Tutor Me Read Free Page B

hide her light under a bushel. She was a History professor at Arizona State University, as was my father. She’d been my dad’s grad student and twenty years his junior. Ian had left his first wife for Freya, and the divorce had been bitter. However, my mother was highly competitive and my father enough of an egotist that they’d weathered the fall-out. When they’d met, my father had been a hot shot, with several important books on the French Revolution under his belt. Now twenty years on my mother was the academic star, while my dad’s career had slowed down. For the Fall my mother was in the Bay Area on a research fellowship at Berkeley. I wasn’t too devastated by this as we weren’t that close. My dad was here nominally keeping an eye on me but the reality was that he was out at talks and work dinners several nights a week, or working late at his office on his latest book, so I was pretty much on my own. When we did have a conversation he usually talked at me about some obscure bit of knowledge or idea that had caught his fancy. I knew he loved me in his own way but any discussion of my personal life, if I’d bothered to bring it up with him, would have bored him to tears.
    I did have a half-brother, Ben, from my dad’s first marriage, but he was ten years older than me and we had not spent a lot of time together. He was now on Wall Street, perhaps in an act of rebellion against my ultra-liberal parents. Freya had always been territorial of Ian and had driven a wedge between him and Ben for years. Of late Ben and Ian had managed to grow closer even so, and Ben and I had an amicable, even affectionate relationship. One thing Ben and I both liked was music. That doesn’t sound like much of a bond, but it was ours, and when I say we liked music, well, we really loved it. The way Ben and I communicated was via Spotify: he would share his playlists with me, and even build playlists he thought I’d like, and I’d do the same for him. I knew he was jealous of my having grown up with our dad, but I felt he’d gotten the best years with him, when Ian was younger and more energetic.
    But my main emotional support these days boiled down to my friend Tina, and it was proving to be tough to adjust to life without her. Her parents were also professors and we’d grown up together. Now that her family had moved to San Diego, we facetimed almost every night and that helped but I still missed her.
    In conversations with my mother, an underlying theme of her own greatness prevailed. The dialogue I was currently having with her was a case in point. “The Q and A session after my lecture was challenging, with some hostile questions from arrogant grad students” (my mother had long forgotten that she herself had been one such arrogant grad student) “but I nailed each response.”
    “Good for you!” I was pleased for her as, after all, she was my mother.
    “Darling I must go- but you: all is well with you, I take it?”
    “Yup. All good. Nothing new.”
    “Darling did you get my birthday voicemail? Sorry I couldn’t reach you but that was my one moment to call in the middle of a busy day.”
    “I did get it, thank you Mom.” I’d turned 18 two weeks before. I’d celebrated in San Diego with Tina and so the minimal acknowledgement of the day by my mother hadn’t been a big deal.
    “Ok darling, ciao. Kisses to you.”
    By the time I was off the phone it was after 5 o’clock and the house was empty, as expected. My dad was at a lecture. I made a stir fry and steamed some rice, leaving my dad’s portion on the stove. I worked on my Physics homework while I ate it, and then took a break to talk to Tina.
    “Hey Ti-Ti, how’s locker boy?” Tina had a crush on the boy whose locker was next to hers.
    “Terrific! Today I dropped my pen and he swooped down and picked it up. Which was already a cute gesture. But then he didn’t hand it back to me right away, he held it and read the business name on it, and it was from