I squirm uncomfortably, cracking my knuckles loudly. Mom shoots me a side glare and I sit on my hands. She gets a little crazy when we're in church.

On the other side of me, Veronica nudges my shoulder. Her short brown hair is straightened, and she's wearing shimmery lipgloss. "Stop fidgeting," she hisses.

Hailey leans over and sticks her tongue out at me. I stick my tongue out back. She understands me.

I'm almost never home on the weekends, since we usually have away games. But lucky me, I'm home for the weekend. So Mom drags us to church.

Mom dips her head and closes her eyes as the priest says something in an old, croaky voice that I can't understand. The Cathedral smells like smoke and old wood, and rain is pounding on the stained glass windows. I rub my face and glance at Mom beside me.

Her eyes snap open like she can see what I'm doing. "Say your prayers, Cameron," she whispers. Her eyes are dark brown and her wavy hair is blonde, like Hailey. Veronica and I got our looks after our dad. 

"I am," I whisper back. Satisfied, she closes her eyes again, her lips moving in a silent prayer. My mom is pretty cool. She's always been supportive of hockey. But she is the most religious person I have ever met. 

After church, we walk home. Mom and Veronica share an umbrella, and Hailey and I share one. Our only pairs of dress shoes are getting soaked in the puddles. Hailey isn't helping by jumping in all of them. 

I breathe in the smell of wet concrete and cold rain, and glance down at Hailey, her small hands over mine on the umbrella handle. She's wearing a coat over her favorite purple dress.

"What are you going to do today?" I ask loudly over the downpour.

"My friend Annabelle is coming over," she says. "She's bringing her Barbie. Do you want to play with us?"

"Maybe," I say.

"Do you have hockey today?"

"No, not today."

"Well, what are you going to do?"

Veronica looks over her shoulder, her steps in synch with Mom. "He has to study," she says, her lips curling into a smile. 

"Yeah," I say. "I have to study."

"Oh no," says Hailey. "I hate studying."

"Yeah, me too."

~

I pull open the front door. Sam is soaking wet. 

"Umbrella?" I say. 

"I'm only a few houses down," he says, smiling. His sweatshirt is dripping with water, and rain runs down his face. "I thought I could outrun it."

I step back and he walks inside. The front hall is pretty cluttered, snow boots and coats and jackets tossed on the coat rack or on the ground. Veronica waves from the kitchen counter and Mom leans her head around the doorway. 

"Hello, Sam!" she says. "So nice to see you again. It's been so long."

"Hi, Mrs. Beckett," he says.

"Are you here to tutor Cameron?"

"Yes."

Veronica laughs. "He needs it."

"Okay, let's go," I say. We go to my room, which I cleaned up a bit earlier when I texted him asking if he could tutor me today. And by cleaning, I mean shoving clothes underneath the bed.

"So, math," I say, pulling out my textbook, then glance at him. "Do you want... like, to borrow a sweatshirt or something?"

Sam shrugs. "If you have one."

I dig through my closet and throw him a old one that I got from a hockey tournament years ago. I clear my throat and flip through the pages in my textbook as he pulls it on. 

"Thanks, much better," he says, and runs a hand through his wet hair. "Okay, math."

He sits on the edge of my bed and I pull up my desk chair, and he goes through my homework with a red pen. I don't know what he's doing, but he's making lots of marks.

"Okay," he says slowly when he's done. "This isn't too bad. Let's start with rational functions."

I squint at the paper. "Okay."

"So let's find the intercepts of number one. We need to set f of x to zero, right?" He scribbles something on the paper. His handwriting is crap. "So we solve this equation. How would we do that?"

There's a pause, and I think he wants me to answer. "S-solve - I mean -"

"It's a quadratic, see? So we have to factor." He makes a mark. "Okay, looks like it can't factor. So we plug it into the quadratic formula." He glances up towards the ceiling, so I do too. There's a vintage Toronto Maple Leafs poster that I pasted up there when I was ten. I had to drag a ladder from the garage and it took me forever. 

I look back down, and Sam is writing something on the paper. "Okay, so the answer is positive and negative 3.7. You see?"

I don't. "Yeah."

He studies me. His eyes are very, very blue. They might be the bluest eyes I've ever seen in my life. And I have played Barbies with Hailey before. 

"You want to try number two?" He pushes the paper towards me, and I groan.

"Let's take a break," I say. "That was a lot of information to keep in my brain."

He smiles again. "That was one problem."

"Baby steps."

"Lazy."

"Lazy?"

"Yeah. You know, you'll be thanking me when you graduate from high school in the spring." He pushes the paper towards me again and I pick up the pencil. 

Math problems honestly suck the life out of your soul. I swear to god. I feel like my brain is being shoved through a shredder. I can't even register the passing of time. Math is like a vacuum of torture. "So," I say, desperate for something inside my brain besides numbers. "You want to be like, a mathematician?"

"A scientist," says Sam. 

"That's cool."

"Yeah. Working at NASA would be amazing."

"Oh, like a rocket scientist. Impressive"

He shrugs and subconsciously pulls at a thread in my sweatshirt. "That's the dream. What about you? Hockey?"

"Yeah." Okay, by now I'm just sketching cubes beside the problem. He doesn't notice, though. "I mean, it's already kind of set for me. I'll play for the NHL next year."

"Wow."

"Yup. That's the dream." There's silence except for the rain against the window, and I clear my throat. "Are you a Leafs or Senators fan?"

"Leafs, of course," he says.

"Good answer," I say. With St. Anne being right in between the two cities, everyone is torn when it comes to the NHL. 

He leans over the bed. "Are you... doodling?"

"Cubes are math-related."

~

An hour and a half later, Sam is waving goodbye to the family. And a little girl named Annabelle.

"No, please stay for dinner!" says Mom, pulling an oven mitt off her hand. There's stew in the kitchen and it smells amazing. 

"It's okay, my uncle is waiting for me," says Sam. "Thank you, though." He glances at me. "We can go over math again sometime later this week?"

"Sure," I say. "Thank you." 

"Here, take an umbrella, Sam," says my mom, picking up an umbrella off the ground and pushing it into his hands. "You can give it back later."

"Thank you," says Sam, starting to blush. He smiles warmly. "Have a good night."

The second the door shuts behind him, my mom puts her hands on her hips. "That boy is so sweet," she says. "Why aren't you two friends?"

I shrug and sit at the kitchen counter beside Veronica, who probably hasn't moved. She's eating a bowl of cereal. "I don't know," I say. "We're not not friends. I'm just busy a lot."

"He's hot," Veronica says, resting her head on her hand. "I mean, he's kind of a nerd, but he's hot."

"Who's hot?" shrieks Hailey, running through the kitchen with her friend Annabelle. They're giggling loudly and waving dolls around. 

"The stew is hot!" says Mom. "Are you girls ready for dinner?"

"Yeah, I'm hungry!"

I glance at Veronica, and she smiles tiredly. Outside, thunder rumbles.