Her Last Breath of Love

Chapter 9: Extra Lessons, Extra Problems

The first lesson was on a Thursday.

Favour arrived at Mama Okafor's compound at four o'clock in the afternoon with her lesson bag over one shoulder and the specific energy of a woman who had spent the previous evening preparing material with a thoroughness that the school curriculum had never once inspired in her. She had gone through Princess's exercise books — borrowed from the girl the day before with a brief, businesslike exchange that Princess had submitted to with the resigned cooperation of someone who knew resistance was pointless — and had identified, with the diagnostic precision of a doctor reading a chart, exactly where the gaps were.

And they were not where she had expected.

She had expected the gaps to be foundational. She had expected, based on the repeating class and the distracted classroom performance and the general presentation of a child who had checked out of academic life, to find a student who had missed fundamental building blocks and needed to be walked back to the beginning. She had prepared for that. She had brought materials for that.

What she found instead was something considerably more interesting.

Princess had not missed the foundations. The foundations were there — solid, clearly laid, the work of a mind that had absorbed the basics without difficulty and then simply stopped bothering to build on them. The gaps were not at the bottom of the structure. They were in the middle floors, the places where sustained attention was required, where you had to sit with something that was not immediately obvious and work through it until it became clear. These were the gaps of a child who was intelligent enough to get the beginning of things and bored enough to stop before she got the rest.

Which meant this was going to be a different kind of tutoring than Favour had planned.

Not remedial. Challenging.

She was, if she was being honest with herself, more excited about it than she had been about a teaching task in several years.

Grandma opened the gate and welcomed her with the warm, unpretentious hospitality of a woman who was genuinely pleased to see her rather than performing pleasedness for social reasons.

"Teacher Favour," she said, in the tone of a woman who had heard enough about a person to feel she already knew them. "Welcome, my daughter. Come in, come in."

"Good afternoon, Mama," Favour said, and meant it.

The compound in the afternoon light was pleasant — the mango tree casting a wide shadow across the swept yard, a pot of something fragrant visible through the open kitchen window, the low sounds of a household in its afternoon rhythm. Favour had been inside many of her students' homes over the years, in the course of the occasional parent visit or the less occasional crisis that required a teacher's presence beyond school hours, and she had learned to read homes the way she read exercise books — quickly, accurately, with attention to what was present and what was conspicuously absent.

This home was full of care. That was the dominant impression. It was not a wealthy home, not by any means, but it was a home where things were tended. Where attention had been paid to the small dignities — the clean curtains, the swept floor, the plants on the veranda given enough water to be properly alive rather than just surviving.

Someone had raised Princess in a home that paid attention to things.

It showed in the girl. Favour had thought this before and thought it again now. However complicated Princess's situation was, however much the absence of her father had carved into her, she had been raised by someone who loved her with focus and consistency. That kind of upbringing left marks. Good ones.

"She is inside," Grandma said, gesturing toward the main room. "I have told her you are coming. She has been ready since three o'clock, though she will not admit it."

Favour pressed her lips together against a smile. "I will go in."

Princess was sitting at the table in the main room with her books already open, her pencil case already out, her posture the posture of someone who had been sitting here being ready for the past hour and was committed to the pretense that she had only just sat down.

"You are early," she said, when Favour came in.

"I am exactly on time," Favour said, setting her bag down and pulling out the chair across from Princess. "Four o'clock was what we agreed. It is four o'clock."

"I thought you would be late."

"I am never late," Favour said, which was not strictly true but was true enough for present purposes. She opened her bag and took out her materials. "How was school today?"

"Fine."

"Did anything interesting happen?"

"Luke got sent out of class for drawing pictures on the back of his notebook instead of copying notes."

"What kind of pictures?"

Princess's mouth twitched. "Teacher Benson's face. With extra features."

"Extra features."

"Horns. And a tail."

Favour looked at her. "Luke is going to be a problem for his parents for a very long time," she said gravely, and Princess actually laughed — a quick, genuine sound, there and gone, but real.

And there it was. The opening. The small door.

Favour moved through it without making a performance of moving through it.

"Alright," she said, spreading the materials on the table. "Let us talk about how we are going to do this. I have been through your books. I know what you know and I know what you have been pretending not to know. So there is no point in either of us pretending about the level we are starting from. We start from where we actually are and we go from there. Yes?"

Princess looked at her with the measuring expression she had worn since the first day of school and which Favour had come to understand as her version of paying close attention. "Yes."

"Good. First thing — I am not going to be kind about wrong answers."

"Okay."

"I am going to be honest about them. There is a difference. Kind means I tell you it is fine when it is not fine. Honest means I tell you it is wrong and then I show you how to make it right. The second one is harder in the moment and better in the long run. Can you handle that?"

"Yes," Princess said, and this time there was something in it — a straightening, a settling, the slight shift of a person accepting terms they find acceptable.

"Good." Favour picked up Princess's Mathematics exercise book and opened it to the most recent marked work. "Let us start here. This question. Walk me through your working."

Princess looked at it. She began to explain her reasoning — haltingly at first, with the self-consciousness of a person not used to being asked to think out loud, and then more fluidly as the explanation gathered its own momentum. Favour listened without interrupting, following the logic of it, tracking where it was sound and where it drifted. When Princess finished, she looked up.

"Where did I go wrong?" she asked.

"You didn't go wrong in the beginning," Favour said. "Your setup is correct. Your formula is correct. You went wrong here." She pointed to a line in the middle of the working. "Right here. You made a sign error. You subtracted where you should have added. Everything after this point is built on that one mistake, which is why the answer is so far off. But the thinking before this point is right." She looked up. "Do you see it?"

Princess looked at the line. A moment of stillness. Then, slowly, "Yes," she said. "I see it."

"Good. Fix it and finish the problem."

Princess bent over the book and worked. Favour watched her — watched the focused quality of her attention when it was properly applied, watched the pencil move with confidence, watched the small furrow between her brows that appeared when she was thinking hard and disappeared when something resolved.

She finished. She looked up.

"Is it right?" she asked.

Favour checked it. "Yes," she said. "It is right."

Something happened in Princess's face then — not a big thing, not a dramatic thing, but a real thing. The small particular satisfaction of a person who has done something correctly after a period of not doing things correctly. It lasted only a moment before her expression returned to its usual careful calibration, but Favour had seen it and filed it away.

That was the thing to protect, she thought. That small moment. That was what this was all for.

They worked for ninety minutes.

Within the first twenty, Favour had recalibrated her entire approach to Princess's level, which was higher than even the exercise books had suggested, because the exercise books reflected Princess at her most disengaged and the Princess in front of her now was a different creature entirely. She was quick. She was not just quick at following — she was quick at anticipating, at seeing where an explanation was going before it arrived, at asking the question that came after the current one rather than the one that had been answered.

Twice, Favour stopped mid-explanation because Princess had already arrived at the conclusion she was building toward.

"You already knew that," Favour said, the second time this happened.

"I figured it out when you were explaining."

"In the middle of the explanation."

"It wasn't — I wasn't trying to be rude. I just —"

"I am not bothered," Favour said. "I am just noting it. Because what it tells me is that your problem is not understanding the content. Your problem is engagement. When you are engaged, you can go faster than I am going. When you are not engaged, you go nowhere." She looked at her directly. "So our job is to keep you engaged. Which means I am going to have to work harder than I do with a normal student, because a normal student I can lead through material and they will follow. With you, I have to stay ahead."

Princess looked at her with the expression she wore when someone had said something unexpected that she did not know what to do with.

"You are saying I am difficult to teach," she said.

"I am saying you are expensive to teach," Favour replied. "There is a difference. Difficult means a problem. Expensive means high value." She closed the book in front of her and opened the Physics folder. "Now. Let us talk about pressure."

It was nearly six o'clock when Favour looked up and realised the light in the room had changed — the bright afternoon gold replaced by the softer, lower light of early evening coming through the window.

"We have to stop," she said.

Princess looked up from the problem she was midway through and made a sound of protest so genuine and unguarded that it was clearly involuntary. She looked faintly surprised at herself for making it.

Favour looked at her steadily. "Same time on Saturday," she said, packing up her materials.

"Saturday?" A pause. "Not tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow you have school. Saturday we have time to go deeper. Two hours minimum."

Princess nodded. She began to close her own books, slowly, with the reluctance of a person leaving somewhere they had not expected to want to stay.

"Teacher Favour." Her voice was careful.

"Hmm."

"Did you —" She stopped. She looked at her books. "Never mind."

"Say it."

A beat. "Did you mean what you said? That I can go faster than you?"

Favour picked up her bag. She looked at Princess — this complicated, brilliant, bruised child who had been told, in a hundred indirect ways over the past two years, that she was less than she was. She considered her answer with the seriousness it deserved.

"I do not say things I do not mean," she said. "It is one of my better qualities." She moved toward the door. "Read through the pressure chapter tonight. Not to memorize. Just to read. Let your brain meet the material before we meet it together on Saturday."

She went to the door. Then she stopped, as though remembering something, and turned back.

"Princess."

The girl looked up.

"You are going to be a doctor," Favour said. Simply. Without qualification or condition. "I am telling you this now so that you know, and so that on the days when you do not believe it yourself, you can borrow my certainty until yours comes back."

Princess stared at her.

Favour nodded once and went out.

In the main room, Grandma was sitting with a bowl of something and the quiet satisfaction of a woman who had been listening to everything through the thin wall and was very pleased with what she had heard. She looked up at Favour with eyes that were warm and knowing and a little amused.

"You will take something before you go?" she asked.

"No, Mama, thank you." Favour adjusted the wig — it had shifted slightly left during the session, which it tended to do when she was leaning forward repeatedly, a structural issue she had not yet resolved. "I will see myself out."

"Come back on Saturday," Grandma said.

"I will."

She went out into the evening, through the compound and through the gate, back onto the road that was cooling now as the day released its heat, and walked home in the gathering dusk with the specific sense of satisfaction that only came from a day's work that had been done exactly as well as it could be done.

It did not happen often.

When it did, she paid attention to it.

She paid attention to it now, all the way home.