THEA
Thea took her stack of books to the table at the very back of the library and grabbed a seat at the corner. This was her favorite place to study after school. She didn’t like going back to her empty house—it made her feel lonely—and though she could have gone to her parents’ restaurant to work, she always felt guilty about doing schoolwork while her parents and Carlo did their jobs.
That said, the school library could be distracting. A lot of students came here, not to study, but to socialize. Thea had learned that they tended to stick to the tables at the front of the library, near the door. As long as she chose one near the back, she could keep away from the noise.
She opened her notebook to the outline she had already begun for her paper and pulled out a pen. She really needed this paper to be good. American Literature was the class that gave her the most trouble, and she needed a top grade if her GPA was going to be competitive for scholarships in a few months.
Several feet away, she heard Jillian Bishop let out a squeal and a laugh. Thea looked up in exasperation. Jillian was sitting on top of a table, wrestling with Liam Ford over something—a graphing calculator, maybe? A cell phone? It was hard to be sure.
Thea glanced at the librarian, but the old woman was completely ignoring the students. I guess it’s understandable. I’m sure she doesn’t get paid enough to worry about making teenagers be quiet during unsupervised hours.
She turned her attention back to the essay. If she could finish the outline and the introduction, she would feel satisfied with the day’s work and would be able to get out of here. Maybe then she would go by the restaurant. She’d have some of Carlo’s tamales for dinner…
“What are you working on?”
She looked up, surprised.
Rob Honeycutt had slipped into the seat opposite hers.
For a moment, Thea couldn’t think of anything at all to say. She always sat at this table when she came to the library, and it was normal for it to remain vacant. She didn’t know whether the rest of her classmates didn’t want to sit at the rear table, or if it was just that they didn’t want to sit with her.
And now—Rob Honeycutt.
What was with him? First the Waffle Shack, and now this. She knew perfectly well that he had his own group of friends to spend time with. He was one of the most popular, well-liked guys in school. He didn’t need to hang around with her.
So why was he? Couldn’t he find anyone else to rebound basketballs for him? She was fairly sure that wasn’t it. He had the whole team to work with on things like that.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him.
“I go to school here.”
“Yeah, thank you. I mean here in the library,” she said. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“You’re not the only one who can try new things,” he said. “You went to the ball game, I came to the library.”
“For what, though?”
“I asked you first,” he reminded her. “What are you working on?”
“The American Lit essay,” she said, pointing to her books.
“What are you writing it on?”
“Feminist trends in nineteenth-century literature?”
“Are there any?”
Thea shrugged. “You’ve got to really want to see them,” she said.
“What books are you pulling from?”
“You aren’t taking American Lit!” she said, gesturing to the books on the table. “Why are you so interested in what I’m doing? Have you even read any of these?”
He picked one of them up.
“You’ve read it?”
“Well. No. What is it about?”