"I don't understand!" Maya huffed, throwing down her pencil. "Why do I keep getting the wrong answer?"
Setting down her own pencil, Isadora glanced over Maya's work.
The group had gathered to study together a few weeks into the new semester, and Isadora had offered to host, since she had to be at home to watch her younger siblings anyways. It was the first time that many of them had been to Isadora's house, a small apartment in Greenwich Village. The building wasn't high, and it was made of chipped red bricks, the fire escapes black iron. It was really a two bedroom apartment; Isadora and her four-years-younger sister Iyla shared one room, and her one-year-older brother Ishaan shared the other one with her nine-years-younger brother Isaac. According to Isadora, their couch pulled out to make a double bed in the small living room, in which her parents slept.
Isadora, Riley, Maya, Lucas, and Zay were all sitting on the floor in Isadora's tiny shared bedroom, while her younger siblings were playing in the other bedroom. Farkle was absent; he had told the group he would come late after his therapy appointment.
"How do you find the area of a trapezoid again?" Maya asked.
"One half of the sum of the bases multiplied by the height," Lucas mumbled, squinting down at his own chemistry homework.
Maya groaned. "I'm lost. Where's Farkle when you need him?" She sat back against the window and screamed, jumping back in surprise when someone knocked on it.
Isadora got up to open the window to admit Farkle into her bedroom. "Maya was just talking about you," she smirked.
He raised an eyebrow. "Yeah?" Then she looked at Maya as Isadora helped him through the window off the fire escape. "God, Maya, you look like you saw a ghost."
"I wasn't expecting you to come through the window!" Maya defended herself. "I thought you would come through the door like a normal person! God, Farkle, you almost gave me a heart attack!" She punched him in the arm, who deflected it with ease.
"Sorry." He grinned sheepishly. "But it was pretty funny, you should've seen your face." He jumped back and made a face of mock horror.
"Jerk!" Maya shot at him.
He laughed, turning to his girlfriend to peck her cheek. "Where's your siblings?"
"Isaac's room," Isadora said, sitting back down on the floor as Farkle stepped around the group and opened his backpack. "How was therapy?"
"Fine." Farkle smiled, and picked up Maya's trig homework. "You used cosine when you should have used sine."
Maya smacked her forehead. "Of course!"
Standing up on the beige carpet, Lucas crossed the room to look at Maya's homework. Taking a closer look, he said, "Well, technically you could have used cosine, but then it would equal 4/x."
Farkle squinted. "Yeah, I guess that would work too."
Lucas shrugged. "I like math. It's easy when you realize there's only one answer."
"I understand that!" Maya protested. "I just don't know how to get that answer."
Riley, having already finished her homework, was sitting back against the wall drawing a purple cat. She wasn't really paying attention to the conversation, even if she could have understood it. Maya was distracted with her homework and hadn't been interpreting, and no one else had really been signing anything they said either.
She turned her head when she noticed Lucas's hand waving in the corner of her vision.
"What are you drawing?" Lucas signed and spoke the question, once he'd gotten her attention.
Riley turned around her sketchbook, smiling a little at Lucas's laugh. 'Purple cat.'
"Beautiful," Lucas said and signed. He scooted around Zay to settle down next to her, letting her rest her cheek on his shoulder.
She smiled absentmindedly at Maya, clearly getting frustrated.
"But if the angle can change even if the arc doesn't, how is it possible that its degree can still be equal to exactly half of the arc's degree?"
Farkle groaned. "I don't know, Maya, ask-"
"Farkle doesn't know something?" Zay sat up. "Call the newspapers!"
"Yeah, yeah," Farkle rolled his eyes.
'What's going on?' Riley asked, signing way outside of her chest so that Lucas could see them while still sitting next to her.
'Maya doesn't understand trig,' Lucas signed back. He used the sign for 'math', and then fingerspelled 'trig' after, not sure if there was a designated sign for trigonometry.
Riley smirked. 'Same.'
Lucas paused, glancing down at Riley's face to see her looking almost sad as she watched Maya and Zay making fun of Farkle. 'Have you thought any more about the cochlear implant?'
Riley sat up, looking at Maya before signing. 'Not here. Maya doesn't know. Just you.'
'Why haven't you told her yet?' Lucas asked, concerned.
Riley watched the back of Maya's head out of the corner of her eye as she signed. 'I don't know how she'll respond.'
'You won't know unless you bring it up,' Lucas pointed out.
'I know.' Riley sat back down, leaning her head back against her boyfriend's shoulder. 'Do you want to go out tomorrow night?' She changed the subject.
'Sure,' Lucas agreed. 'It's been a while since we've been on a proper date.'
A/N: Not much happening in this chapter but I wanted to try to get the ball rolling on fanfictions again. Gonna focus on getting some Rucas and Joshaya fluff out here.
Kisses,
C
