When Amy Santiago started tutoring Jake Peralta at the beginning of the year he didn't think anything was going to change. All he had to do was attend all of the sessions and he wouldn't get detention, so he thought he was just going to screw off like he had every year and with every tutor he'd been assigned before. But apparently she was chosen as his last ditch effort because it was already junior year and whoever was in charge of making sure kids graduated all right put him on academic probation with future valedictorian Amy Santiago.

All he planned to do was screw off, not actually do any work. But it didn't take long for Jake to realize that he liked her smile better than her scowl.

Once he started paying attention and listening to her when she'd go over whatever subject she was focusing on that day it wasn't hard at all to remember what he learned and how to do stuff by himself.

Amy looked so pleased the first day he actually asked an active question. It had something to do with how to solve a problem in Algebra II and he already had the correct and easy way to solve it down, but he asked her if taking a shortcut with certain steps would work. He maintained that he only wanted to do it quicker, but she said it showed initiative and that he was actually thinking about it.

And she said yes, that his shortcut would work.

When he started coming to tutoring with most of his homework for that day completed, he always said that he was bored and did it at the end of class instead of just sitting around like he used to. But that was a lie.

He actually did do homework while he was in class, but he didn't always get the same amount of free time for every class every day, so he would just head to the next class straightaway instead of lollygagging and use the few minutes of passing period to work on what he had left, and then he'd use whatever free time he got in whichever class to complete it. He had all the core subjects early in the day, so when he'd get ¾ of the way done on Algebra II homework he'd start on Physics until he got ¾ of the way done on that, and continue on and on so it wouldn't look like he was completing it systematically. And he always made sure to never have any of it completely done because Jake Peralta completing all of his homework really was suspicious.

Why he started doing homework at all was so he could spend a good portion of the time allotted for tutorials just cracking jokes and making Amy laugh.

They had this whole friendly teasing thing going on, and it was good.

He liked tutoring with Amy Santiago. He liked spending time with Amy Santiago.

He liked Amy Santiago.

"You keep this up and you won't even need me anymore. Really, you never needed me, but you only need two more weeks of all B's and you won't be on academic probation anymore. I bet you never expected to do so well to get out of tutoring, did you?" Amy grinned and patted him on the back like it was some big accomplishment. Like it was something he should be proud of, and happy about.

He hadn't really given how well he was currently doing in school a second thought. He'd been on whatever sort of tutoring program they had at that grade level for years. Since 6th grade. And while he never did so bad that he had to be held back (which mattered more before high school when kids jumped ahead or behind or stayed- he honestly didn't know which math class was supposed to be on level for 11th grade) he had never done well enough to get out of a tutoring program. He's gone from intensive tutoring to just regular tensive tutoring as his grades improved throughout a year, but he'd never done well enough to be like dropped from tutoring. He'd never done well enough to get out of tensive tutoring. So he really hadn't even thought about doing well enough to get out of graduating-next-year intensive tutoring with first choice for valedictorian Amy Santiago.

He really should have thought about it sooner, but he didn't so the shock made it hard to cover up how upset he was to learn that if he kept getting good grades that meant she wasn't going to have any reason to see him anymore.

"What? What are you talking about? Like I don't have to do this stuff with you anymore?" Jake made a quick call to phrase it as an obligation. He had to do stuff with her, not get to do stuff with her. It wasn't a privilege.

"Yup," Amy smiled. "You'll be free from this jail of a library you were sentenced to before I became your warden."

Jake's laugh was loud and empty.

Of course Jake started sabotaging his grades. What other choice did he have? What other option did he have?

He didn't know what to do. He didn't know what he was doing.

He let his grades start slipping. Slipping and sliding. All he had to do was let one class get a 79 and then hopefully the counter would reset.

And maybe he wasn't as stupid as his history of failed classes implied, but he wasn't smart enough to like orchestrate a calculated drop in scores.

So he didn't know how much was too much. And from one week to the next he went from an 82 to a 75 in Algebra II.

He always hated that class. He just didn't turn in his homework and he'd rather be safe than sorry (safe as in dropping his grade too much than sorry for going passed the deadline of two weeks) so he kinda bombed a test and a quiz (to be fair he didn't know that tests were worth more credit than quizzes, though that wouldn't have made a difference if he did).

And as his tutor Amy got weekly updates and was super worried that he was acting all normal from one day until the next and she didn't know something was bothering him and he didn't tell her.

He didn't have an excuse prepared and so when she asked him what was up he said he was stressed. He didn't say about what though.

He didn't know how he thought this was going to work. Cause it wasn't working now. But he didn't know how to fix it.

She didn't smile when she saw him anymore.

He didn't even enjoy spending time with her like he thought he would because he disappointed and worried her, and it wasn't fun anymore.

Amy didn't laugh at his jokes anymore.

He wanted to make her laugh again. And he wanted to laugh with her.

She was disappointed in him, but he at least got to see her face this way. If he told her the truth then he wouldn't get to see her at all. He wouldn't get to see her frowning and mad at him for brushing her off when she asked him what was wrong.

He stopped going to tutoring when he couldn't take her frowning anymore. He thought he could, but he just couldn't deal with it in the end. It was easier to not see her face than see it frowning at him all the time. He had to face that he was never going to get back to her smiles.

Even though Amy was the reason he was sabotaging his good grades, she was also the reason he started getting good grades in the first place. He knew it was childish and immature to be lashing out, but it wasn't exactly as active as sabotage and lashing out sounded like. He just stopped trying. Apathetic and all.

Letting it all fall away and mess up felt good, and a hundred times better than trying to hold it all up. The only one he was hurting was himself. Or his future self.

People always said how important stuff like grades were down the line, and Jake knew they were right, but it still never felt like the reality of the future was applicable to him. It was like when you tried to comprehend insanely large numbers. If you were asked to picture a pile of a trillion pennies and then picture a pile of a quadrillion pennies it wouldn't matter because human brains just couldn't visualize stuff like that. Just two big piles of pennies.

Jake's brain couldn't comprehend the future. He couldn't picture, visualize, or even imagine his own future.

No matter how many futures came and went with Jake the next one up didn't matter, just like the last one hadn't. And the one before that and the one before that. None of them ever mattered.

Amy started trying to approach him outside of the time they used to spend together. Of course he never went to the library anymore, but she went farther out of her way. When she started heading to his classes during passing period he started to make sure he was always 15 minutes late if not more, and he just walked out of class 15 minutes before the bell rang no matter how many times the teachers threatened him with detention if he didn't sit down. He probably had years worth of detention slips built up by then.

So he'd been avoiding her for a month by that point. He was avoiding a lot of stuff. He stuck around his usual group of friends just enough that it wasn't obvious that he was not at all okay. Even though that was just at school. He stopped messing around and having fun and avoided everyone after hours.

So he'd been doing everything he could to ditch Amy for a solid month when Friday night came around. He was in the middle of lying on his bed and using all of his skillz to sling shot rubber band after rubber band trying to push a little league trophy on the edge of his shelf into falling off when his bedroom door opened with a vengeance.

He thought his mom had left for work almost half an hour ago, so the fact that she was still there surprised him.

Even more surprising than that was the person standing in his doorway was the one and only Amy Santiago.