Page 74 of Challenge Me

“I’m not with him for his money, you little shit. Yeah, yeah. Start making a tab. I have a terrible mouth.”

She went silent again, and I continued to look at the blank expression on her face. Swiping the pen from her, I set the worksheet on the coffee table and flipped it to the other side, then I took a minute to write down all of the problems.

“Here, let’s look at this another way. You like words, right?” Going by her silence, I figured that was a nuanced answer. “Tell me the order of operations.”

She shrugged.

“Don’t be lazy.”

Her nostrils flared, but her expression remained mostly blank. Dragging the coffee table over to the couch, I angled the paper so she could see it, even in her self-imposed time-out.

“Your dad’s too soft on you. How about I confine you to this couch until you’re finished?” I didn’t expect a response, and I didn’t get one. “PEMDAS. Tell me what it stands for and I’ll give this back.” Reaching into my hoodie pocket, I pulled out one of the cars she’d brought with her.

She tried to grab it immediately, but I closed my hand and tutted at her.

“You take this one everywhere. It must be your favorite, huh?” I opened two fingers to reveal half of it. It was a red Mustang, but I didn’t know a damn thing about it. I glanced at the balcony. “Do you think it’ll survive eleven stories?”

For the first time, I saw actual anger on her face. With a smirk, I set the car on the coffee table and kept a careful eye on her movements so she couldn’t steal it. She must’ve had enough sense to know I wasn’t playing around because she didn’t try.

“Parentheses,” she muttered. “Exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.”

“Ah, so you do know it. But you’re not following it.”

“Math is stupid.”

“Yeah, but if we didn’t have math, all of our houses would turn into the Tower of Babel after a year. Don’t get me started on what the IRS will do if I get all my calculations wrong. Once I lose my bar, I’ll be living on the street, my hair will start falling out, and I’ll definitely start talking to myself more than I already do. Ergo, math sucks, but it’s necessary.”

I wrote out the six words beside the first problem, numbering each of them in order. Next, I used the highlighters I’d gotten from my backpack to make each one a different color. I followed suit with the symbols in the equation, then snapped my fingers to get her attention.

“Tell me what I need to do first.”

Finally, she sat up, and her gaze moved across the page. “Parentheses.”

“Where?”

She put her finger on the spot. Moving the pen away from the equation itself, I wrote down what was inside the parentheses, then highlighted all the relevant symbols.

“From the beginning. What’s first?”

“Exponent.”

“Are there any?”

She shook her head. “Multiply. Blue.”

It was impossible not to smile as I wrote out the two numbers.

“Twenty-four,” she said before I could ask.

I rewrote the equation with the part that we’d solved and had her start the order over. It took a while, but eventually, we got to the last part.

“Three.”

I looked at the problem and frowned. “No. Nine minus three is . . .”

Immediately, she began to shut down. I quickly grabbed the pen and put a line beneath every nine. Next to the order of operations, I added the corresponding symbols so she could associate them. After a second, I changed the dots in the division sign to hearts, giving them a more noticeable shape. On the multiplication symbol, I added a horizontal and vertical line so it became a star.

“You get them mixed up,” I noted. “It’s easy to do. That was my bad for not using the color.”