//------------------------------//
// Chapter 3 
// Story: Sour Love 
// by RomeoDKat 
//------------------------------//

	“What do you mean I can’t join the swim team?!?”

Apparently there are things that can keep me from joining the swim team. Since Indigo Zap and I still had some extra time before classes started once we had our uniforms on, we went straight to Dean Cadance’s office to make me an official member of the swim team.That’s where we hit a little snag.

“I didn’t say you were not able to join the team.” Dean Cadance said, trying to calm me down. “I’m saying that at the present moment, you can’t compete at meets with the rest of the team.”

“But what could possibly stop him from competing? He already has my approval and I’m sure the coach wouldn’t be opposed to having an extra person on the team.” Indigo Zap said, just as surprised at what Dean Cadance was saying as I was.

“It’s his grades that are stopping him from competing. He is still able to join the team, but the only thing that he will be allowed to do is attend practice.” Cadance answered simply.

“But that’s impossible! My grades from my previous school transferred over, right? And in my previous school, my grades were high enough to compete with the swim team. So what’s stopping me from competing here?

“You may have been able to compete with your previous school’s team, but this isn’t your previous school. Here, our students need to make at least a C or higher in all of their classes in order to compete in athletic competitions.

Of course, Principal Cinch would make higher standards for the academic performance needed to participate in athletics. In my previous school, just simply passing courses with a D was enough to be considered allowed in there athletics programs. But here, I needed a C. “So, what courses do I need to pull up?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Fortunately, you only need to pull up one class, physics.” She said trying to cheer me up. It only filled me with dread. Last time I checked, my physics grade was currently a D+.

Indigo Zap just stood there with a frown on her face, arms crossed, and sighed in frustration. She made it very well known that she was not pleased with what Cadance was telling us.

“So, what do you recommend that I do in order to raise my grade up?” I asked.

“Well, our school does have a tutoring program. Basically, we have various students that are doing well in their courses help students that are having trouble by becoming their personal tutors. In return, we give them a little bit of extra credit to their final grade.”

‘So, you give students that are having trouble tutors to improve their grades and give the extra credit to students that are already doing well. Both result in students possibly getting higher GPAs when they graduate. Very clever, Principal Cinch.’ I thought to myself.

“So for you, I would recommend you take advantage of the program.” Cadance continued.

“Yes he would!” Indigo Zap answered before I could. I just smiled and nodded to Dean Cadance to confirm that that’s what I would like to do.

She just smiled before browsing through the computer on her desk. “I only have one student that’s available, and she’s available at any time after school. Would you like to set that as your time for tutoring?”

So, my personal tutor is going to be a girl. “Yes please.” I said, not really having any other option.

“Okay.” She said as she looked at the clock. “I think that she’s actually on the school grounds right now, I can call her in if you want to meet her right now.”

“That would be nice actually.” I replied.

“Alright.” She said as she turned on the school’s PA system. “Miss Sour Sweet, could you please come to my office if you’re available?” 

I was suddenly filled with dread. Sour Sweet’s going to become my tutor. If I had any other options, I would have said no right on the spot. But Cadance said it herself, Sour Sweet was the only student avaliable that had signed up to tutor physics. ) So I stood there, kept my objections to myself, and mentally prepared for the shit storm that was going to come.

Around five minutes later, Sour Sweet walked in with a sweet smile on her face as she called out to Cadance. “Hello Dean Cadance, was there-.” She stopped talking as soon as she noticed me, and her happy expression turned to a slight look of rage. She started to make everybody in the room feel uncomfortable, but thankfully she didn’t blow up in a fit of rage. Instead, she turned to Dean Cadance again, giving her another smile. Only this smile was more forced than her previous one as she continued her greeting to Cadance. “Was there something you needed to speak with me about?” She said with a forced sweetness.

However, this did little to ease Cadance’s comfort level as she responded to Sour Sweet’s question. “Um, yes, I have a student here who would like to sign up for tutoring sessions for physics. Have you met White Foam?

Sour Sweet continued with her forced sweetness. “Oh yes, our lockers are right next to each other and we share four classes together.” Then she suddenly changed to the sour tone that I had been expecting. “Which is four too many classes than I would care to have with him.”

“Okay then, so I was wondering if you would be able to tutor him. I understand if you aren’t able to, but keep in mind that you are the only available tutor right now.” Cadance hesitantly said, still feeling uneasy about the situation at hand. “It is possible for me to make you a temporary tutor for him until another tutor opens up, if that's what you'd prefer."

Sour Sweet seemed to consider that for a moment. Then she turned to Indigo Zap and asked, [b“]I take it you have a hand in this, Indigo?” 

‘So asking Indigo why I need to raise my grade instead of asking me. Real classy Sour.’ I thought to myself as opposed to saying in to Sour Sweet.

Apparently Indigo wasn’t expecting Sour to include her in the conversation either, since it took her a few moments to give Sour a shaky answer. “…Oh, um, yeah. I actually want him to compete with our swim team, but his grades aren’t where they need to be, so...” 

Sour Sweet raised an eyebrow at Indigo’s response before asking, “He actually impressed you enough to make you want him to join?”

Indigo, clearly nervous by how Sour Sweet would react to her answer, shakily responded, "Um....yes actually. He actually beat me in the 500 meter freestyle."

Sour Sweet just stared at her with a deadpanned look, and gave a sigh in frustration. “Only because you want him on the team.” She said with disdain. Wait, she wasn’t actually going through with this, right?

She then turned Dean Cadance, returning to the forced sweet persona she had earlier. “Dean Cadance, I will be his physics tutor. At least until he finds someone else to tutor him.” She said, switching personas to let everybody know that she intends to make this a temporary arrangement if she can help it.

Cadance gave a sigh of slight relief before responding. “Okay, I’ll put you in the system with a mark for temporary tutor. As for scheduling, I'll let you and him take care of that.”She kindly stated as she typed a few things on her computer.

Sour’s smile wavered a little bit before responding. “Of course.” She then turned to me. “I’ll meet you in room 158 where we have our physics lectures around 2:45. It’s usually empty around that time. Don’t be late.” She then walked out of the room, not giving me enough time to react to her arrangements.

Cadance then turned to Indigo and me. “Well, you two better be off as well if you don’t want to miss your first class. You two have a good rest of the day. Let me know if Sour Sweet becomes too much of a handful for you, okay White Foam?” She said sweetly.

“Will do, you have a good rest of the day as well.” I said to her as Indigo and I left her office. I then turned to Indigo and said, “So, I guess I’ll see ya at practice tomorrow then.”

“Yeah, sure. See you then.” She said without much emotion. She seemed to have been thinking about what happened with Sour Sweet a few seconds ago. She then turned to me and worriedly asked, “Are you sure that you’re going to be okay with her as your tutor?”

“I should be fine. So long it gets my grade up, I should be able to struggle through Sour Sweet, right?”

She then turned away and muttered, “Yeah, if she actually helps you learn the material.”

I pretended that I didn’t listen, but I knew that she had a good point. Dealing with Sour Sweet everyday would mean nothing if I couldn’t learn the material in the process. But at this point, I didn’t have any other options. All I could do is hope that another tutor becomes available. “Don’t worry about, I’ll be fine. Trust me.” I tried to reassure Indigo. But at this point, even I didn’t believe what I was saying.

Apparently, Indigo didn’t believe me either, because she gave me a skeptical look before responding, “Sure, whatever you say. Well, I need to start heading off, see ya later.” She said, before walking. As she walked out, she pulled her phone out of her bag. She flicked her fingers around it's screen, then put the device to her ear. “Hey Sunny, are you doing anything after school?” She was still audible from where I was standing. “….Great, I have something that you need to do, it involves-” Before I could hear the rest of her conversation, she turned the corner, causing me to lose sound from her conversation. Even so, I imagine that it involved Sour Sweet, since what occurred in Dean Cadance’s office was still fresh in her mind.

Seeing as there was nothing else for me to do, I decided to head off to my own class, getting ready for the impending doom that was and extended day with Sour Sweet. 





My school day was pretty average. I go to my classes, ignore Sour Sweet as much as possible, and get into little arguments with her whenever ignoring her didn’t work. The only thing that was different was that Lemon Zest and Sugarcoat decided to talk with me during lunch. Apparently they heard from Indigo Zap that Sour Sweet was going to be my physics tutor. I tried to reassure them the same way I tried to reassure Indigo, but they believed it just as much as she did. Sugarcoat at least offered me a ride home after school, which I accepted.

It was currently 2:40, and I was walking to room 158, getting ready for the hell that would be tutoring with Sour Sweet. I don’t even know why I was even going there any way, knowing her she was probably not going to show up and force me to waste my time going to a tutoring session she wasn’t even going to have. But as I walked through the door, I was surprised to see her sitting in one of the desks, waiting patiently for me to show up.

She must have noticed the surprised look on my face, because she just raised an eyebrow at me and sweetly asked. “What’s wrong?” Before sourly stating. “You actually seemed surprised to see me.”

“I was actually expecting you to not to show.” I said, putting emphasis on the “you”.

“Please, I actually take my agreements seriously. So, take a seat, because standing there is just going to waste my time.”

I rolled my eyes as I went to a desk right next to her, then pulled my physics notes and assignment for us to go over. “So, what are we going to go over first?”

She decided just to get straight to the point, probably thinking that the less time it takes to learn something, the sooner we get this done. “Well we’re going over circuits, so I think the first we should discuss about is adding up capacitors. So, without looking at your notes, how do you get the total capacitance of a circuit if all of the capacitors are in a series?” She asked nicely.

And straight into a pop quiz on the first day of tutoring, isn’t that great. Not to mention the question she asked involved some sort of memorization, which I wasn’t really good with, and this is material we just learned yesterday. Well, guess that just leaves me with one option, go with my gut feeling. “Um……add the capacitance of all the capacitors together and you get the total capacitance.” I answer hesitantly.

She sat there silently before responding, “Yes, adding the capacitance of all the capacitors together is definitely how you get the total capacitance of a circuit.” She said sarcastically in her sweet tone before suddenly yelling out in her sour tone. “If the capacitors were in parallel!"

‘Okay, so I got the question. Did that really warrant an attempt to make me go deaf?’ I thought to myself as I tried to recover from her sudden outburst. “So, how is it found then?”

“You’re telling me you don’t know material we learned today.” She yelled, keeping her voice at the volume as her outburst.

“Hey, memorization isn’t really my strong suit. Besides, we get a formula sheet during the exams. So why do I need to know to have the formula’s memorized?”

Thankfully, she decided lower her volume when she responded. “Because the more you know the formulas and how to use them, the more likely you’ll actually use the formulas correctly in the test. You’d think that anybody would know that.” She sarcastically pointed out.

This got me to stop and think. 'Okay she actually has a good point, but-'

“And, they’re not going to put the names of the formulas next to them. So what do you think is going to happen if you keep thinking that you find the total capacitance of a circuit just by adding of the capacitors that are in a series together?" She suddenly asked, interrupting my thought process.

I didn’t say anything. I just tilted my head down slightly as she sat there with a smug smile on her face. Even I had to admit, she made a really good point and I had no way of arguing against her logic. She knew that I didn’t have a counter-argument before she even asked that question, and I could tell that she loved every second of it.

I felt that she enjoyed her victory long enough, and decided to just hurry up and make this tutoring session as short as possible. “You still didn’t answer my question, Sour. How do you find the total capacitance then?” I asked harshly.

“Hmph, rude.” She simply remarked as she pulled a piece a paper out of her folder. She then began drawing a line to represent a circuit with three marked segments to represent three different capacitors in the circuit, each marked C1, C2, and C3. “It’s simple, all you have to do when you add capacitors that are in a series together is to take each value of the different capacitors and put them in a fraction of one over that value.” She said as she started writing down 1/C1, 1/C2, and 1/C3 on the paper.

“You then take all of those values and add them all together to equal one over the total capacitance.” As she said this she had all of the values added up to equal 1/CT. She then added another line after that to have 1/CT=C1+C2+C3/C1*C2*C3 in order to show that the next step was basic adding with fractions. She then turned to me and said, “Now tell me what the next step is. It should be easy. Key word being should.”

I looked over the solution that she had written so far, which thankfully made it really obvious what the next step. With confidence, I answered her. “You flip the values. That way you have the total capacitance equal to C1 times C2 times C3 all over C1+C2+C3.”

“Oh my god, you can learn.” She sarcastically exclaimed. I decided to keep silent. The last thing I needed was rile her up when we only just now started the session. “Now,” she said as she pulled out another piece of paper and started writing on it, “to start figuring out problems for you to work on."

“Wait, you’re telling me that you didn’t have a plan?” I asked bewildered.

“Oh no, I definitely had a plan, I was just expecting us to be further along in the lesson by now. But I didn’t account for you being as much of a dumb ass as you are a creep.” She stated coldly.

Okay, it’s starting to be really hard not to argue with her. I get that she’s still pissed off about the incident from yesterday, but did she really need to make it into such a grudge? It’s almost like she wanted me to respond to her insults, just so she could get me to do something stupid.

The rest of the session went by like this, her giving me a problem to work on, me working on the problem, and her belittling me at any possible moment. It was around 3:15 when the two of us decided to call it quits and pick up from where we were tomorrow.

“So, same time tomorrow?” I ask.

“Sure, if you don’t find somebody else to deal with your dumb ass.” She said bitterly.

It was at that point that I had enough with her abuse and decided you yell back. “You know what, that’s perfectly fine with me. I’d be more than happy to have somebody else tutor me on this subject. God, with how much of a bitch you are, I’m starting to question why the hell you even signed up to be a tutor in the first place!”

She immediately stopped putting her notes away and slowly started to look down. I was expecting her to turn to me just to continue our shouting match. She never did, all she did was sit there in silence and her frown to more of a saddened look. It was almost as if she was thinking about that last sentence I yelled. After a few moments, she just put the rest of her notes away, got up from her seat, and quickly walked out of the room without saying a word.

I just looked on with confusion, this was the first time she was ever rendered speechless. I wanted to be happy about actually winning an argument against her, but I didn’t. Instead I just felt empty inside, making it feel more like a hollow victory. Deciding that the least I could do was to see if she was okay, I quickly put my note in my bag, got up, and ran out of the room to see if I could see where she was going. But when I reached the hallway, she was gone. The only other person in the hall was a girl with short mulberry hair with light raspberry streaks wearing a sun hair clip along with her school uniform standing close by the room Sour Sweet and I were in. Turning to her, I asked, “Have you seen a girl with long rose colored hair walk out of room recently.”

She just simply turned to me and answered, “Sorry dearie, but she’s probably long gone now.”

“Okay, thanks anyway” I responded, in disappointment. Since it was too late to go looking for her, I decided that the best thing to do was to go find Sugarcoat and head home. After all, it’s probably best to let the situation calm down before talking to Sour Sweet again anyway. 

When I did walk outside, I found Sugarcoat’s car at the front of the school, with Sugarcoat sitting in the car. I quickly ran over to the other side of the car and opened the door to get in the passenger seat. When I sat down and started closing the car door, Sugarcoat plainly asked me, “Did things go well with Sour Sweet?” I just sat there in silence. Thankfully, the silence seemed to have told Sugarcoat about everything that went on between Sour Sweet and me because she put a reassuring hand on my shoulder before saying, “It’s okay, we’ll think of something.”

I nodded, but then I stopped and thought about what she said. ‘Wait, what does she mean by we’ll think of something?