Free How To Be A Perfect Girl by Mary Williams Page B

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words, “Oh well, we’re here.”
    “Hang on,” Val said, holding an arm out to
keep Porter in the car, “Here, I’ll make it easy. You said the
third mode was for girls you think are hot. Do you think I’m
hot?”
    Porter’s blush was the only answer she
received; it was also the only one she needed. Val grabbed her bag
from underneath the seat and sauntered to her next class.
    Chemistry was rather uneventful. Val
disturbed the lecture by walking in almost seven minutes late, but
other than that nothing happened. Jenny made a few jokes about
toxic soap, but Val did her best to ignore them; after all, it
wasn’t her fault that she had happened to be the butt of Mr.
Phillips’ joke.
    Keenan never took notes; he just sat there
and watched Mr. Phillips as he wrote. Val almost envied his
nonchalance; she wished she could just put her notebook aside as if
her grades didn’t matter. But she knew if she did that her grades
would slip, and she wanted—needed—a perfect transcript, which meant
no B’s, no slacking off, and copious notes.
    Val frowned and crossed out one of the
equations she had copied from the board; she had let her mind
wander and as a result her version of the equation didn’t make any
sense. Keenan watched her scribble out the erroneous note; “Having
trouble?” he joked, raising his eyebrows in mock concern.
    “I just—need to slow down, that’s all.”
    “Shh,” Jenny scowled at Val.
    Keenan turned back to face Mr. Phillips,
“Hey Mr. Phillips, could you go over example two again?” he
asked.
    “Sure,” the teacher paused, then went to
where the equations for the example had been written on the board.
“So, if you look at—“ Valentina used the time it took for him to
explain to catch up on her notes.
    The rest of the class was uneventful; Mr.
Phillips droned on about ‘significant figures’. Val tried her best
to keep up, even though she doubted she’d need to know anywhere
near as much about the subject as she wrote down. By the time class
was over, she’d filled five pages of her chemistry notebook; Keenan
smiled and showed her his notebook—as far as Val could tell he only
had one that he used for every class. In it, he’d written ‘Use the
same number of digits at the end of a calculation as you did at the
beginning’. Under the note he’d added, ‘How about dinner next
Wednesday?’
    “Wednesday doesn’t work for me,” Val said,
“I have soccer—hopefully.”
    “Oh,” Keenan shrugged, “Well what day works
for you?”
    Val thought a moment, “I’m pretty sure I’m
free Monday.”
    “Alright, Monday then. By the way, Alex told
me we’re ‘studying’ at your house tonight?”
    “Oh yeah,” Val had forgotten in the flurry
of the day’s events, “But we’ll actually be studying. So you know,
if you don’t wanna come, I’d understand.”
    Keenan laughed, “Babe, if you wanted me to
go watch opera I’d say yes. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing
tonight than studying with you.”
    It was the first time Val had been called
‘babe’; it was evoked a strange feeling within her. “Great! See you
tonight!”
    “See you,” Keenan waved; he took the stairs
down, where Val assumed he would meet his brother in the parking
lot. She went to the cafeteria for the fifth Student Gov meeting of
the week.

Chapter 8
    “Ugh, why does algebra have to be so hard?”
Val complained.
    Alex grinned, “It’s not. You’re just bad at
it.”
    “Thanks,” Val stuck her tongue out at
him.
    “Look, it really is simple. If you have a
variable that you want to single out, you just perform the
operations that allow you to get it to equal one,” Keenan said.
    “Oh my gosh, that actually made sense!” Val
looked at the first of their homework problems.
    Keenan took out a blank
sheet of paper, “Here,” he wrote down three
quarters x , “Now what do you need to do to
make it one x?”
    “Multiply it by four and divide by three.”
Val giggled, “That’s