Ten.

In Biology on Monday, we got our papers back. By sheer luck, Mrs. Hancock handed the paper to me instead of Madison. I had expected a good grade - we went beyond the five required sources to eight - but I hadn’t expected it to be this good. 99%. Madison had turned around to look at me, tentatively, so I held up the paper with the grade on the top. I watched her face light up like streetlights. Before the end of the hour, I asked around. I couldn’t be sure, not completely, but it sounded like we had the highest grade in the class. That gave me an idea.

After class, I met up with Madison so she could see our paper. She still didn’t meet my eyes, but whatever had happened on Thursday afternoon seemed to have faded away from her. She had a lot of time to decompress, I supposed. But before she could flip through to the second page, I handed Madison ten dollars from my wallet. It was all the money I had for lunch this week, but I was acclimatized to not eating at school.

“What’s this?” she asked, staring at the ten dollar bill instead of my eyes.

“We made a bet, remember?”

She didn’t remember. But she did meet my expectations: she looked up. Her eyes searched mine for answers. Her eyebrows pushed together in the middle, awash with confusion. The milky brown inside her eyes seemed to swirl around behind her glasses, like moonlight in a pond. If she stayed like this forever, I think I could be happy.

“You said, ‘I bet you ten dollars we get the best grade in the class’. It was in your text.” I had a high attention to detail, though I had read her text a hundred times.

She didn’t know what to do, what to say. She stared down at the ten dollar bill and the grade on her paper. Honestly, I think she was overwhelmed. Where did this rank on her best moments in life? I wished I could read her mind…

“Thank you,” she finally managed, though it came out as no more than a whisper.

“You earned it,” I said sincerely, and I should have left it like that. The smartest thing to do was allow everything to fall back into normalcy: the same Madison Bell and the same Jamie Lawson who worked on their poster presentation together less than a month ago. But I didn’t want that anymore. What did Madison want?

“Madison?”

“Uh… what?”

“Let’s be friends, alright?”

Madison smiled. She smiled so brightly it dimmed the overhead fluorescents. She smiled so wide I could count her teeth to double digits. She smiled so much the skin around her eyes wrinkled and bent. She smiled so sincerely, so honestly, I knew there was never a forced smile I would mistake for the real thing ever again.

“Alright.”