Cat took some pride in that, she wanted to believe she'd distracted him- but she found herself rushed out the door with a brief "see you next week" and a wave.

She stood at the end of his street in the orange fluorescent haloed glow of a streetlamp and watched them get into her car filled with a feeling she didn't quite recognize, something that burned her eyes and her throat. She watched the blonde laugh, lean over and touch his thigh. When she put her hand on the back of his neck and fingered the hair there, a familiar gesture, Cat seethed, surprising herself with the heat of her outrage.

And so she didn't go to his house on Monday. She told her stepfather that David couldn't meet her, but she hadn't counted on him calling to ask where she was. On Tuesday, because Ted insisted, she met David at the door, but she wouldn't meet his eyes. She refused tea and some new delectable treat-she later found out they were called scones-and just opened her book and pointed to the problems they were on. Pythagorean again. She hated that guy. Almost as much as she hated David as he sat with her and attempted, once again, to explain the reasoning behind the mathematical mysteries of the universe.

"Cat, you can tell me off the top of your head just exactly what Pythagorean's Theorem is, word for word, can't you?" David looked at her curiously. She managed to reach the tip of one of her dark brown curls to her mouth and sucked on it, concentrating hard on not looking at him. She just shrugged. "Well, tell me then."

"The sides of a right triangle are related by the equation a squared plus b squared equals c squared, where a and b represent the lengths of the legs and c is the length of the hypotenuse," she muttered, turning her right shoulder toward the opposite wall, away from him.