I stopped.
Her pencil hovered over the page. She bit her lower lip.
"You have to isolate the variable first," she muttered, more to herself than to me. "Everything else is just noise trying to confuse you."
She worked through it. Slow. Methodical. Color-coded every part. Wrote each step.
Then she circled her final answer and looked up at me.
I checked it against my answer key.
Correct.
I pushed a blue chip across the table. The one worth five reds.
"Correct."
Her eyes widened.
Then she got the next one right.
And the next.
Not all of them. She still made mistakes, still lost chips when she forgot to distribute or dropped a negative sign. But the ratio was changing. The pile on her side of the table grew from pathetic to respectable to almost competitive.
That fierce glint appeared in her purple eyes. The one that said she wasn't just trying not to lose anymore.
She was trying to win.
