*3 weeks later*
As I walk out of AP American Literature, my final class of the day, I secretly hope Jameson will be sitting in the backseat, with another bouquet of flowers and a beautifully written speech about how it wasn't just a deal, how he, too, can't move on and forget about what happened.
This is what I've been hoping for the past three weeks.
And everyday, for three weeks, my dreams have been let down.
This includes today.
I walk through the parking lot with my head of security next to me, my backpack slung over my shoulder and my blazer's and button up blouse's sleeves rolled up to my elbows. I feel a bead of sweat form on my eyebrow and fan myself with my hand. Texas November feels like Connecticut July.
Oren opens my car door for me, and I crawl into the black SUV and enjoy the AC. I sling my bag onto the seat beside me and fish my phone out of the front pocket. As I scroll through GoFundMe.com, finding overdue rent and grocery needs to fund, the gray-tinted iMessage banner falls from the top of my screen.
It's from Jameson.
I have to stop myself from smiling.
The message reads, "Meet me in our library when you get home."
I like him calling something ours.
I type out "I'll be there," and press send.
When I get home, I can't walk to the library fast enough. Once I finally get there, I take two steps into the door and realize what this meeting is.
Jameson is sitting against a shelf on the ground floor of the library, surrounded by a pile of books. He's back on the clue—back on sorting through books for anything out of order. He has about 3 stacks of books as tall as me stacked next to him, and another one open in his hand.
I notice he's in his uniform—he must have gone to school today—but I'm not sure how he got back to Hawthorne House so much faster than I did. "What class did you skip?"
"Economics, then Mandarin. The less Dr. Kleinsman I have to listen to, the better," he says, his eyes scanning over the last few pages before he closes the book and puts it into a stack.
I turn to the bookshelf closest to me, picking up Around the World in 80 Days, looking for any notes written in the margins."I've already done that shelf," Jameson comments, barely looking up from his book, a leather-bound The Book Theif.
"Well what shelf have you not looked at?" I ask him, my skirt twirling as I turn around.
"That one," he says, pointing to the shelf right beside him.
I walk across the room and get to work, taking a book off the top shelf—L'Assomoir, the first book in a series by French author Emile Zola. "How many of these books do you think you've read?" I ask him.
"I'd guess 18 percent," he responds.
"Only 18 percent?" I say.
"In a library of almost 4,000 titles, doing the math leaves you with a pretty impressive number."
I cross multiply by x in my head. "720?"
"Probably something like that," he says. He stands up, his book still open. He's standing closer to me than I was prepared for.
"What's in the stacks? Just books you're done looking through?" I ask, nodding to his 5-foot-4 pile of novels.
"No, books that have been annotated," he says.
