“I’ve been trying to get a hold of you all week!”
“Sorry. I was…busy.” He started walking back toward the frat house, realizing for the first time how cold it was-and he was still damp.
“I got a call from your professor.”
Henry froze on the frat house steps, his breath gone. “You did?”
“You’re one lucky young man.”
“What?” The word barely made it out of his mouth.
“Not many students get to be personally tutored by their professors.” His mother sounded smug.
Henry sank to the steps, sitting. “What are you talking about?”
“Toni’s agreed to tutor you.” He could hear the satisfaction in her voice. She got that tone whenever she felt she’d solved a big problem.
“Toni…who in the hell is Toni?” He was drunk, but he had a feeling this conversation should still be making more sense than it was.
“You didn’t recognize her?”
He rubbed his eyes. “Recognize who?”
“Toni Franklin. Don’t you remember?” His mother laughed. “She and her husband have lived around the block for years. They used to come over and play cards.”
“No…” He frowned, blinking up at the stars. Toni Franklin? Why did the name sound so familiar?
“Well, you were pretty little…” His mother conceded. “Anyway, she thinks she can help you bring up your grade.”
Then it dawned on him. Toni Franklin. The name stenciled on her office door-Antoinette Franklin. Professor Franklin.
Just what were the odds on that? Henry gulped. “What did she say?”
“Just that you were having trouble and she was willing to tutor you.”
“Mom, I don’t need a tutor.” I need a fairy fucking godmother.
“Well you’ve got one, young man.” He hated when she used that tone. It meant she’d solved it all and there was nothing more to be said about it. “I made an appointment for you with her tomorrow at two. You don’t have a class then, do you?”
“No.” He had hockey practice at noon, but all morning classes. What the hell was he going to do now?
“You’re supposed to meet in her office. Do you know where it is?”
“Yeah.” The door opened behind him and he glanced up to see Elaine coming out. For a minute, he thought she might be crying. “Hey, listen, I’ve gotta go.”
“Henry, you’d better show up,” his mother warned. “I mean it.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, I will.” He hung up on her, getting up as Elaine rushed down the stairs, headed the way Libby had gone. He called after her, but she ignored him, practically running down the block. Henry sat back down on the steps, his head in his hands.
There was only one thing he was sure of now.
Life couldn’t get any more complicated than this.
But he was wrong.
Chapter Five
Henry knocked, barely getting out the words, “Professor Franklin?”
“Come in!”
It was like deja-vu, a replay of the events of last week. He didn’t think he would ever be able to face her again, let alone be standing across from the woman actually asking for help.
“Hi Henry.” Professor Franklin stood, coming out from behind her desk to shut the door behind him, gesturing toward a seat. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Not likely, he thought, sitting stiffly in the chair. His hair was still wet from the showers-hockey practice had gone long, and although the coach had warned him he’d be off the team if it happened again, he’d managed to smooth over his absence the week before.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot.” Professor Franklin didn’t sit in the chair behind her desk this time. Instead, she came to lean against it, half-standing, half-sitting on the surface, right next to him. “Can we start over again?”
“Sure.” Henry focused his attention out the window. It was cold and windy, dead leaves chasing each other out on the lawn. “I guess so.”
“I’d like to do an assessment with you.”
He frowned, glancing up at her. “You want me to take a test?”
“No, not a test,” she assured him, her eyes softening. She really was a very pretty woman, although Henry couldn’t remember, for the life of him, anything about her coming over to their house like his mother indicated she had. “It’s just an assessment. It will give us an idea where you are and what you need to work on.”
“I can’t read.” He’d never said those words out loud to anyone, ever, and he didn’t even know how he’d managed to say them now. They made his breath turn shallow, his stomach flip. But there was something about the way she looked at him-understanding in her eyes, but strangely, no pity.
“That’s the first step.” Her smile made her eyes crinkle at the corners. “Admitting you have a problem.”
He shook his head and gazed back out the window. “You can say that again.”
“How did you make it this far, Henry?” She sounded both incredulous and sad.
“The truth?” He watched a black squirrel scurry across the quad and up the nearest maple.
“The truth,” she insisted. “It’s safe with me.”
He met her eyes, leaning back in his chair. Why not spill it? What did he have to lose? “Sometimes I cheated. Sometimes I lied. Sometimes I paid people to write papers or essays for me. But mostly, I just played hockey.”
“Hockey?”
He continued, “I went to a private school and they guaranteed me a varsity spot before I even tried out for the team. It was all about hockey. They even cut the budget for the football team my senior year so the hockey team could go to the International tournament. We were state champions three out of my four years. College and NHL scouts were around year long. They kept a count at the local Best Western. And I had my pick of colleges.” He said it all matter-of-factly, without any hint of arrogance.
“Hence the scholarship.”
“Yeah.” He shrugged, as if it meant nothing, but it meant everything to him. Everything.
Her lips were pressed together in a line, an expression Henry had come to recognize as annoyance or anger. “So your coach and your teachers had an arrangement?”
“Something like that.” He looked back out the window. The squirrel was down on the ground again, digging. “I never really asked. They just…passed me.”
“And your parents have no idea?”
He glanced up, panicked. “You can’t tell them.”
“I should.” She pulled herself up onto the desk fully and crossed her legs. She was wearing a skirt of course, a white one with brown spots, and Henry couldn’t help but admire her legs, even in his sudden state of panic. “I called your mother with every intention…”
“Please!” Henry reached out, grabbing her wrist, the touch startling them both. He took his hand away, trying to breathe. “You can’t. You just can’t.”
“My father was illiterate,” she explained, one of her feet swinging. She always wore heels and today was no exception-soft brown pumps-and one of them hung precariously from the end of her toes. “He spent his whole life unable to read. It’s no way to live.”
Henry stiffened. “Don’t feel sorry for me.” Now he understood how she had known, why her thoughts had immediately jumped to the conclusion she had when he sat there, frozen, staring dumbly at the paper she had given him, unable to read it out loud.
“I don’t,” she assured him. “My father was born in an era that didn’t even have names for learning disabilities, let alone ways to test for them. You don’t have that luxury.”
“I…I guess not.” He blinked at her, trying to remember a time, way back in elementary school, when he’d first started having trouble. He’d been so embarrassed by his affliction that he’d convinced his older sister to read to him from his school books over and over, thus memorizing the text, and when he was “tested,” he passed with flying colors. That was just the beginning of his ruse.
“I’m angry that someone didn’t notice before this.” Her eyes narrowed at the thought. “That you were able to slip through the cracks simply because you were good at some stupid sport.”