Most Important

She pulls up a stool to the desk in my office.

“Okay, so I did these ones, but I don’t get this one.”

In front of us on her Chromebook screen is a bridge, a series of parabola problems, and pages of math that is almost out of my reach.

“This is just like the ones we did the other night,” I tell her, jotting the formula that Google had given us.

That was the night, we started out kneeling at the the side of my bed and – problem-by-parabola-problem – slowly slipped to sitting side-by-side on the floor as the minutes ticked toward midnight.

“Math is the most important,” we’ve said all along.

And today is no exception.

“We have, like, six more problems left.”

“We?” I shoulder her with a smile.

She scrolls down to the next one. Another bridge.

Her fingers fly and her giggles grow as we sit side-by-side at the desk. She’s got this.

And yet still she sits stool-side.

Turns out this, this is the most important. Math is just a bonus.