Chapter 5: What She Saw
The Duncan House
"What are you doing here?"
Adam stared at Juno, who Teddy had just let in, genuinely caught off guard.
"I told you already — I'd help you study!"
Juno walked in and looked around with easy curiosity. "Nice place. Pretty clean. Is this your sister?"
"Yeah."
Adam nodded automatically, his brain working overtime.
He'd just gotten rid of one terrifying person, and before he could even enjoy an hour of peace, an even more terrifying one had shown up at his front door.
Amy could at least be partly explained by his looks — she'd been drawn in like most people were. But Juno was different. She openly didn't care much for guys in general. So what was this about?
Was it because he'd been hovering around nine-year-old Sheldon Cooper? Was she suspicious of that? No, that didn't hold up either. Sheldon was a kid, and Adam was fifteen — weird older brother territory at most, not anything worth flagging.
Or was she actually being genuine? Just a classmate who happened to like him well enough and was offering to help?
"You're doing it again."
Juno watched his expression cycle through several things at once, clearly entertained. "You're sitting there wondering — why is Juno suddenly being so helpful? Does she like me? Does she want something?"
"It's just... a little unexpected."
Adam met her eyes and immediately felt like she could read every thought he'd just had written across his face. He laughed dryly and nodded.
Juno and Amy were both sharp, but completely differently so.
Amy worked for it. She studied people, catalogued their reactions, and built her understanding of them deliberately and carefully. That's why Adam had been able to perform around her — it took her time to process and verify.
Juno just saw things. Instantly. Instinctively. There was no lag, no process you could exploit. You were just already figured out before you'd finished your sentence. That was a completely different kind of terrifying.
So with Juno, Adam had made a decision early on: no performances. No angles. Just honest answers, because anything else would backfire immediately and make things significantly worse.
"Okay, I'll stop messing with you."
Juno tilted her head, and for just a second her expression did something that looked almost shy — which Adam was about eighty percent sure was deliberate — before she laughed. "It's not what you're thinking."
"Then what is it?"
"Simple. I like you."
Juno sat down next to him and started flipping through his textbooks like she owned them. "There are genuinely very few people our age who will stop and help an old lady cross the street or spend time with the elderly guys at the park. And you do it consistently, not just once for show. You're kind of a disaster in other areas, but that part of you is actually real. That's rare."
"Is that a compliment?"
Adam was caught between laughing and being mildly offended. But underneath that he felt genuine relief. Six months of small good deeds hadn't done much for his lifespan, but apparently it had done something for his reputation where it actually mattered.
"Obviously it's a compliment."
Juno's mouth curved slightly. "You think I'd be here if I had a crush on you?"
"Absolutely not."
Adam shook his head with a dry laugh.
"I don't have a lot of friends," Juno said simply, flipping to a page and scanning it. "Basically none, if we're being accurate. My grades are good and you clearly need help. So — friends?"
Adam's instinct was to say no. Pure self-preservation. But he couldn't come up with a reason that would hold up under Juno's scrutiny, and turning down a reasonable, genuine offer repeatedly was exactly the kind of thing that would make her think he had something to hide.
Which he did. But still.
Besides — she wasn't Amy. This wasn't some complicated dynamic with consequences he couldn't predict. It was just a smart classmate offering to help him study.
"...Wouldn't that be a lot of trouble for you?"
"It's mutual. That's how studying with someone works."
Juno's smile shifted into something more genuine when she understood he was agreeing. She'd been to five different therapists by this point in her life, all of whom had varying opinions about what was going on with her. She was used to being treated like she was strange. Not having many friends was the polite way to put it — one acquaintance she was sort of friendly with from a distance was closer to the truth.
"You've gotten up to here?" She tapped the page.
"Yeah."
"Questions?"
"How did you know I had questions?"
"You keep flipping back to the same pages."
"That's..." Adam paused. "Can you tell which parts specifically are confusing me?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Everyone's gaps are different. Something that stumps a regular student and something that stumps a genius aren't always the same thing. I don't know yet which one you are."
With Juno actually walking him through the material, Adam's pace picked up significantly. His real problem had never been raw ability — he had decades of general life experience behind him, and it was only 1989. A lot of the underlying logic wasn't new to him. The issue was that his thinking patterns didn't map cleanly onto the American curriculum, and Juno had a way of finding the exact point where his understanding broke down and fixing it without a lot of unnecessary explanation.
"You're actually pretty sharp."
About an hour in, Juno looked up with mild surprise. "I knew PJ Duncan as someone who'd never voluntarily picked up a textbook. You're nothing like that. You could genuinely get into college."
"Just college?"
Adam, caught up in the momentum of actually getting things, felt a flicker of confidence. "That's the bar we're setting?"
"Fair enough." Juno smiled. "A good university."
"What about an Ivy League school?"
Juno's expression became more careful. "That's a different conversation."
"Can it happen or not?"
"It's not easy from a public high school," she said honestly. "Most of the students competing for those spots come from private schools with better resources, better connections, stronger academic programs. Look at how many kids from our school get into the Ivy League any given year — it's not a big number."
"Can you do it?"
Adam asked directly.
Juno just smiled.
That answered that. The rare students who stayed in public school and still made it to the Ivy League were out there — and Juno was clearly one of them.
"If you can do it, I can do it."
Adam said it mostly to himself.
"Then work for it."
They exchanged a look — not quite a smile, something more like a mutual acknowledgment — and then from the living room directly above them came a very obvious, very deliberate kissing sound.
End of Chapter 5
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