Page 55 of Wild Card 13

For the first thirty seconds, I focused on the actual argument.

Then I found myself staring.

His points flowed naturally. His transitions made sense. His examples were thoughtful. When he stumbled over a sentence, he corrected himself and kept going.

No blank stare.

No desperate attempt to make something up.

Just prepared confidence.

I sat back slowly. Ty continued speaking. And for the first time, I realized he wasn't reading from the note cards anymore. He barely glanced at them. He already knew it. Because he'd practiced.

Ty didn't care about school. Not the way I did. Not the way most honor-roll kids did.

But somewhere over the last few months, something had shifted.

He cared about trying. He cared about showing up. He cared about not wasting the time I spent helping him.

The argument ended several minutes later. Silence settled over the room.

Ty watched me expectantly. "Well?"

I stared at him. Blinked once. Twice. Then lowered the grading rubric. "That was actually really good."

His entire face lit up. Not cocky. Genuinely happy. "You mean it?"

"Yeah," I murmured softly. "I mean it."

Something warm moved through his expression. A quiet pride.

For a second, all I could do was look at him. At the boy everyone else saw as a jock and nothing more. At the boy who made me laugh until my stomach hurt. At the boy who had spent two weeks practicing a debate speech because he wanted me to be proud of him.

"Wow." Ty leaned back in his chair, looking entirely too pleased with himself. "That's an A, isn't it?"

"Let's not get carried away. It's a solid B-plus."

His eyes narrowed suspiciously.

I smiled. "Fine. Maybe an A-minus."

"That's basically an A."

I laughed as he reached across the desk and stole my grading sheet before I could pull it away.

"Hey."

"You already admitted it."

I watched him fold the paper triumphantly and tuck it into his notebook like he'd just secured a major legal victory.

The ridiculous part? I was proud of him too.

The next hour disappeared faster than it should have.

We tweaked a few transitions. Practiced answering possible rebuttals. Got distracted twice. Once because Ty insisted one of his examples was "objectively funny." The second time because he spent ten straight minutes trying to convince me that a pop quiz qualified as cruel and unusual punishment.

By the time we finally packed up, the familiar after-school hum had settled over the building. The late afternoon sunlight had faded from gold to deep amber. Custodians were beginning to move through the hallways. Lockers slammed somewhere in the distance.