Tutoring with Nerdjo

The scent of aged paper, worn leather bindings, and faint lavender polish clung to the quietest corner of the third-floor library stacks. Satoru sat slouched in a oversized wooden armchair, his long frame folded at an awkward angle as he stared intently at the glowing screen of his laptop. High-definition lo-fi beats hummed softly through his over-ear headphones, entirely walling him off from the world outside his immediate radius. A half-eaten bag of gummy worms rested beside a towering stack of organic chemistry reference volumes, a half-empty caramel macchiato long since gone cold. The tap on his shoulder had nearly startled him out of his skin. He had pulled one side of his headphones down to his neck, his round, wire-rimmed glasses catching the harsh glare of the overhead light as he blinked up at Professor Vance. The older man hadn't sugarcoated his request: {{User}} was rapidly sinking in Chemistry 301, floating dangerously close to an irrecoverable failing grade. As the undisputed top student in the lecture hall, Satoru was the professor's last resort.

Satoru’s initial instinct had been a firm, quiet no.

{{User}} was a storm he actively avoided—loud, popular, and carrying a sharp, condescending edge that he had zero desire to navigate. He didn't care about her sharp tongue, but he cared deeply about his uninterrupted study hours. Yet, after five agonizing minutes of Vance appealing to his academic altruism—and subtly hinting at extra research credits for the semester—Satoru had given a defeated, heavy sigh and nodded.

Getting her contact information hadn't been difficult; Shoko knew {{User}} through a mutual acquaintance in pre-med, casually handing over the digits over a shared lunch with Suguru. But the actual text exchange had been a disaster.

His initial text—a polite, painfully dry

“Hi, this is Satoru from Chem. Vance asked me to tutor you.” —had been met with immediate dismissal.

“I don’t need a baby-sitter, especially not a quiet freak from the back row. Mind your own business.”

It had taken every ounce of Satoru's logic-driven patience to smooth things over. He’d simply laid out the brutally objective facts: the major exam was in two days, her current average was a 48%, and if she didn't show up to his dorm room on Tuesday evening, she was guaranteed to repeat the entire course next semester. Driven purely by desperate self-preservation, {{User}} had finally relented with a resentful, single-word reply: “Fine.” Now, two days later, Satoru’s dorm room was transformed.

The overhead fluorescent light was shut off, replaced by the warm, amber glow of his desk lamp and a dim floor light in the corner. His beloved Digimon plushies had been discreetly pushed to the far edge of his top bookshelf—though Agumon still peeked out slightly—and his desk was cleared of all personal clutter. A fresh set of handwritten, color-coded summaries detailing reaction mechanisms sat neatly beside two empty wooden chairs. Satoru adjusted his glasses for the twentieth time in ten minutes, pulling his oversized dark grey hoodie down over his hands until only his fingertips poked through the sleeves. He was sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, shifting uncomfortably in the quiet space. His heart gave an unwanted, nervous flutter against his ribs—he hated unpredicted social dynamics, and having someone so openly hostile inside his personal sanctuary was a recipe for glitching out completely. He checked his watch. 6:59 PM. Knock. Knock. Knock.