Not my characters, and I make no money from them.

I'm publishing this as an unbeta'd, less stylishly rigorous story. My hope is that I can keep up more frequent updates in this format, and hopefully not interfere with my writing or posting schedule of other stories.

St. Paul, Minnesota

October, 2006

Jack Twist looked up at the knock on his door. "Can ya give me a second?"

"Sure."

"You ain't goin' out with the colloquium speaker?"

"Nope." Ennis pressed his lips and made a face. "Condensed matter."

Jack nodded. "Alright, but my office hour don't end for another ten minutes."

Ennis nodded again, but walked in to Jack's small office and sat himself down. He knew as well as any professor that no students come to office hours for intro classes like Jack was teaching. They sat in comfortable silence, Jack answering e-mails, until noon rolled around, and Jack hopped up to grab his jacket. "Robin and Rich were talkin' about Smoky's earlier. That sound alright to you?"

"Yup," he nodded, and followed Jack down towards Robin's office, where all the Astro professors met for lunch every day. Well, all the Astro professors, plus two Astro post-docs, and one quiet gravitational theoretical physicist, whose admission to these Astro-only proceedings was granted by a gleaming platinum ring on his right hand.

Laramie, Wyoming

September, 1992

The TA grumped a bit, turning to the class. The topic was kinematics, and Jack was bored. He popped a piece of gum into his mouth and slumped back against the chair. Mostly he doodled his way through discussion section. The TA was a dry, quiet boy, who explained everything in ways that made it even harder to understand than the professor or the book. He didn't hardly ever raise his eyes to look at the class. He was just an undergrad, but some kind a genius, and knowin' that only made Jack less happy to have that lanky boy explainin' crap to him.

Leaving discussion, Jack caught up with Ron and Gayle. "You believe how boring that guy is?"

"Yeah," Gayle looked unhappy. "He might be smart, but he is not ready to be teaching. He doesn't know how to explain anything."

Ron just shrugged. "We have to do the homework anyway. I don't see how it hurts."

"Well, it hurts my boredom to be stuck in that crappy-ass discussion with Mr. Mumbles."

Gayle giggled, and Ron looked away. Jack turned in time to see Mr. Mumbles himself stalk away. "Shit."

"Relax, it's not like he controls your grade."

Jack nodded. Gayle was right. Mr. Mumbles wasn't even their grader, just discussion section lecturer. He shrugged it off, and headed back to Ron's campus apartment to start work in earnest on the homework.

The first few weeks of classes proceeded no differently, though the homework got harder, and with it Jack's patience for his TA that simply couldn't help him with it, because the kid didn't speak English, just math, and Jack didn't care to know so much about differential equations.

Ennis, too, was growing frustrated. He didn't seem to be able to communicate with the class he was TAing. Most of the students were trying their hardest, but there was that one, Jack Twist, who always had a smart remark, who gazed at him with disdain, who purposely tried not to understand what Ennis was saying. Jack was wearing out his welcome. Ennis didn't like to say so, but he was nervous as hell being up in front of a group of people like that, trying to teach them, like some kind of authority figure, and only about a year older than most of the people in the class. He was already scared shitless, and Jack's negativity was wearing on Ennis. He came home worried. He left for class worried. He sat in the kitchen of his tiny off-campus apartment worried. He didn't think TAing a class would take too much time or energy, but with Jack Twist and his way of pointing out anything Ennis did wrong so the class could snicker at it... well, it certainly wasn't worth the six dollars an hour he was making. He wasn't doing it for the money, though, and he knew it. It would look awful good on his CV come grad school admission time.

When midterm reports went out, Jack found out he was failing Introduction to Mechanics for Majors. Shit. Not failing, exactly. But he had a C, and it was really the same thing as far as your GPA is concerned. Jack'd always been a smart boy, sharp as a tack, with unique problem-solving skills, good interpersonal skills, and mighty fine talent with a trumpet, too, but his second semester in college was wearin' him down. First semester he'd gotten a D in Calculus II, and was retaking that now. He could not afford a C in physics. And shit, he knew what this meant. He'd have to see the professor.

Jack found Professor Pitt in his office on the fourth floor. Dr. Pitt was a researcher in gravitational field theory, which Jack thought was a scary enough name. He'd once opened a textbook on the subject, and if you thought the name was scary, you ought to see the math.

But Dr. Pitt wasn't interested in teaching his students any more than he was interested in flying them all to the moon. He mumbled something to Jack about not having the time to go over the exams with him, told him maybe he needed a tutor. Told him maybe he should see the TA.

Against his better judgment, and feeling pretty lost for alternatives, Jack approached Mr. Mumbles after discussion that Friday.

"Ennis? I, uh, I'm not doin' so well in this class."

"You don't say," The lanky kid mumbled. Ennis was growin' in a bit of facial hair, and had recently cut the hair on his head to a crew cut. He had a serious, if withdrawn, look about him.

Jack creased his brows at this bit of unexpected sarcasm from such a soft spoken person. "Hey now. It ain't funny."

Ennis stood and fixed Jack with a stare, spiraling into the crystal blue for just a second until he remembered that those eyes belonged to the worst smartypants physics major Ennis had ever met. "Yeah, well, you don't try very hard is all."

Jack shifted from foot to foot. He wondered what in hell gave Ennis the idea that he didn't try very hard. He was at home toiling over the damned homework for this class nearly every night. He spent probably three hours per question or something, and got together regularly with Ron an Gayle to try and work through them. He studied for every test. He was always in lecture and always took notes. He even came to the crappy discussion sections. Jack was finding out the hard way that a smart kid from a rural Wyoming high school wasn't the same as a smart kid in The University of Wyoming physics program. Kids here came from all over, and were smarter than him. He was trying his hardest all the time, and it just weren't good enough. But he didn't know how to say these things to Ennis in a way he would understand. That kid was such a genius, probably everything came to him naturally, and he didn't understand that a person could put good time and effort into something, and still get nothing to show for it. Instead, all he said was, "Don't know how to try goddamn harder," in a soft, soul-sore voice.

Ennis was stealing up a snappy retort, not his style, but thinking he had to put Jack in his place, when something in Jack's tone made him look in those blue eyes again, and what he saw this time wasn't cockiness at all, but some odd emotion lying at the brink of both hopelessness and hope, and Ennis knew in that instant he had to help this poor boy. He'd been there. There wasn't anything good about that kind of frustration. Squinting hard at Jack, he simply said, "You really are trying, ain't you?"

"Yeah." Jack sounded breathless.

"Yeah. Physics can be pretty hard sometimes." Ennis was looking down at his notebooks of notes.

Jack stared at Ennis then. This boy, he was a genius! He couldn't find physics hard in the way Jack found it hard. Jack was just about to go find a new major. Maybe English. He was good at communicatin'. Maybe he could try journalism? But in Ennis's quiet admission, some sort of secret that he wasn't a genius, had been down this path before, sprung something like hope in Jack.

Silence hung in the air between them, before Ennis squinted back up at Jack, his head cocked to one side. "You, uh, you want me to tutor you or somethin'?"

Jack licked his lips. "Yeah. I mean, that would be nice. I could pay ya."

"No need. I'm your TA."

"Yeah. Uh, thanks. An'... sorry I been such a dick?"

Jack felt an unusual warmth in his chest when he saw the corner of Ennis's mouth quirk up, though Ennis was lookin' down trying to hide that.

"Hey, you, uh, wanna go catch a drink, work out the arrangements."

"You ain't of drinkin' age, and neither am I."

Jack shrugged. "That's why we got fake Ids."

"I don't, uh, that's illegal."

Jack chuckled a couple times. "Whatever. Alright. How about some food. Taco Tower or somethin'?"

Ennis was thinking that he'd rather eat alone, like usual, but he hadn't gone grocery shopping, and Taco Tower was sounding pretty good. Still, the company of this overzealous kid probably wasn't going to be too good. Weighing the alternatives, Ennis shook his head. "I'm just gonna head on home."

"Aww, come on, you ain't no fun. Look, I stayed after, an' I missed my friends. Least you could do is chow with me."

Seeing that he was going to have to put up with a half hour of whining either way, Ennis opted for a half hour with a taco rather than a half hour standing in the classroom. "Well, alright." He set about to erasing the white board.

"Alright!" Jack said. "I just hate to eat alone. No one to talk to."

That was the idea, Ennis thought, but all he just said "ummhmm" and nodded.

They walked together across campus towards Taco Tower. Jack pulled out a cigarette. Ennis took one of his own, but asked Jack for a light.

"Say, you from around here?" Jack asked.

"Out by Sage."

"Oh. Alright. I'm from Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border. Most of the kids in the physics program are from the bigger cities. From Laramie, Gillette, Casper. How a rural boy like you get to be a big, smart physicist?"

"Could ask you the same," Ennis pointed out, inhaling long and slow on his cigarette.

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess. Well, my home wasn't exactly a place I wanted ta be growin' up, so I spent a lot of time at school."

Ennis nodded, but didn't say anything more about his own past. And so they walked in silence down to Taco Tower.

They sat at a small table down in one corner of the restaurant. Ennis got three bean tacos and inhaled them. Jack got steak and took his time, savoring the taste. Jack had also ordered a beer with his, but he hadn't even been carded. This was one of those college town places that thought business was more valuable than not being fined.

"You know, I really am tryin' physics."

Ennis nodded.

"I failed Calc II last semester, and I can't do that again. Probably didn't try in that class as hard as I should on account of the professor never collected the homework. That was my own stupid shit. But this semester I been workin' hard. I can't get no C in this class, Ennis."

Ennis was taken off balance by hearing his given name come out of that boy's mouth so effortlessly.

Jack sighed deep. "Even if the bad grades don't ruin my chance of ever gettin' inta grad school, my old man said that if I get anything less than a B again, he's gonna cut off my school money."

That caught Ennis's attention. "Well, uh, Jack? Physics is hard. Might not always make a B."

Jack heard what Ennis was sayin', sayin' he wasn't too smart. He guessed he knew that was true, but it still hurt some to hear it said so plain like that. "Yeah," was all Jack said. A minute passed before Jack went on. "Yeah, well, I at least gotta get some scholarships or somethin' lined up before that time, and I can't do that with C's. Besides, it don't bode too well for me to be getting C's an I ain't even past my first intro class."

Ennis nodded. This was true. He hated to say it, and would never say it to Jack, but he didn't think Jack was cut out to be a physicist. He just didn't have the raw know-how. Ennis knew what it felt like to feel that way, though, so maybe he was wrong about Jack and ought to help him.

"What about you? You got any scholarships?" Jack was eyeing him in such a way that gave Ennis the impression that it wasn't simply an academic question for Jack.

"A couple," was all Ennis said.

"Yeah?" Jack wasn't going to leave well enough alone.

"I, uh, got a scholarship from the state on account of my folks is dead."

The silence hammered hard for an instant, before Jack blew out a breath. "Shit, that's hard," was all he said, before he went staring into the oblivion behind Ennis.

They finished their food in silence, but Jack finally broached the topic. "So, uh, when you willin' ta tutor me."

"You free Wednesday afternoons?"

"Yeah, I get out a class at 1:50."

"How 'bout 2:00, then."

"Sure. My dorm has a study lounge hardly anybody ever uses, down in the basement. Not even really a lounge, just a little room. They call it 'the library', I guess 'cause it has a few books on the walls."

Ennis nodded.

"Anyone can get inta the basement, 'cause they have classes down there. I'm in Gilliam Hall. I'll meet you down there next Wednesday, at 2pm, then?"

Ennis nodded.

Jack stood up from the table. "Well, listen, it's been fun, but I got tickets to the basketball game, an' I gotta go."

Ennis nodded.

Jack hesitated, feelin' a strange sort of gratitude for Mr. Mumbles. He licked his lips again and smiled lightly. "Nice ta finally know you, Ennis del Mar."

Ennis looked up at Jack, catching blue eyes too earnest and too close for his own comfort, and looked away. "Yup."

"Alright." And Jack was gone, into the night, goin' with his friends to his basketball game. Ennis was alone again. Ennis usually liked alone, but suddenly he felt Jack's absence, and wished for that company for what might a been the first time in his life.