This choice: Hailie Morrison, ditzy but sweet girl attending the local community college • Go Back...Chapter #4Hailie Morrison by: grumbus   “WHAT THE HELL, ALAN!”
Alan grimaced and shifted the phone’s speaker away from his ear. “I told you, Vi,” he spoke, trying to keep his voice level. “I can’t do it. Tell ‘er I said sorry.”
“She paid you! It’s hard enough to go to college on minimum wage at best, and you’re just gonna take her money?” Alan’s brow furrowed deeper; despite his distance from the phone, his sister’s voice remained ear-piercingly shrill.
“I’m not a goddamn monster Violet, Christ. I’ll give her the fee back.” Alan fished his subway card out of his wallet and waved it across the turnstile’s sensor, looking around the station once or twice. Empty, thank God. “Maybe give her a nice card, too.” he joked, trying to lighten the mood. He winced at the strangled squeak the returned. That didn’t go over well.
“Ugh, she doesn’t need well wishes, you asshole!” Alan opened his mouth to protest but almost immediately thought better of it. “She needs a tutor!”
Alan’s frustration reached a zenith. “She needs Albert-goddamn-Einstein!” His shout echoed off the station’s pillars. “She’s unteachable, and she’s a moron! God knows how she got out of high school! God knows how she’s able to tie her shoes!”
Regret washed over him almost as soon as the words left his mouth. The other end of the phone was silent, save for a few scattered sobs.
“Fuck. You. Alan.” A heavy sniffle punctuated the condemnation. “I’d tell Hallie what you said, but it’d break her heart. Not that you’d understand what that’s like, you dickhead!”
“Violet, I didn’t mea—!” But his words only reached the beeps of the disconnect tone. The black call-screen faded, returning to the siblings’ equally vitriolic text chain. Alan slid a finger down the screen accidentally, scrolling past the harsh words and coming to rest on a picture of the argument’s subject — Hailie Morrison. Her smile was blinding.
https://external-preview.redd.it/ILmBg4B...
Alan guiltily stowed the phone in a jacket pocket and speed-walked to his line. He leaned against a nearby pillar, his thoughts drifting.
He definitely could’ve handled that better. When his sister had proposed that he ‘help an old highschool friend with her classes’ he didn’t think that she’d go to the wall for her. And he didn’t think that Hailie would need help with, well, all of her classes.
Alan kicked a littered can onto the subway track, frowning. It was his own fault, really. An indefinite tutor job for fifty bucks per session? He should’ve smelled something fishy. But he didn’t — probably because of the pretty face. God, Vi reeled him in with that pic, hook, line, and sinker.
Warning bells had gone off when she wasn’t at the library at 3. They rang louder when she rushed in, thirty minutes late, gushing apologies riddled with upspeak and ‘OMG’s. They rang loudest when her response to ‘What classes are you struggling with?’ was a shrug and: “I dunno, like, all of ‘em?”
He had kept his expression neutral when she gave him her latest tests to highlight her issues. Almost all of them were sub-forties, with one calamitously dropping down to single digits. An aside glance to look for the shame of atypicality was returned with a vacant stare, confirming his fears. These scores were normal; the Hailey Morrison standard.
A tinny ‘Please stand away from the platform’s edge’ buzzed out from the overhead speakers, interrupting his train of thought. Alan straightened up, frown still troubling his face, as the silver tube slowly ground to a halt.
He tried to let her down easily — and indirectly — but she was just too goddamned nice. He had mentioned how difficult his classes were going to be this semester, only to have her coo in surprise at how ‘mega-smart’ he had to be to take them and help her. When he had posed the problem that it would be hard to schedule future sessions around her job, she had assured him that ‘My hours ‘r flex— flexeb— I can move ‘em around ‘n stuff.’ And when their time was up and he was going to bite the bullet and tell her, she had pulled him into a warm, unexpected — and rather squishy — hug, and thanked him profusely, tears starting to pool in her eyes.
Hence the sister-proxy-cancellation. Hence the shouting match. Hence the likely-to-be-awkward family get-togethers that awaited him, most likely. He sullenly walked into the open doors of the train, absentmindedly noting that it was just as empty as the station. Weird.
Guilty thoughts swirled through his head as the train sped up, blurring the wall outside the window into a dun-colored smear. The next thing to catch his attention was...
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