False Start - Jessica Ruddick Page 0,17

Zizzo held her hand out for the assignment. “Let me see it.”

I handed it over. “Sorry, Ziz. Being stupid is my natural state.”

She rolled her eyes before returning her gaze to the paper. “Shut up. You’re not stupid.”

Debatable. But I only had to make it through one more semester, then I would declare myself eligible for the draft. If a team didn’t pick me up, then I didn’t know what I would do. I seriously did not want to take a job with my father’s company. I wasn’t terribly worried, though. I might not go in the first round like FM4, but I would be surprised if I didn’t get selected in the second or third round.

The team had tutors to help players with assignments, but I preferred to have Ziz help me. She’d been doing it since high school, and we were used to each other. Besides that, I trusted her. If she told me to do something on an assignment, I did it without question.

“It’s not like it matters,” I said. “I can take another class to fill the eligibility requirements.”

She narrowed her eyes at me through her tortoise-shell glasses. Those combined with her hair in a messy bun gave her the whole hot-librarian look. I doubted she realized the effect she was creating, though. She hated drawing attention to herself. Thank God. If she ever decided to flaunt her assets, I would need an army to help fend off all her admirers.

“But this class fills a requirement for your major, so you need to take it now. There might not be a better option in the spring.”

I opened my mouth but clamped it shut before I could tell her that graduating wasn’t part of my plan. I thought she already knew that. For me, college was the means necessary to play pro football.

“Sure, okay,” I said instead, not wanting to earn a look of disappointment. I should say to hell with what she thinks like I did with everyone else, but Ziz’s opinion was one of the few that mattered to me.

She slid the paper across the table. “It’s not that hard. It’s only five hundred words. That’s like two pages.”

“Easy for you to say,” I muttered. Her major wasn’t writing intensive, but she was so damn smart, she was good at it anyway. If she had one flaw, it was that she didn’t understand that academics didn’t come easily for some of us.

“Do a page tonight and a page tomorrow. If you send it to me by nine tomorrow, I can proof it for you.”

I opened my laptop and flexed my fingers over my keyboard. I held them there, but as expected, words didn’t fly out of them and onto the screen. Writing sucks.

Ziz took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then she rooted around in her backpack. “Damn,” she said. “Do you have any eye drops?”

I shook my head. “Are your eyes bothering you?”

“It’s the dry air in the engineering building. This happens at the start of every semester. I almost had to come home halfway through the day to take my contacts out.”

“Then why didn’t you just wear your glasses? Or take your contact stuff?”

“It was fine the first two days,” she grumbled. “I was hoping it would be okay this semester but nope.”

I turned my attention back to my laptop, but the blinking cursor didn’t do me any favors. “What should I write?”

Ziz chuckled. “I can’t tell you that. It’s a personal narrative, so that means you have to come up with it.” At times like these when she was showing me tough love, I had to remind myself that one of the things I loved about Ziz was that she didn’t put up with my bullshit. In some ways, it might be easier to work with a tutor because I might be able to manipulate them into helping me more, especially if it was a chick. Slacker.

I sighed. The class was sociology of education, and the assignment was supposed to be a reflection of our experience in education so far. The professor was going to save the essays for us to read at the end of the class after we’d been enlightened or some hippy-dippy bullshit.

Ziz took pity on me. “Here.” She pointed at some bullet points on the assignment. “Start with these questions and go from there.”

While I wasn’t the best student, I wasn’t illiterate. I could read the paper myself. I ground my teeth and mentally told myself to