One week later, before Bayou City could attend another tournament, Audrey texts Pablo about their travel arrangements for it. “Do you want to sleep at my place on Thursday, and study for the ACT?”

“Why?” Pablo answers her back.

“My parents will drive Cora and Susan to our next tournament and hence will sleep at my place on Thursday”

“Yes; can I bring guests?”

“Malcolm is already confirmed to sleep there, too, but you will need to tell me who, and whether they can sleep there as well”

Knowing Audrey, and Cora, they may want to study some for the ACT together, in which case I may as well bring in some rising junior as well. Not George because he’s going to be studying with Lilina no matter what, but Bart might, Pablo tries to think of whom he can invite to Audrey’s place to study for the ACT.

He then texts Bart: “Malcolm and I will be studying for the ACT at Audrey’s place Thursday night. Do you want to study with me too?”

“I guess, I don’t have a choice” Bart tells him before Pablo goes out and tell his parents about his plans.

“Mom, I’m going to sleep at Audrey’s on Thursday night! I will be studying for the ACT!”

“Good; between your job, and football practices with your teammates, you need to make some time for ACT studying!” Pablo’s mom warns his son.

“Speaking of football, from what you have seen in practices this summer, what would you expect from the team this season?” Pablo’s dad asks him.

“Personally, our offense is a little weak this year, after the graduation of last season’s starting quarterback. I can’t do everything on this team on offense, and we got no real incoming talent at running back or wide receiver!” Pablo tells his parents about who could possibly join the football team.

“I guess we need to pray that opposing defenses are weak to make the playoffs…” Pablo’s dad sighs upon hearing about how the VA football team’s offensive talent pool has remained mostly shallow.

I didn’t get to see Audrey much lately. However, I think that, because the town knows me more for my quiz bowling prowess as the special topics player than as a footballer, they won’t pressure me as much as they do other offensive players, such as Valter, Pablo ruminates, while he realizes that neither Malcolm nor Bart have taken Algebra II, and hence he feels like Thursday night will amount mostly to making these two learn as much Algebra II as possible. And maybe Susan and Cora if they aren’t accelerated in math.

On Thursday that week, after both Audrey and Pablo finish their respective shifts, they go to Audrey’s home, while Audrey’s parents are preparing pelekie zirni, with, as before, chickpeas as opposed to grey peas. And, of course, bacon, onions, cilantro and radish.

“While we wait on my parents to finish the chickpea salad, we’ll go through a few sample questions…” Audrey tells Pablo before the other four arrive.

“Once Malcolm and Bart arrive, we’ll need to focus on Algebra II material because neither took the course yet. Until then, we can answer practice questions in other areas” Pablo replies to his girlfriend.

And the couple buckles down, answering the daily set of questions in English and, time permitting, reading, knowing that the others will arrive later. Which is mostly about word choice or error correction for the former, but couldn’t do a whole lot of the latter.

A bit later, when the doorbell rings, the door opens to reveal a person Pablo doesn’t remember very clearly, but Audrey is much more familiar with.

“Hi Susan...”

“Hi Audrey; who is he?” Susan asks Audrey after looking in Pablo’s direction.

“Pablo, he’s my boyfriend. He plays tight end for the Venomous Agendas, and quiz bowl, too”

Damn it! I saw her play once last year, after my quiz bowl debut. In this foul-fest of a game against Lacassine… A bulb flashes in Pablo’s mind, while Susan asks a question of him:

“Did you play at the HSNCT too?”

“Yes, just not on the same squad as Audrey. I still performed well, mind you, but that’s not what I’m here for” Pablo answers Susan’s question. “Tonight is about ACT studying!”

The three buckle down and answer practice ACT questions about a literary passage. Once the three are done answering these practice questions on this literary passage, the remaining three guests arrive, with Susan rolling her eyes when she sees the two male guests, not recognizing either guy.

“Who are they?” Susan asks the other two, after seeing Cora among them.

“This is Malcolm and Bart, free safety and left linebacker for the VAs respectively” Pablo introduces the two male guests to Susan.

“I apologize, I didn’t date Malcolm for very long yet” Cora explains herself.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Dinner is ready!” Audrey’s mom calls to them as she serves the pelekie zirni on the guests’ plates.

Having this many guests to study for the ACT at night has the consequence of leaving no space around the dinner table. Then Pablo pops a comment that makes the other female basketball players react:

“I think I should have asked you this before, but I wonder whether Cora or Susan took Algebra II”

Cora didn’t take AP Bio, and if she took Algebra II, she wasn’t in my section. Other than that, if she was with me in my other classes, she didn’t interact with me much, if at all. For what I know, she might still be a strong student, Pablo ruminates on his past academic dealings with her. Audrey might know, however.

“Yes, I took Algebra II” Cora tells the other guests.

“Me too!” Susan continues.

Oof. I knew Audrey was the brainiac of the basketball teams, but what made Cora fly under the radar? She’s not playing on an academic team, Malcolm seems a little puzzled by Cora confessing having taken Algebra II. And making him believe that Cora was better in math than he initially thought.

When the dinner ends, the six are in the living room, with Audrey having her laptop ready to show them common types of Algebra II problems on the ACT and everyone else trying to do the problems on their cell phones.

“Since it appears that Malcolm and Bart didn’t take Algebra II, this will be new material to them, and we will focus on that tonight” Audrey explains what they will do tonight.

They start with explaining the basics of function domain vs range, as well as min/max over a domain.

“Don’t forget, Malcolm, Bart: since you didn’t take these courses yet, these notes will be useful to you a few months from now. That way you won’t be completely lost” Pablo warns his football teammates.

“Question one: What is the domain of the function…”

Audrey refers to a fraction of polynomials. The answer choices given are the empty set, all real numbers, and finally x excluding certain numbers, of which two choices contain only one number, and one last choice contains two numbers.

“We know that the denominator cannot be zero. However, is there a way to know when the denominator is zero in that sort of questions?” a confused Bart asks his teammate, not knowing how to deal with the denominator.

“In general, when you have equations of the format AX squared plus BX plus C, and you want to know when it hits zero…” Pablo starts to explain the quadratic formula.

“Why jump directly to the quadratic formula?” Malcolm asks. “In that sort of tests, it seems like time is of the essence, and we don’t always have time to use the full formula!”

“Sometimes there are shortcuts, but you should understand the more general methods first before you can think of using them. Here you could simply plug values from the answer choices into the denominator, but it’s a lot more general than just trying to determine when a fraction’s denominator is, well, zero!” Audrey retorts to Malcolm.

And then the two football players start asking questions because they wonder what happens when, for instance, b^2-4ac < 0. When that happens, they are dealing with complex numbers, so they start realizing just how much they have to learn by the state-sponsored ACT date in March.

“Damn… that’s a lot to take in!” Bart is left wondering why he’s even learning this much material at this point of the summer. “And that’s a little too fast to his taste!”

“But, depending on the problem, there are times when you know you made a mistake when you realize the quadratic formula returns a complex solution” Cora explains to them. “Usually, it depends on the meaning of the solution”

“Also, you realize that you cannot have a real and a complex solution to a quadratic problem. Your solutions are going to be either both real or both complex” Audrey adds on to what Cora was saying.

They are then given more questions about polynomial factorization, the quadratic formula as well as their uses, such as solving for a system of two equations, one quadratic and one linear. Later in the night, one of these questions about solving a non-linear equation system seems to be puzzling Susan for whatever reason, and also puzzles Bart and Malcolm:

“Why can’t we just simplify a factor of x in both equations? There is no constant term in either equation!” Susan asks the others.

“Yeah, if only we could just do so…” Bart asks in turn.

“Doing so acknowledges that zero is a root of the system. However, if you do so, you’re completely transforming the problem!” Pablo warns the people in the room.

And then they are treated to a different problem that looks like a driving problem. They want to know at what speed they will hit the wall, knowing they are driving at a certain speed, in miles per hour, their car can brake at a certain rate, and they are at a certain distance from the wall…

“I never solved a practice problem like this one. This sounds far too complicated for an ACT question!” Pablo exclaims.

One of the five choices in this problem is the car won’t hit the wall. As tempting as it might be to some to just answer the car won’t hit the wall, it seems like several people answered just that. When the answer is revealed…

“D’oh!” A frustrated Bart exclaims, after having answered the car won’t hit the wall, and realizing he got it wrong.

“How did you get to the conclusion that the car won’t hit the wall?” Audrey asks him. “I feel like there’s something wrong with the practice question!”

The first step of Bart’s solution is to just determine when the car will come to a full stop. At this point, no problem. But the complication came when trying to find t such that they will cover the distance. Some people believed that braking was the same as an acceleration, and Malcolm actually believed that braking came with a positive acceleration.

“What the hell is going on here? What do you feel is wrong with this practice question?” Susan asks them.

“Actually, the leading coefficient of the distance covered as a function of time when an object is uniformly accelerated is not the acceleration, but half of it!” Audrey answers the concerns of the others. “There was missing information in the problem, and the problem assumed we had background in physics!”

“Now I know why it was too complicated!” Pablo sighs.

“To finish the night, I believe it’s better to go into coordinate geometry, since it builds on notions you just began to learn tonight!” Cora adds on them.

I feel like they forget we aren’t mathletes! That’s an attempt to get us to learn more material than we can absorb in a single night! Bart starts to ruminate after going through some sample practice questions on coordinate geometry. But it was only at the end of the segment that diagnostic scores are brought up.

“OK, guys, before I forget, what are your diagnostic scores?”

“Nineteen” Bart answers.

Bart has the lowest diagnostic score, and, of course, Pablo and Audrey have the highest, 32 and 35 respectively. But, in Audrey’s mind, it’s clear the other footballers have the most work to do in math, while the other basketball players might still be able to score in the 30+ range by the state-sponsored date if they fine-tune their practice accordingly.

At Lacassine, I’m surrounded by people who didn’t take their academics nearly as seriously as they did. Other Cardinals athletes essentially took no-pass, no-play for granted, VA athletes clearly don’t, Susan keeps her thoughts to herself.

And then Pablo and Audrey kiss each other in front of the other four, prompting Cora and Malcolm to do the same.