First Crush

There are some people who are just impossible to shake. Amber checked her schedule and felt herself shrink when she saw his name in the 12:30 time slot. Steven. He had signed up Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday for tutoring. 

Despite the nearly two weeks he’d spent with Amber in the computer lab, Steven had made meager progress. She had told a classmate about him, and this classmate called him a creep, a weirdo, gross. He’d originally shown up to get help with his English paper, though this classmate speculated that he was there exclusively to pick up girls. At the start, he’d been quiet, agreeable, willing to try unlike many other students who’d been pressured or incentivized to receive tutoring by their teachers. But as the tutoring continued, he’d become what Amber called “distracted” and even “deceitful.” Upon seeing his name on the sheet, she felt a sort of nervous dread.

Amber logged into one of the school computers and waited for Steven to show up. The computer lab was empty except for one other pair of students who were huddled close to the computer monitor like cavemen around a fire, their faces basking in the blue glow.

Steven, dressed in all black and purple, showed up a few minutes early but he stated anyway: “sorry, I got done with lunch late.” He slung his backpack to the ground and promptly sat in a chair next to Amber, scooting close to her so that he could get a good view. Amber cringed inwardly, feeling herself scrunch together like an accordion. Her face grew warm. He flipped his brown hair out of his eyes, attentive.

Amber didn’t know many other boys like Steven; at least she’d never talked to other boys like him. He wore band t-shirts, and Amber was unfamiliar with all of them. Sometimes his fingernails were painted and his shoelaces were colored with Sharpies. Despite his appearance which might have suggested he was an unruly punk, he was actually rather mild-mannered. His fatal flaw was not the neon green on his fingernails or the marker streaks on his shoes but his poor ability to read and write.

“Hi, Steven,” Amber greeted him mechanically, tapping her pencil on her chin like a pendulum.

“Hello, Amber,” he smiled warmly. “Hey, I like your bracelets,” he said, gesturing to them. “Those are sweet.” 

“Oh, thanks,” she said bashfully, twirling her wrist. She opened his essay on the computer. “Okay, do you remember where we were?” she asked.

He chewed his lip as he watched her scroll. “There!” He pointed at a paragraph in the middle with more zeal than was probably necessary.

“Oh, right.” Amber began to reread the paragraph. After she finished, she turned to Steven to offer him her feedback. It was clear he was not very interested. When she looked at him, he was suddenly shocked to life, blinking and chewing on his lip again, as if he’d been in some sort of trance.

“See here, Steven?” she said, highlighting a sentence.

“Mhm.”

“You can just take this out. It doesn’t really fit in with the rest of what you’re saying.”

“Mhm.”

“Can I delete it?” she asked with her index finger resting on the backspace key.

“Yeah, sure.” Steven leaned back in the chair with concession, his hands clasped on top of his head. 

Not only was Steven consistently punctual, but he also began appearing at their 12:30 pm meetings with his lunch tray. He would push the keyboard at the neighboring station aside, sit his tray down on the desk in its place, and open his milk carton and ketchup packets. Steven even asked Amber to join him for lunch in the computer lab once to which she’d agreed simply to humor him. Often, he would inexplicably spill something on his shirt or jeans: mustard, milk, applesauce, etc. His messy eating habits were not quite as offensive as his apparent laziness, however.

It seemed like every time Steven showed up for tutoring, parts of his essay had disappeared or been significantly altered so that they were no longer coherent. That, or whole sections were left uncompleted although he and Amber would talk explicitly about his goals at the end of each meeting. If Amber confronted him about his lack of effort, he was avoidant, or he’d outright deny knowing anything about the rearranged sentences, the plethora of misspellings, and the jumbled paragraphs.

Once, he’d pulled out a half-finished ‘Sudoko’ puzzle while Amber was making little edits to his title page. “I’m not here to do this for you, you know,” she’d reminded him. 

Despite his reluctance to participate in the tutoring at times, he grew increasingly concerned about finishing the essay. He was worried about summer school and what his mom would say if she found out he failed. He’d told Amber as much and she’d assured him that they were making headway.

When Amber reported about their meetings to Steven’s teacher, she’d concluded quite frankly that he must be lonely (not a creep or lazy as Amber’s classmate had said), and so that was why he was showing up to tutoring with his lunch and his Sudoku puzzles. His teacher thought that it was admirable that Amber would be so nice as to continue to “tutor” him regardless of the lack of real progress Steven made. 

As their days together stretched into weeks, Amber continued to find little mistakes that needed corrected and instances where entire sentences had vanished. Steven said he couldn’t remember how the changes had happened; he’d claimed to have spent time working on his essay (ask the librarian!), and he swore that the errors Amber was pointing out hadn’t been there before. Amber would chastise him lightly, sigh, and roll her eyes. The classmate who she’d confided in previously told her not to try too hard; he’s just a dumb boy who couldn’t care less about his schoolwork.

Amber twisted her hair, a little bit vain, while she continued to scroll through his essay. “Steven, why haven’t you been working on this yourself?” Steven shrugged. Eventually, she settled on an arbitrary error. “I think you meant to say ‘can’ not ‘could’ here.” Amber highlighted a word with her cursor. Steven was silent. “Do you think so?”

He leaned forward in his chair and looked open-mouthed at the screen. He rubbed his chin. “Does it matter which one?” he asked. It was true; in this context, the words were interchangeable.

“It does actually,” Amber fired back.

“Hm.” Steven glowered at the essay. “Hey! There’s something missing here.” He underlined a sentence with his finger.

“What do you mean?”

Steven was irritated. “There was another word here. I remember, I remember typing it.” His eyes searched the essay fervently for the missing sentence.

“It looks the same as last time to me. It all looks the same as it was the last time we met.” Amber continued to twist her hair. Steven squinted at the screen, almost hard enough to see through to the otherside. He threw himself back in his chair once more in defeat. He crossed his arms.

“It’s okay,” Amber soothed. “We’ll get through it together.”  

__

Amber was flitting through Steven’s essay, waiting for him to appear for their scheduled meeting. She spent most of the block alone, because he didn’t show up until only a few minutes before the end of Amber’s shift. He was distraught. “Mrs. Johnson is going to fail me because I haven’t turned my paper in yet,” he explained. “I tried to tell her that we’ve been spending a lot of time on it but she won’t listen.” Agitated, Steven shifted his weight back and forth, back and forth. He held tight onto his backpack straps as if it were a parachute that wouldn’t deploy. Then, he posed a solution: “Maybe you can talk to her and tell her too that we’ve been working hard on it? I really don’t want to have to do summer school.” His face was pleading.

“Sure, Steven, I’ll do that for you,” Amber agreed in a calm voice, very opposite from the anxiety Steven was experiencing. 

“Aren’t we almost done?” Steven stopped to ask before leaving the room.

“It depends,” she said. “I’m still reviewing it.” He looked at the ground, dejected. He walked over to the wall where the tutoring sign-up sheets were posted and wrote his name in the boxes next to Amber’s shifts. With a sad sigh, he headed toward the door.

“Hey,” Amber called after him. He turned around. “Maybe we can have lunch here together next time?” Her cheeks were rosy, radiant.

His expression didn’t change. His skin had a certain greyness about it, as if this essay had sucked all of the joy from him. “Okay,” he agreed after a brief consideration. Amber smiled warmly. Steven stalked out of the computer lab.

After he left, Amber turned back to the computer where Steven’s essay was pulled up. She highlighted a paragraph and deleted it. Next, she inserted the cursor into a sentence on the following page and deleted it too. Finally, she added a string of irrelevant sentences to the conclusion. Satisfied, she saved the document and closed out of the word processing program.