“You’ll miss it.”
Rain ran down Skye Anderson’s school uniform as she pushed the rusted wheelbarrow along the street.
Eleanor had seen the championship badge against the ten-year-old’s soaked clothes and understood what the child was giving up.
“You should go,” Eleanor said.
Skye glanced at her watch.
She had worked all year toward the California State Mathematics Championship.
Every minute spent moving through the rain was a minute she could not recover.
“That doesn’t change whether you need help.”
Skye had been checking the time since before she found Eleanor.
That morning, each minute had belonged to the championship: getting there, finding where to go, being ready when the work began.
Now the numbers on her wrist seemed to measure something else entirely.
She looked at them and calculated what remained, then looked at Eleanor and knew the calculation could not decide whether she stopped.
The wheelbarrow was difficult to guide.
It wanted more attention than she could give while also trying to think about the venue.
She had to watch the wet street and put her effort into the next small stretch.
Rain kept reaching places in her uniform that had felt dry a moment earlier.
Eleanor could see the strain and the badge, and Skye understood why she was telling her to go.
It would have been easier if the choice felt obvious in the painless way adults sometimes described kindness.
Instead, she wanted two things with equal force: to reach the competition and to get Eleanor to help.
She did not know how to keep both.
Her answer came from the thing that had not changed while she looked at her watch.
Eleanor was still there, still unable to solve the problem by being told that a child had somewhere important to be.
She tightened her grip and kept pushing.
Her backpack pulled against her shoulders, and mud darkened one knee.
The street seemed longer each time she looked ahead.
The wheel made the journey feel uneven.
Skye adjusted the handles and concentrated on keeping the movement steady, refusing to let her frustration become roughness with the person she was helping.
She could not push the weather out of the way.
She could not make the distance shorter by doing the arithmetic again.
Yet she kept returning to the time because numbers were familiar, and this morning had become frighteningly difficult to organize.
