You're Kind of Gangster

I sit outside of the police station in my car, waiting for Max and Will as they check in with Lynch for the day. I fiddle with the radio with the hand not hanging out of my open window. It's a lot nicer today compared to yesterday's single digit temperatures, and it's close enough to the freezing point that I can ignore the cold. After about a minute, I find the radio broadcast for the Detroit Red Wings' hockey game. I pause on that station, listening as I try to piece together the game. I was never good at listening to games, and now, no longer around hockey everyday, everything about the game has become foreign to me.

I smile as I hear the name Datsyuk, remembering the times when Matt and I would spend hours at the rink, modeling our games after him. The smile fades, though, as I think back to the anger in his eyes when he found out I was the one who pushed Shai during team sports. By now, I'm sure our friendship will never go back to the way it was.

"Ean?" I hear from behind me. I look out the window and see Shai coming up to the car. She bends down so she can look through the window.

My smile returns. Then I remember why I'm here and it fades to a grimace. "What are you doing here?" she continues.

"Uh, no reason? Just... listening to the game," I say, pointing at my radio. She nods and I panic when she makes no move to leave. Max and Will should be out soon. "Do you need to be somewhere?"

"Here, actually." I blink and glance at the door to the station. It's silent for a minute. "Well, I'm going to head inside, see you later?"

I jump, yanking the key out of the ignition. The radio goes silent and I push open the door to follow her into the station. I let her go in first and she smiles when she sees me. I follow, a few seconds behind. Shai stops at the desk with a younger looking girl, probably only five years older than us, and starts talking to her. I look around for the two guys, staying close enough to Shai to keep her within my sight. If Will and Max see her here, there's no telling what they'll try to pull. They're no longer aware of any limits, even in a police station.

Max, Will and Lynch all come out from a back part of the station, and the two guys talk quietly between themselves as they follow Lynch back to his desk, separate from the other cops' desks as the sheriff.

They don't see me, which means they don't see Shai. I'm careful to block her from their line of view, no matter the weird looks she gives me as she obliviously continues her conversation with the lady.

After a couple minutes, the guys are dismissed by Lynch. They turn around to leave and both meet eyes with me. I casually nod at them, but they know something is up; I never come in when I come here with them on occasion. They know immediately that something is wrong or something is off and I can see it in their eyes as the determination to figure it out appears.

"Shailene, what are you doing here?" Lynch calls. My head drops and I sigh. The guys both cross their arms and give me a smug look, glancing behind me to see Shai now looking up confusedly.

"Nice try," Will mouths to me as Shai weaves around us to go talk to Lynch. They both come up to me.

"What were you trying to do? Protect her?" Max snorts. I see a glint in his eye, and the punch to the gut is expected. "She's an innocent little girl. Get over your puppy love."

-

"You're still hanging around with those hoodlums?"

"They're my friends, Olivia," I snap, though for the first time, I'm beginning to doubt that.

"Then I guess we won't be seeing you tonight for Sunday night dinner."

"Yeah. Whatever. I don't know why you keep calling me every weekend when you know that nothing will change."

"I was notified by the school you got a tutor, Ean. I thought maybe..."

My mind goes immediately to Shai. "Nothing's changed, Olivia. Nothing will change."

She sighs, "Stop calling me Olivia. I'm your mother, Ean." She's normally adamant about me calling her mom, but this time, there's no effort in it at all. Maybe she's finally beginning to give up.

"Sure. Bye." I cut off whatever she was about to say as I disconnect the call and drop my cell phone on the couch. The apartment is a depressing quiet, just as it normally is. I sigh in frustration. As I sit down on the couch, my phone begins ringing again. It's Shai.

“Hello?” I ask hesitantly.

“Hey. I was looking through your schedule and I saw you have a calc test coming up on Tuesday. You seemed fine last Wednesday when we were doing your homework for the class, but I just wanted to make sure.”

The part of me still loyal to the group is screaming at me to laugh and hang up without a response. It’s telling me fuck everything, fuck the progress I made with Shai, that I can tell the guys she’s too much of a prude. Like I even care about this bet anymore. But the new part of me knows that I don’t want that. And the new part of me I discovered with the help of this girl wins the battle. Before I know it, I have plans to meet Shai at the diner downtown in half an hour.

-

I find Shai in the corner of the dining area during the tail end of the breakfast rush. She's sat at a table, next to an empty chair she dragged closer to herself for me.

I walk over and drop my backpack on the table, cringing at the noise it makes. "Sorry," Shai practically whispers to the glares from the surrounding tables. When she turns away from them, she gives me a weak smile, gesturing to the chair next to her.

I wince as I bend down to sit, the bruise from Max forming under the skin of my core, and it doesn't go unnoticed by Shai. Her eyebrows scrunch together in worry. I shake my head as I lean against the back of the chair.

“Can we drop it?”

Surprisedly, she agrees and turns to my backpack. “Okay. Where do you think you need help?”
I shift, propping my elbows on the edge of the table, ignoring the discomfort. “Whatever we did on Wednesday. And whatever we did the Wednesday before that. I don’t remember it enough to even tell you what it was.”

Shai looks up from my calc textbook, midway through turning a page. “You were doing so well on it, I thought,” she says as she lets the page fall. “You got A’s on the homeworks for the lessons.”

I give her a look. “You had more than a little to do with that. Do you really think I could get an A on any assignment by myself?”

“Oh...”

Something about her tone hits me harder than Max’s punch. Maybe she really doesn’t believe that I can change; she doesn’t believe in me academically, so her personal opinion of me can’t be much different. Here I was, thinking that I could change, and she was accepting of it, the reason for it. Maybe Max was right. No.

“Ean?” I snap my gaze from a spot on the table to meet her eyes. “Look, maybe I was helping you out a little too much. But your test isn’t until Tuesday, and now I know my limits with how much I should help you. Just- let’s start with the lesson from two weeks ago.”

She flips to the page of practice problems for the lesson once she’s gone over it with me. Grabbing one of my notebooks from my backpack, she gives each of us a sheet of paper so she can do the problems along with me.

When she’s done, I notice she looks up. My elbows are propped up on the table and my head is held in between my hands, trying to hide the blank sheet of paper. “Ean?” I barely look away from my paper to look up at her.

“I have no idea what I’m doing.” She moves around in her chair for a second, not saying anything.

Then, she scoots her chair even closer to mine to guide me through the problem.

Shai believes that the reason I was doing so good, and now I’m back to where I started has to do with her basically doing the homework for me. But she couldn’t be anymore clueless. I only used to listen to her during the tutoring so I could get out of there as fast as I could. Now, I find myself no longer focusing on the work, but on her. And it scares me. It scares me that this bet has brought this complication along with my tutoring.

“Ean? Are you paying attention?” I finally look up and immediately regret it. Her face can’t be more than five inches from mine.