Make It Count Read Online Free PDF

away from him.
    “ ‘Princess Brat,’ ” he muttered.
    She clenched her jaw, but didn’t say anything.
    “Look, this isn’t going to work if you aren’t an active participant—”
    “Sounds good.” She began gathering her notebook and book again . She’d rather fail. Enough was enough. “I’ll ask for another tutor. No biggie.”
    He smacked his hand down on top of her notebook, and she froze. “No way are you getting out of this.”
    She glared at him, wishing she had superpowers of her own so she could incinerate him on the spot. Or better yet, steal his brain so she didn’t need a tutor. She concentrated really, really hard on stealing his brain, but unfortunately, she wasn’t an intelligence-stealing mutant.
    He sighed. “Look, let’s end this for today. Next session, on Thursday, make a list ahead of time of all the concepts you’re having trouble with and we’ll go over those. Okay?”
    A future of hearing the acronym NASDAQ every day, multiple times a day, with her parents breathing down her neck were the only reasons her mouth opened and she said reluctantly, “Okay. And can we keep this . . . you know . . . between us?”
    The name Max lay unspoken between them.
    Alec nodded. “No problem.”
    Kat wanted to vomit.
    Well, she didn’t want to vomit. Because vomiting was gross, and it was bad for her teeth, but she felt like she was going to vomit.
    Of all the tutors, why did she have to be assigned to Alec? Scrunchie-wearing Ashley looked mighty great right about now.
    Kat walked up the flight of stairs to her suite in McCoy Hall. As a sophomore, she had the option to move out of the dorms and into the on-campus apartments. She shared a bedroom with her friend Tara, and they shared a common room separating them from the other bedroom in the apartment, where their friends Casey and Shanna lived.
    She opened the front door of her suite and stomped her booted feet to get the feeling back into her frozen toes.
    “Hey,” Shanna said from a beanbag chair on the floor, where she was playing some fantasy video game with swords and guys in dented armor and women in cleavage-baring dresses. Kat sometimes wondered if the controller was permanently attached to her hand. It was Kat’s idea for all the roommates to pitch in to buy the beanbag for Shanna for her birthday so she would stop squinting at the TV from the couch.
    “Hey,” Kat mumbled. Shanna gave her a look underneath her dark fringed bangs and nodded in greeting. Kat trudged into her bedroom and threw her book bag onto her bed, then flounced onto the mattress on her back. The toilet flushed and Tara bounced out of the bathroom. “Hey, Kitty-Kat.”
    “Hey, Tare-Bear.” She stared up at the waffled ceiling, thinking it looked a lot like an inverted egg carton. The bed dipped and Tara’s scent, minty from the gum she always chewed, tickled her nose.
    “How was the new tutor?”
    Kat opened her eyes at Tara, her friend since freshman year, when they lived on the same dorm floor and had horrid, shower-averse roommates.
    “Guess who it is.”
    Tara scrunched up her nose in thought, accentuating the freckles splattered across the bridge of her nose, and toyed with a strand of her pixie-cut blonde hair over her ear. “Um . . . Theresa Spalding?”
    Theresa was in their speech class freshman year and did a totally creepy presentation on Jack the Ripper. Kat still had nightmares about it. “No.”
    Tara shifted her lips from side to side. “Okay, how about . . . Bryan Coulter?”
    Kat had gone on one date with Bryan Coulter. Turned out his job was to dress as a giant mouse at the local kids’ arcade. They’d made out in his car for a little, but when she later found a game ticket down her pants from the many that littered his car, she declined a second date.
    “Damn, I haven’t thought about him . . .” She shook her head. “Anyway, no. But thanks for the reminder.”
    “How about . . .”
    Kat bolted upright. “Seriously,