Two

Chris Mathis had little to no experience with crying girls. He had, of course, had the occasional girlfriend cry when he'd broken up with them, and there were the old, fat crying ladies at the movies he took said girlfriends to before he broke up with them. However, since he was not breaking up with her, and since Lena Harrison was by no stretch of the imagination fat (nor was she old), her crying sort of threw him for a loop.

But Chris was no idiot. He knew that crying girl=distraught girl and distraught girl+cute=opportunity for him to offer his oh-so-sympathetic shoulder to cry on. And sympathy+girl+distress=good things for Chris.

In addition to being no idiot, Chris was also very, very good at math. Not for nothing was he taking Calculus.



So, being very good at math, and no longer terrified into shocked silence by the tears--Lena Harrison seemed like a reasonable sort, and was certainly no longer crying, not after a whole night--Chris had decided to talk to her.

But then she wasn't in school.

Given his consideration of Lena as a remarkably reasonable girl, Chris had to assume that she wasn't missing because of the whole crying thing. Or, even if she was, seeming concerned=getting an in with the distraught girl, and an in=progress and progress=being closer to good things for Chris.

So he decided to talk to that Chloe girl that Lena was always hanging out around. She was cute, too. That was the thing about attractive girls: they always traveled in packs, so if you wanted to talk to one, you had to be ballsy enough to brave it in front of all her friends or clever enough to enact some tricky maneuver that got her alone.

Chris was good at math, but he was also plain ballsy. Not that either of those things mattered, because Lena wasn't in today, so Chloe was looking pretty all by her lonesome. He walked over to her.

Just because he noticed pretty girls and wanted pretty girls and liked talking to pretty girls didn't mean Chris was a player. He didn't sidle over with a sidelong glance and a "come here often?" pickup line. He was a friendly kid. He was being friendly. And if girls happened to respond to that, so much the better.

"Hey," he said, sitting next to her as if nothing was out of the ordinary--as if he sat here every day, which he didn't, because Lena did.

Chloe looked adorable, with her face all screwed up over some problem on last night's homework--she chewed on the end of her pencil in intense concentration. "Hey," she mumbled around the pink eraser.

She scrawled an incorrect answer for number seventeen. "Do you know where Lena is?" he asked, wondering if she'd be offended if he fixed her work. Who knew, maybe she was the kind of girl who liked that sort of thing? Not that he wanted her to like him, like him--he just wanted her to like him enough to tell him everything he'd ever need to know to win over Lena Harrison.

Trying to scrub out the answer with her chewed eraser only left a spitty, messy streak on her paper. Chloe shrugged slender shoulders. "I guess she's sick, or something." Her tone implied "or something" was more likely--but an uninteresting "or something." Did Lena Harrison make a habit of playing hooky?

As Chris thought this over, Chloe looked up at him for the first time, with some interest in her eyes. "Chris Mathis," her eyes seemed to say. "He does pretty well in math, doesn't he?" What her mouth said, with a demure smile with a bitten bottom lip, was, "Hey, you don't know how to do this by any chance, do you?"

If nothing else, Chris always knew how do to the math.