Karyn's phone rang the moment she got home after speaking with Jon. Unsurprisingly, it was Gina.
"Hey Karyn, could you come over?"
For some people it might be odd that a high school girl's two best friends were a boy and a middle school girl seven years her junior, but somehow for Karyn, this was just life. Jon was her best friend at school, and Gina was her best friend when she got home.
"Sure, I'll be right over!" Karyn spun on her heels and turned back out the front door. She had no way of knowing that Gina Malucci had been a complete stranger just a moment before, and that Karyn's memories of friendship had been implanted by Mikey's unassuming wish.
When Karyn arrived, it wasn't like she was being greeted by someone seven years younger than her, it was like meeting a peer. She didn't talk down to Gina, and Gina didn't speak with any kind of reverence for Karyn. They were just... friends.
a moment after Karyn entered the house, however, a set of words exited Gina's mouth at the exact same time as they left Jon's several blocks away: "We should sit down and work on our homework together." Karyn didn't think anything was odd about the statement and shifted her backpack off of her shoulder, while Jon, back in his own home, guided his younger brother over to the kitchen table.
In both the Gibson home and the Malucci home, a high school senior and a 6th grader were sitting down to do homework together. The difference was that Mikey was struggling with his math problems at about the rate one would expect from an 11 year-old, and turned to his brother a few times for help, while Gina seemed to find the basic arithmetic and foundational concepts oddly old-hat. As though her biggest hurdle was thinking back to when she'd first learned these concepts several years ago. But she hadn't, had she?
It wasn't something Gina dwelled on, just a passing thought, and she finished her own work within ten short minutes.
But Karyn, as one might imagine, took longer with her trigonometry. Gina started looking over Karyn's shoulder once she'd finished her own work, and while it certainly didn't come easily, she found everything on Karyn's page to be familiar. Familiar enough that after a moment, she asked a question about one of the problems, and then had a suggestion about the next one, and soon an organic sort of shift occurred, where the worksheet and the textbook found themselves directly between the two girls, and they were working in tandem to solve each problem, and contributing equally to the solutions.
All of this went without notice, as though it was normal for an 11 year-old girl to be reasonably proficient in 12th grade trigonometry. About as good at the subject as Jon was.
With the added help, Gina and Karyn blazed through all of Karyn's homework in short order, while Jon took a bit longer than he normally did because every five minutes or so, Mikey would need help with his own work. Jon was happy to lend his support, but it meant that he was working a little bit distractedly on his own work, and naturally it took longer. When Karyn closed her textbook and put her papers away, Jon and Mikey still had another half-hour to go before the two of them finished their own respective work.
So the two girls moved to the sofa, and Karyn pulled the younger girl into her lap.
