Two wide blue eyes blinked behind the screen of her glasses, and then blinked again, surprised, as if questioning reality. Benoit had just...thanked her? Legitimately? Teachers had, by an large, gotten angry every time she corrected them, fixed a mistake...reminded them that they for all their degrees and schooling and experience, they were still knew less than some kid who'd read a book about it once. But there was no stopping her. Getting facts wrong was bad enough, but teaching them to people, when the real answer was so obvious? That was an unforgivable sin. So she spoke up, and they got upset, calmed down eventually....and then she did it again. It drove them mad. And that was just run-of-the-mill professors, reasonably nice in other circumstances. Leddy? Never nice, in her experience. Just pissed off or exasperated, treating her like a particularly troublesome chore he had to do.
But here he was, really noticing her, as if for the first time. It would been so nice a feeling, if she didn't recognize the exact expression on his face....the one people got when she finally did or said something to prove the claims always being made about her. It usually took a few days, unless she showed off on purpose. But Brooklyn didn't do that, because for her, it was just a daily struggle, as much disability as ability, a pointed, constant reminder than she was different. And people made sure she'd never be allowed to forget that fact....as if she could forget anything if she tried, by making it the focus of every conversation about her, glossing over the monumental difficulty it brought into her life and focusing on the novelty of it all.
And so now it began...the testing. Whenever someone even half as smart as Benoit clearly was caught even a glimpse of her abilities, they had to test her, one way or another. Rattle off whatever math they considered 'difficult', ask her to count the pennies in a jar, tell her to speed-read a book and then ask what word was on which line of a particular page. Y'know, do a trick, like she was a show-pony or a fancy new gizmo. If not annoyance, disdain, the had to be what came next.
But instead....he just moved on, beaconing her over to the computer, finally deciding to include her in what she'd been watching him do for two hours, just waiting for this exact moment. It was an opportunity the little blonde pounced on, finally being invited in, as it were, scooching her chair in right beside him and leaning perilously forward to get a good look at whatever fact-filled chaos lurked on that computer screen of his. That was where her attention was...not on the fact that her face was so close to his that the slightest tilt would have twisted together golden and crimson locks, or that the jacket he'd unintentionally made a gift of was the only thing between her back and his bare torso. Physical sensation...as well as sound and smell and whatever else was all shoved into the background routine, to clear up more pathways for her eyes to soak up the pile of 'infocaine' there for the taking.
All that mattered were the numbers, words, patterns and all the implications they promised. He was trying to start her off slow, but Brooklyn was already far, far ahead, half-dilated pupils scanning back and forth barely inches from the screen, flash memorizing every letter and digit. Not all of it made sense to her, but it was all a matter of context, which would only come with a wider frame of reference. Finally, she spoke up, not breaking eye contact with the LCD lighting up her face.
"Some of these conversations are partial. And some of the windows are overlapping. This is clunky. Can I mess around with the settings? I need the full view. More print on page or this is going to take forever." She rattled off, already reaching for the mouse before he'd even answered, not skipping a beat as she started flipping through the menus, explaining as she went in clipped sentences, spoken slowly, like to a child. It wasn't about what she wanted, it was about what she needed in order to learn this efficiently.
"I need to reformat all the text. No font. No spaces. Your messenger doesn't have to list handles next to each response. Wastes space. Just color-code it...." She went on and on, talking to herself, 'fixing' everything as she said it, turning Benoit's desktop, carefully-tailored to his own taste, into what looked like a jumbled mess of tiny letters and numbers, breaking the information presented into the most simple state above the ones and zeroes it was arranging into it. That was fine, she could fix that right back the way it was when she was done..already saved his usual format as the default.
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