Ava's Wishes by Karen Pokras

Plus, you don’t want any little Ava’s running around, do you? You know what they say ... no glove, no love. ”
    “Good-bye, Carly!” she shouted as she left the art studio shaking her head. Yup. Thirteen-year-old boy.
     
     
    Chapter 13
     
     “I know, I’m late, I’m sorry!” Ava ran into the room, holding her Statistics book, completely out of breath.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Max answered.
    Damn he looks good, Ava thought to herself. Stop it, Ava. You’re here to study.
    “Besides, I figured that the probability of you getting here on time was about 45%.” Max looked at Ava and smiled. “That’s a little statistics humor. Get it?” He cleared his throat. “Okay then. Why don’t we get started?”
    Ava took off her coat and spread out her books. Normally she sat next to Suzanne so she could point things out in her books and watch her go through her problems, but Ava decided it would be best if she sat across from Max, even with their agreement to keep it all business.
    “So, what are we going to work on?” Ava asked.
    “Well, I need to see what you know and what you don’t know, so I prepared a test for you to take.” Max pulled a sheet of paper out of his notebook and handed it to Ava.
    “You’re joking, right?” Ava asked.
    “Um, no. I’m actually serious. How else will I know where to start?”
    “Let’s just assume I know nothing about this stuff and start from the beginning,” Ava remarked, pushing the paper over to Max.
    “That sounds fun, but we only have a few days. Just humor me, will you?” Max pushed the paper back to Ava.
    “Oh fine.” Ava looked down at the paper, trying to concentrate over the sound of a buzz coming from her phone. She ignored it and began working while Max worked on his own problems. Ten minutes later she was only on the second problem … struggling.
    Max declared time and took the paper away from Ava. Looking at her work, he scrunched up his forehead and rubbed his temples.
    “Told you,” she remarked.
    He sighed. “So three semesters of Basic Statistics and nothing clicked?”
    Ava shook her head and shrugged.
    “Okay, well here are some very basic rules and tricks. May I?” Max pointed to the empty seat next to Ava.
    She sighed and said, “Sure.” Certainly she could control herself for the sake of passing this stupid course.
    Max came around and sat next to her. As he pulled the chair in, his leg lightly brushed against her, creating a chill up her spine. She closed her eyes and desperately tried to re-focus. “Do you understand, Ava?”
    She opened her eyes. “Could you explain that again, please?” she asked. Pay attention, Ava. Pay attention!
    “Wait a minute, that’s how you measure standard deviation? That actually makes sense. Why didn’t anyone explain it like that before?” Ava asked. “Keep going.”
    Max continued to write down shortcuts to common formulas while Ava’s phone continued to buzz.
    “Don’t you want to check that? It sounds like someone is trying to get in touch with you,” Max stated. “You’re doing really great. Let’s take a break. I’ll write up some problems for you from what we just went over.”
    Ava grabbed her phone and walked over to the window. This time there were four text messages: Two from Carly with lewd comments about being alone in the room with Max, one from Tessa gushing about some boy she has a crush on in school who finally asked her out on a date, and one from Thomas … apologizing for interrupting her studies, but he was going to have to cancel their dinner date due to some sort of business something or other. She quickly texted Thomas back that it was no problem, then texted Tessa a congratulations and a good luck. Carly’s texts she ignored. Finally, she put her phone on silent and returned to the table, waiting while Max wrote out some problems from her textbook. Ava felt absolutely giddy. She didn’t even care that Thomas had cancelled her date. The important thing was