucky and managed a perfect score in her absolute worst subject!

Bleeeeeehhhhhhh!!!

Numbers were duuuuumb!

Okay not dumb, Brooke got the basics of arithmetic alright, it was when they started combining the real stuff with the imaginary stuff and the irrational stuff and the letters which weren't really letters. Brooke could probably do it easy if she tried, it just wasn't interesting enough to her. Monotonous. At least history or English offered new material when you studied, it wasn't just repetitive stuff over and over again.

The girl who was supposed to be tutoring Brooke was younger than her, which was a slight jab to her pride, but it was all a-OK because she was at least something nice to look at. Aaand, if Brooke wasn't completely mistaken, she'd seen this chica at a dorm-party recently, though honestly it was one that Brooke hadn't stayed for very long at. She rolled her shoulders forward and slid her torso across the desk, holding her pencil between her upper lip and her nose and trying to trill them at the same time. The pencil threatened to slide out from one side. "This is booring, I wanna do something else," she complained as soon as the pencil hit the desk.

[Marnie Sullivan]

Marnie had never tutored before, but when she found out it was an option, she'd signed up right away to offer her services. These days even getting other students caught up on their homework was another opportunity to meet people, and that had been her primary goal as of late. Marnie had no idea what kind of teacher she was, but she was confident in her math abilities. Math was simple - opinions and interpretations didn't factor in the way they did when studying, say, literature or politics. In math, there was always an answer. You just needed to know how to find it.

Announcing herself with a knock on the classroom's open door, Marnie arrived with textbook and paper in hand.

"Sorry I'm late," she told the girl waiting for her. Marnie had been told she was working with a senior today, but this girl looked a bit young to be the right person... then again, Marnie had already made the same mistake with her dormmate. Better not judge quite yet. Instead she hurried over and took the seat next to the brunette, all the better to share material between them.

"So I'm Marnie," she offered brightly. This close up, the girl looked a little familiar, although she couldn't quite place her. "So what are we working on today? Is there something particular you're having trouble with?"

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Brooke did tutoring sometimes as well, but for anything outside of history and english, Brooke was pretty much useless. Maybe not completely useless, but she did find the technical subjects a lot more difficult than the wordy ones. She liked to read, and her favorites always required a lot of reading. Math was…something that should be simple but was somehow made more complicated just for the sake of being complicated. She could do it more or less, but her interest was vastly limited by her overall boredom with the subject.

The Marnie girl came in, yet that did very little to perk up the shifter’s drooping eyes. “’S’okay,” she mumbled, stretching across the desk a little more.

“Brooke,” she said lazily, limply holding her hand up as if to shake the other girl’s hand. Regardless if Marnie tried to take it or not, the hand would fall limply back down on the dest after a second or two.

Brooke considered her question. “Mmmm….what’re they called…? Identities? Trig’itries.” Trig identities. “Sumthin’ like that.” She trilled her lips and turned her head to rest on it’s side, facing Marnie’s direction. Brooke looked at her through heavy-lidded eyes. Hmm…she was pretty cute.

[Marnie Sullivan]

Marnie reached out to shake the girl's offered hand, her grip light. Her eyebrows furrowed in concern - was Brooke okay? She seemed kind of out of it, although for all Marnie knew this was how she always behaved. 

"Identities. Trig identities?" she asked, hoping for clarification. If she had it right, they were in luck - trigonometric identities had been the subject of Marnie's most recent math test, and she'd managed a high B grade on it. She flipped through the textbook between them to the chapter that introduced the subject, then opened her own notebook to a page of her own notes on the matter.

"How far have you gotten with this stuff in class?" Marnie asked, in an attempt to figure out where to begin. "Because if you want, we can just start with the basic identities, those aren't so bad." Hopefully Brooke wouldn't be offended by her assumption that they ought to start at square one. Generally when students sought out tutoring they were either overachievers looking to shore up their skills as much as possible, or they were totally hopeless. 

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Brooke’s handshake wasn’t usually so limp, but she wasn’t in a very good mood today. Normally, she gave an extra-firm, hand-breaking shake. But today…it was obviously as limp as some dude she did last week. Whaaat a disappointment!

“Mmmmhm….” Brooke barely had the will to hum out the rest of that affirmative “statement”. She just wanted to go back to the dorms, or go out downtown and stake out the clubs and looks for some guy(or gal) who’d be willing to buy her a drink or two for the night…but her want to actually not fail and graduate won over her need for her vices. Sighhh….

She trilled her lips in boredom.

“Uhh…..” she drawled out. Where were they in class right now? “Thaaat’s fiiiiiiine…” She wasn’t offended, because that was honestly one of her weakest subjects of the subject. Brooke sat up a little, all ready and good to actually listen to her maybe. But as she listened to…whatever she was talking about, Brooke decided to keep her eyes on the girl…Marnie? That was her name, right? “Whatcha got for me, bonita?” she asked, a small smile on her lips and a bat in her eyes. Subtlety, that’s how you did it. It’d be fun how long she could get away with it before Marnie became visibly uncomfortable.

[Marnie Sullivan]

Luckily for Brooke, there was a lot of mileage to be gotten out of her game; Marnie mistook the upperclassman's smile and petname as a sign that she was perking up for the lesson. It didn't help that Marnie didn't speak a lick of Spanish, either.

"Okay, great." Maneuvering the textbook between them for ease of reading, Marnie pointed out a table on the page listing the most basic identities to start. "So these aren't too bad, because you can kind of pair them off 'cause they're reciprocals. It's a little weird though because tangent and cotangent go together that way, but secant doesn't go with cosecant, it goes with cosine." In her notebook, Marnie scribbled a small illustration - a pair of circles labeled tan & cot, a triangle and square labeled csc & sin, and another square and triangle labeled sec & cos.

"This is how I remember it," she explained. "There's three types of pairs, but only the circles go together the way you'd expect." Okay, maybe that was getting a little too basic. Marnie soldiered on, hoping that her thought process made as much sense out loud as it did in her head. "So, um, those are the pairs. Anyway, being reciprocal means..."

((I don't actually know a damn thing about trig identities, so I'm just gonna fudge from here on.))

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Brooke probably didn’t need these explained so step-by-step and beginner-like, but, ah well, it was never a bad thing to go over the basics, that’s what she always said…or someone always said it. So she listened…for about ten seconds before she got completely bored and her already hyperactive mind decided to take a right turn at Albuquerque and end up somewhere in the Netherlands. “Ahh-haaa…” she breathed, her lips hanging open and starting to play on the eraser of her pencil.

Brooke twisted her gaping mouth into a gaping smile, tilting her head so that her shoulder-length hair fell over hear shoulder and brushed across the desk. Finally, she closed her mouth and grinned. “You’re reeeeaallly good at explaining this. That makes so much more sense than what the teach said.” Brooke giggled and fluttered her lashes casually. She leaned in closer. “So how do you do this one?” Brooke leaned in closer, pulling her textbook in between the two of them so that their elbows were crossing over one another and their faces were positioned much closer to each other, all the while pointing to one of the more difficult problems. “I think I tried it an’…it kind makes my head spin, ya know?” she said softly, turning her face up into Marnie’s. “Maybe you could show me?” Brooke just barely pouted out her lower lip to accentuate her plea.

Inside, however, Brooke was already thinking troolllololololololll!!!

[Marnie Sullivan]

As out of it as Brooke sounded, Marnie was pleased to hear that apparently what she had to say was getting through. Maybe this tutoring was turning out better than expected.

"O - okay, well, the thing about this problem - " she began, before she was thrown by the girl's sudden proximity. Marnie wasn't claustrophobic or anything of that nature, but having heightened sensitivity as a result of her power meant being hyper-aware of every inch of contact against her skin, even with layers of clothing between them.

But if Brooke needed to be that close up - to see the book, surely - well, it would be rude to insist otherwise, right?

"That is, the thing to look for here..."

Jesus, Brooke's eyes were blue.

Marnie stared for a split second before shaking her head slightly to snap back to reality. Where had that come from?

Brooke's eyes... Maybe her eyesight was the problem. Yeah, that made sense.

Clearing her throat, arm tingling where their elbows crossed, Marnie continued, trying to maintain a lightness in her voice. No need to make Brooke feel bad for having poor vision, after all.

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Brooke’s question about the problem was an honest one, yes. She had tried it and it took her about a million years to solve it(she did it eventually), but it was a convenient one to point out for the excuse of getting closer to the girl.

Because, certainly, Brooke wasn’t looking at the page anymore. She was looking at Marnie’s adorable widdle face, which was no more than 5 inches away from hers. She giggled when her tutor seemed to lose her train of thought.

Marnie seemed to recover quickly though, so Brooke threw her another curveball.

“That makes so much sense,” she said with a giggle in her voice. “You’re so smart, I bet there’s lotsa things you could teach me.” And a lot of things Brooke could teach her.

Brooke pulled back slightly and let her hand rest casually on Marnie’s wrist. “So whaddaya do when you’re not being all pretty and smart? Got a boyfriend?”

[Marnie Sullivan]

Marnie 's smile grew at the compliment, even as she felt her face grow hot. Decent marks on tests and notes scribbled on essays were one thing, but hearing her intelligence complimented to her face, well, that always got her spirits up.

"Well, if there was another subject you were having trouble with-" Marnie began, stopping short when she felt Brooke's hand alight upon her wrist. Pretty, her? Marnie felt her face prickle with color as she processed the compliment, but at the same time, there was no denying she enjoying hearing the girl say it.

"I don't, um..." A boyfriend? Marnie's mind immediately flitted to Lucas. But she had only known the boy for a couple of weeks - sure, they'd kissed, but it wasn't like they'd ever talked about what they were. After a moment's bitten-lip consideration, she turned back to Brooke and said, "Nope, no boyfriend, you?"

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Hee hee hee, Brooke could feel the smoking hawtness of the sweetie’s face, as close as she was to it. It was hard to not see the gradual change in color, as it went from a peach, to a faint pink, and then finally bloomed into a brilliant rose. “Mmhmm…I don’t really got too many things I can’t do…Math and anything related to that are my absolute worst,” she explained with a seesaw tilt in her head.

Brooke raised an eyebrow, interested in the pause Marnie gave before finally answering with a ‘no’. Heh heh…she didn’t have anyone, huh? But…it seemed like she at least had someone in mind. Kewwwt.

Brooke didn’t mind, though. She liked sharing.

“Perfect!” she exclaimed on “accident”. “Ah, I mean, nope! No boyfriend, not in the least.” Brooke beamed a giddy, giggling smile to the girl, leaning in closer…if that were even possible. “Are you…doing anything later?” she asked, fluttering her eyes exactly twice. Hey, if she could get this girl back to her room then there might be a score in it for her! Whee!

[Marnie Sullivan]

At last the clues clicked into place, and steam might as well have been pouring from Marnie's ears.

"Oh - oh! I'm not - " she stammered, stopping herself before she could blurt out, I'm not gay! It sounded so... blunt, almost confrontational in her head. But how on earth was she supposed to proceed here? She was still just trying to figure out how to deal with the affections of a single boy.

Realizing she'd been silent suspiciously long, Marnie hastily attempted to recover. "That is, no, I'm not doing anything later," she said, mentally kicking herself as she smiled broadly to hide her embarrassment. Of course that would be the first save she could think of.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad though? she told herself. Brooke was nice, and it's not like she was explicitly calling it a date. Maybe they could be friends. If straight boys and girls could be friends, surely they could be, too. And frankly, Marnie's social circle was a little sparse these days.

"What did you have in mind?"

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Oh….looks like she caught on. Well, that kind of took the fun out of things, but then again, it was it’s own kind of fun watching the girl fluster about as she tried to figure out how to respond to Brooke’s advances. Brooke smiled internally. Had she turned her down outright, Brooke would have gone out of her way to make Marnie feel guilty for it.

Brooke instead donned her hopeful puppy eyes, ones that seemed like they’d burst into teats if Marnie even thought about turning her down. Despite having not called it a date, Brooke was totally going to treat it as such. A date as put on by Brooke, what a rare and amazing thing for one to experience! There may even be some kissy kissies at the end of it, who knew??

Brooke grinned brightly, as if Marnie’s answer just made her day, her week, her year and practically bounced up in her seat. “Great!” she said a little too excitedly. She thought for a moment. “You ever been to karaoke? I know a great underage club that does that kind of thing.” And of course, Brooke planned on boozing herself(and Marnie) up beforehand, because what was karaoke without a little sauce? “We can even go shopping before hand, if you don’t have anything to wear.” Because no way was Brooke letting Marnie go out on the town dressed in that. However cute she may be. "Whaddaya think?"

[Marnie Sullivan]

Marnie had briefly considered waiting maybe half a day to cancel before Brooke turned her big blues on her. God... she was trapped, Marnie realized with a sinking feeling. No way out of it now.

"No, I haven't! I didn't even know there was a karaoke place around here," she answered, truthfully. She knew what it was though - didn't everybody? - and it frankly didn't make her feel any better. Marnie wasn't much of a singer, so what was she supposed to do in front of a crowd? But Brooke mentioned it was a club (an underage club, now those Marnie hadn't heard about), so maybe there'd be other stuff to do as well. "That sounds, uh, fun."

"I don't think we need to shop first, though," she continued quickly. "Unless you want to? Maybe?" Getting dressed up for a club wasn't the same as throwing on a sweater and jeans for classes. Marnie did have nicer clothing - like the black dress she'd worn to the party where she'd met Greg, maybe that would work? - but what if clubs called for something else? Ugh, she was definitely in over her head.

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Heh, this was fun! Brooke wondered if the girl would back out before the taking the plunge.

She wondered how far she could get with this one? Shopping definitely. Probably the club. Could she get her drunk? Could she get her in bed? Those were going to be the hard parts.

Though if not, then Brooke would have had a grand time trying anyway.

“Yeah! There’s all sortsa stuff around here, like stuff you’d never think of! You really gotta look for ‘em though!” It took Brooke forever to find the underage club, but only because she wasn’t looking for it for a long time. There were also a select few bars that didn’t do the good job on checking IDs, so Brooke frequented those as well. After that, though, there was always the house parties. There was always at least one of those going on somewhere. Brooke wondered if she couldn’t drag Marnie to one of those as well?

It’d be a night of adventurous fun!

“I dunno. It really depends what you already got in your closet. And if buying something new really bugs you, I can probly loan you something!” Though Brooke wasn’t sure if anything of hers would fit. Brooke was a skinny twig with breasts somewhere between the A and B size. Brooke looked over Marnie, trying to assess her size.