Chapter 8: Tutorial: Parabolas
Ring.
The bell cut through Mr. Kowalski's final sentence, and the classroom dissolved into the organized chaos of thirty teenagers simultaneously deciding they needed to be somewhere else.
Owen was sliding his textbook into his bag when he heard it.
"Hey. Owen, right?"
He turned.
The girl from the corner of the classroom — blonde ponytail, the one who'd been watching him during the problem — was standing two desks away, backpack over one shoulder, cheeks carrying a color that might have been from the walk over or might have been something else entirely.
"Yeah," Owen said. "That's me."
"Karen." She extended her hand with the easy confidence of someone who'd never once doubted she'd get a handshake back. "Karen Jackson. Your math is genuinely incredible. Like — where did that come from?"
"Just a lot of practice."
"Okay, so here's the thing." She tilted her head slightly. "I am drowning in this class. Kowalski moves so fast and I fall behind and then I'm too embarrassed to ask questions and then I'm more behind. It's a whole spiral." She paused. "Would you be willing to tutor me?"
Owen looked at her. There was something familiar about her — the face, the particular quality of the smile, something he couldn't immediately locate. He'd spent the last two years in something close to academic tunnel vision, and his social calibration had been running on low power.
"Sure," he said. "I can do that."
Her smile widened. "This afternoon? Come to my place after school?" She reached over, slid his calculus textbook smoothly out of his hands, flipped to the inside back cover, and wrote her address and number in clean, confident handwriting. "You'll come?"
"I'll be there."
She handed the book back, held eye contact for exactly one beat longer than necessary, and walked out.
Owen stood there for a second.
Spring, he thought, has officially arrived.
After school.
The Jackson house was a tidy two-story brick colonial on a tree-lined street — the kind of house that had a welcome mat and a storm door and suggested its occupants took home ownership seriously.
Owen knocked.
The door opened to a chain-width crack. A middle-aged woman with reading glasses pushed up on her forehead studied him through the gap with the methodical thoroughness of someone reviewing a job application.
"I'm Owen Carter," he said. "Karen's classmate. She asked me to come help her study."
The chain slid. The door opened.
"Come in," said the woman — Karen's mother, Owen gathered — with a warm but particular smile. "But before you do — could you slip your shoes into one of those?" She gestured to a neat stack of individual plastic bags by the door.
Owen looked at the bags. Looked at her. "...Sure."
He bagged his shoes. The woman — "Sheila," she said, as if they were completing a transaction — let him in and called up the stairs: "Karen, your study friend is here."
"Coming!"
Footsteps descended. Karen appeared in an orange hoodie, saw Owen holding the plastic bag with his shoes, and gave him an apologetic wince. She leaned close enough that he could hear her murmur: "She has a contamination thing. Mysophobia. Everyone gets the bag."
"Totally fine," Owen said, meaning it. He had spent two years corresponding monthly with a man who wore latex gloves to shake hands with his own grandmother and had once quarantined a library book for forty-eight hours before touching it. Sheila Jackson's shoe policy didn't register as unusual by comparison.
Karen led him to the dining table — round, just outside the kitchen, where Sheila had settled on a stool with the TV on low and a pot of something simmering on the stove.
They sat. Karen dropped her textbook on the table and looked at him with an expression of genuine academic distress.
"Okay," Owen said, pulling the book toward him. "Where are you losing the thread?"
"Everywhere."
"Pick a starting point."
"I don't have one. It all looks like a foreign language."
Owen flipped to the chapter they'd been covering in class. "Parabolas. Let's start there — it's the foundation for the next three units, so if we get this solid everything else gets easier." He uncapped a pen and pulled a scratch pad from his bag. "The standard form equation looks like this—"
He wrote it out. Drew the axis. Started sketching the curve.
Then he noticed Karen had gone quiet.
He glanced over.
She was watching him write with the expression of someone watching something they found genuinely, distractingly compelling. Her chin was in her hand. Her textbook was untouched.
"You following?" he asked.
"Mm-hm," she said, in the tone of someone who was not following at all.
Owen looked back at the paper. "So the vertex is here, and the direction of the opening is determined by the sign of the leading coefficient — if it's positive, it opens up, if it's negative—"
The chair beside him was empty.
Owen stopped.
He looked at where Karen had been sitting.
He looked under the table.
Karen was under the table. Kneeling on the floor. Looking up at him through the gap in the tablecloth with an expression of total composure, like this was a completely normal place to be.
"What," Owen said, "are you doing."
"Math makes me so interested," she said pleasantly.
And then she disappeared back under the tablecloth.
In the kitchen, Sheila stirred her pot and watched her show.
Owen sat very still for approximately four seconds.
And then it hit him.
Not gradually — all at once, the way a key turns in a lock. The face. The smile. The specific quality of the chaos. The mother in the kitchen. The plastic bags for the shoes.
Karen Jackson.
Shameless.
He'd watched maybe a season and a half of Shameless — enough to get the landscape, enough to clock the characters. He'd always been more of a Big Bang Theory guy, comfort-watch sitcoms with laugh tracks and academic humor. Shameless was a different genus entirely — South Side Chicago, the Gallagher family, absolute moral anarchy played completely straight. He'd watched it with the slightly guilty fascination of someone rubbernecking at a freeway incident.
Karen Jackson. Supporting character. Sweet face. Extremely complicated interior life. A reputation at school that the show treated as both a punchline and, quietly, something sadder.
She emerged from under the table and sat back in her chair like nothing had happened, smoothing her ponytail.
Owen looked at her.
Shameless was set in Chicago. He was in Chicago. The System had told him this universe was an integration of the Big Bang Theory timeline and dozens of other American series and films. He'd filed that away as a theoretical thing — abstract, future-relevant.
He had not expected to be sitting at Karen Jackson's dining room table with his shoes in a plastic bag while her mother made soup twelve feet away.
The System chimed quietly in the back of his mind, the way it did when it had something to say:
"Owner. Several Destiny Protagonists from secondary integrated universes are present in Chicago. Interaction may yield Existence Point opportunities outside the primary BBT track."
Owen absorbed that.
Then he looked at Karen, who was watching him with bright, patient eyes and the completely unfair combination of genuine sweetness and absolute unpredictability that had apparently followed her out of the television and into real life.
He picked up his pen.
"Okay," he said. "Back to parabolas."
Karen leaned her chin on her hand and smiled. "I'm listening."
In the kitchen, Sheila changed the channel.
Outside, Chicago did what Chicago did in autumn — went gray and gold and cold, all at once, without apology.
High school, Owen thought, is going to be something.
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