To say Eddie Munson was unmotivated was a bit of an understatement. All of his teachers for the past five years of high school continually reported back to Wayne that, "Eddie is an incredibly gifted student, however he doesn't seem to apply himself in class." He would absorb those words and regurgitate them at Eddie the second he had the opportunity to, and after a while, Wayne began to see an improvement in Eddie's educational performance. Of course he didn't go from being a straight D student to a getting straight A's, but he was able to bump up his scores in History, English, and art to B's with the occasional A. However, not matter how much complaining from his teachers or pushing from his uncle, Eddie couldn't get his math scores to jump above a D.
Maybe it was something about the numbers, or maybe it was the lack of a creative outlet in the projects. He wasn't exactly sure, but the more he tried, the more he struggled, and the more he struggled, the more he was nagged to do better, which only perpetuated the cyclical downfall of disappointment he existed in.
"You're really a bright kid, Eddie," his math teacher reassured him. "Trust me, we all want you to succeed. You deserve to graduate this year, especially after all the hard work you've put into raising your grades, we don't want this to be the thing that keeps you from getting your diploma."
"So you're going to sweep my math grades under the rug?" he suggested with a mildly sly smirk playing on his lips. His teacher laughed at Eddie's attempt to get the school to ignore his failing grade, but spoke to clear any confusion.
"How would you feel about getting a tutor?"
"I don't think my uncle can afford a tutor, Mr. Klein," Eddie said in a somewhat defeated tone. He'd heard the richer kids at school talk about how they had either a subject specific, or college-prep tutor come to their homes a few days a week to bring up their grades or to prepare for higher education. Never did he think someone would even confuse him for the type of person who would be able to obtain such a luxury. He knew he wasn't going to college unless he had a scholarship--which by his grades and lack of involvement in athletics seemed to be an impossibility. All he wanted was his damned diploma and to flip the bird to his principal one final time.
"I have a student in one of my advanced classes who has some free-time after school. If you're interested, I can arrange for you two to meet so you can work on the materials in one-on-one setting, perform some extra-credit work, and study for the last test of the year."
That's how Eddie Munson ended up at the library after school on a Friday sitting across the table from Helen McKillop. He'd known of Helen since kindergarten, but never spoke to her in their years of attending the same school. Part of it was that they never shared any classes--he was in all on-level courses while she was enrolled in every advanced course the school offered. The other reason he'd never spoken to her before was because it seemed as if she would run the other way if he so much as looked at her.
He'd always remembered her as this timid girl who avoided getting to know anyone outside of her immediate friend group. Barbra Holland and Nancy Wheeler were two of the only people in school Eddie ever remembered Helen interacting with, and after Barb's disappearance and death, she stopped talking to Nancy altogether. Her last two years of high school were spent in the background of everyone else's story. It was as if she were a non-player character that existed simply to further the plot of everyone else's high school life.
Eddie sat across from her, his metal rings clanking loudly on the table as he anxiously tapped to the drumming of his heart. His knee bounced impatiently as he waited for her to say something in regards to the notes he'd taken and the small assignment he completed in class that his teacher wanted her to look over before Eddie officially turned it in. However, her fingers continued to turn the paper over, and her eyes continued to scan his chicken-scratched writing from behind her glasses lenses.
Helen McKillop...the geek he thought to himself in a slight tone of either disgust or dread. Of course he knew that the social hierarchy of high school was bullshit, but it still existed, and people within varying stages of that hierarchy developed opinions of people in others. He knew his place among the hierarchy as a "freak" and he knew what others thought of him. He had mostly come to accept the bullshit stigma of being labeled a freak, and he embraced making the jocks feel uncomfortable. It was nice, in a weird way, having anyone be intimidated by the kid who, in elementary school, was teased for how often he cried. In hindsight, he shouldn't have believed the stereotypes and rumors that were spread about Helen, and he shouldn't have approached their first tutoring session with those in mind, but he did.
Helen had always been quiet, and she could tell her silence was beginning to drive Eddie Munson up a wall. She'd only known of Eddie in passing, but there was something about him that always made her feel uneasy in a good way. She couldn't describe it, but whenever she noticed him being his authentic self among his friends, she could pinpoint this desire and urge within herself to break out of her shell and participate in whatever shenanigans and tomfoolery he was getting into. To be honest, that urge scared her, and given the choice between fight and flight, her body would choose flight ten out of ten times. Helen McKillop didn't step out of her comfort zone. She kept her head down, didn't make a fuss, and avoided the whims of adolescence.
With a swift flick of her wrist, Helen pushed the paper back to Eddie after erasing every last pencil mark on the page.
"What was that for?" he asked abruptly as she handed him a blank page.
"I think it's better to start over with a clean slate," she admitted as a piece of her conscious mind recognized the sub-conscious decision to get over her, for lack of a better combination of words, enamored fear of the boy before her.
"Did you have to erase my name?" he grumbled under his breath as he printed E-d-d-i-e M-u-n-s-o-n back in the top right corner of the page.
With a great sense of apprehension, Helen opened Eddie's textbook to the section Mr. Klein told her Eddie's class was in. While Helen was in Pre-Calculus, Eddie was still in Algebra, so his homework was a breath of fresh air to her; however, within seconds of watching the boy before her shove his pencil into his hair and begin twirling it around a coiled lock, she quickly realized the difficulty Eddie was experiencing.
"Is it that you don't know how to do it, or is it that it seems like a lot to do and it's overwhelming to look at?" Helen asked as she studied the boy across from her.
Eddie's bottom lip was pinched between his teeth, his narrowed eyes peered vengefully down at the paper before him, and his nose was ever so lightly scrunched that it would have been impossible to make out had she not been searching for it. She recognized the look on his face--hell, she'd worn that look a number of times herself--and immediately knew the answer to her question.
"I can do it!" Eddie retorted a little too loudly and ended up being shushed by some nearby middle schoolers.
"I didn't say you couldn't," Helen quickly responded in a shy and reserved tone. She took a deep breath and found herself letting it out abruptly in frustration at Eddie's defiance. "You're a musician, right?" she pressed in hopes he'd stop being so closed off and defensive around her. He nodded in response as he continued to absentmindedly stare at the numbers and letters on the page before him. "What do you play?" her voice was what he'd expected based on the type of girl he thought Helen to be--soft and light, like a feather drifting in the wind.
"Guitar mostly."
"I take it the guitar didn't just come to you super easily, right?"
"No, things don't come easily to me," Eddie nearly hissed in frustration. Here was this girl--this nerdy, goody-two-shoes, teacher's pet girl--who probably has never had to struggle for a descent grade in her whole life, trying to talk to him about what comes easy?
"All I'm saying is, like with music and learning an instrument, things take practice. It's okay to not know where to start."
"The thing is, I know what to do, I just don't know how to make it through these damn questions without wanting to fall asleep. Learning guitar was easy because it was something that was interesting to me. I'm just taking this class because I have to."
Understanding the root of the problem, Helen silently began digging around in her bag until she found a d20. The di certainly caught Eddie's attention since Helen McKillop was the last person he'd expect to play Dungeons and Dragons.
"The good thing is, we don't have to start at the beginning and work our way to the end," she said as she rolled the di and noticed the number 12 appear right side up. "Sometimes I don't know where to start with things either, so I leave it up to chance. Chance says we start at question number twelve," she said and turned his homework over. "Focusing is hard for me, so I have to make little games of things to hold my attention."
"And so you use DND dice to decide how to do your homework?" Eddie asked with a slight laugh as he began to work through the problem.
"My parents took me to be evaluated for ADD in middle school. I've had a few years to find things that work for me. DND dice keeps school a bit more interesting, however I've found them to be more effective to add a few incentives though."
"You had problems in school?" The shock in his voice was evident as Helen anxiously bit at her lower lip.
"I never had to try on assignments," she admitted, only to have the looming judgement of Eddie Munson's words 'things don't come easily for me' echo in her ears. "When I did struggle with something I took it out on myself and thought I was just too stupid or lazy to grasp it. Knowing how to motivate myself to do the things I don't want to do helped me with my boring subjects, but also made me even stronger in the ones I liked."
"So you also just didn't try to do things you thought were too complicated to just start doing?" Eddie's voice was now gentle as he realized he couldn't have been more wrong about Helen.
"Correct," she said as her gaze lifted from where she'd been staring at where his ring clad fingers rested upon the paper in order to meet his eyes. "I promise that if you find ways to keep your brain engaged in what you're doing, you'll find it easier to get things you don't want to do done."
"You promise?" Eddie repeated her words hesitantly as he playfully yet skeptically raised an eyebrow at the girl before him.
"I do," she assured him with what had to be the sweetest, most wholesome smiles he'd seen grace another person's face.
"Well then, I guess I'll keep at it," he said with a joyful grin landing on his lips until it faltered into a coy smirk. "After all, I want to know more about those incentives you were talking about." With a curt wink, he could see her cheeks begin to flush and could feel the heat rising into his own ears. And so the freak began to fall for the geek.
Today’s disabled character of the day is Spencer Allen Douglass from Sparky’s Excellent Misadventures: My A.D.D. Journal, who has Attention Deficit Disorder
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