Excuse my French

deux. une idée

The smart kid stopped talking, and I immediately clamped my mouth shut and tried to write some of what he'd said down. As I scribbled down what I could remember—which wasn't very much, considering that I had a very one-track mind—I raised an eyebrow at the words that I was writing. Scintillating? Rich description of the primal nature of man in war? What the hell was the kid on?

My eyes swept the room and finally rested on Luc Mercier, who looked absolutely fascinated by the teacher's rant about how genius Homer was. I wrinkled my nose. What a try-hard.

Then, a stinging pain in my arm completely distracted me. I whipped myself in the face with my own hair when I turned my head to Lila, who didn't look guilty at all as she still held her very pointy pencil.

"That hurts!" I hissed to her. "What now?"

"What's going on?" She blinked demurely at me like a confused kitten. She pointed at my notebook, wiggling her eyebrows. "Please?"

Aside from sparing her a single disdainful look, I felt no desire to hand my notes over to her like she expected. "Why don't you listen and write down some for yourself?"

Lila sighed so loudly that the teacher shot the two of us a suspicious look. With a wide-eyed look, she waited until the teacher decided to direct her attention on Luc, her brother, who probably had another ingenious remark to make about the lyrical flow of the stanzas of the book or something as sophisticated.

"You're such a party pooper," she complained, writing down the few scribbles she did see from my notebook, regardless of my efforts to hide them from her.

I shrugged her off and raised my hand, earning myself a four second respite from her antics by answering a question about Agamemnon (whose name I could almost never spell). A couple seats in front of me, Luc turned around and looked at the entire back row, eyes resting on me for a split second. Or maybe it was Olivia. I couldn't really tell.

I finished my thought about Agamemnon. The teacher actually looked pleased and pleasantly surprised—like she didn't know I was capable of forming intelligent analyses. My smile turned into a frown. Did I really come off as that dumb?

And Luc, that jackass, initiating eye contact with me again, raised his hand, probably just out of spite. "Actually," he said when the teacher nodded at him, "Agamemnon has a close bond with his brother, Menelaus. His quick temper causes him to act otherwise and to create problems for himself."

I bit my tongue and sank down in my seat. There was something about Luc Mercier that made me feel like everything I did was very insignificant in comparison. It was very annoying because I knew that I couldn't really compete—but whatever. Luc was so much like his sister with his off-handed intelligence. They were both so smart but always forgot that the rest of the world didn't operate on the same wavelength—which was so fucking aggravating.

But of course, I couldn't tell Lila that.

"Your brother is an ass," I muttered out of the corner of my mouth to Lila.

"Yeah, tell me about it," she whispered back, taking the opportunity to copy down my notes while I was distracted with her brother.

"I have no idea why Olivia likes him."

What a lie. To be fair, I had to admit that Luc had the four B's—brains, brawn, beauty, and bravado. The latter part of his person tended to make me want to disregard the first three.

I underlined the word "brutal" three times in my notes and dropped my pencil on my notebook.

Life was so not fair.