you make me sick (for being so perfect)

Twenty One.

                  

"I will meet you here." Lauren promises as she leaves her in front of the library. "At four. I'm going to go to art and wait for you, and then we can walk to my house together."

"Okay, honey," Camila leans forward and kisses her girlfriend goodbye. "I'll see you at four. Have fun in art."

"I will," Lauren calls behind her, "have fun tutoring."

Camila doesn't reply to that, because extra Spanish isn't something she really needs, but whatever. Helping someone else makes her feel good. Once Lauren is out of sight, Camila heads into the library and takes a seat where she's visible to anyone who walks in – she doesn't want Shawn to think she'd decided not to show up at the last moment – and pulls out her phone, deciding to check her social medias as she waits.

She scrolls through Instagram, naturally ending up on Lauren's page, and she's in the middle of liking all of her girlfriend's adorable selfies when she hears someone clear their throat in front of her.

"Hey," Shawn announces his presence and sits down across from her. "Thanks again for doing this. I really need the help. You'll see in a minute."

Camila laughs. "I'm sure you're not that bad. You wouldn't have made it into the advanced class if you really sucked."

"That's the thing, I was good at the regular class," Shawn defends himself; apparently he's set on proving how bad he is. "It's just that the advanced class is ten times harder."

"That's a good thing though, it's a challenge," Camila replies, although she doesn't find their advanced Spanish class hard at all. Mostly because she's fluent in it, but she keeps that little detail to herself. "You can't really get worse if that makes you feel any better."

He laughs and opens up his notebook. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

After she walks him through some grammar she considers to be quite easy and realising that he really isn't very good, Camila decides to slow it down and go over what he already knows before starting on the new stuff. When she returns to some more complicated things, he has a little bit of an outburst. Thankfully the library nearly empty so there's not many people to witness it.

"I don't get this. How the hell do you get this?" Shawn groans and throws his pencil down against the notepad. "Maybe I'll just drop Spanish. It'd be easier."

Camila laughs, aware of the weird look he received from the librarian. "It's not so bad. You've just got to go over the grammar as much as you can and eventually it'll click in your head."

Shawn sighs. "It doesn't seem like it's going to click. And my brain feels like it's about to explode."

"That's exactly how I feel about math, and I have to deal with my best friend Dinah telling me how easy it all is." Camila replies. Out of all of her friends, Dinah is the last one she suspected to be a secret math genius. Even Lauren admits Dinah's better at math than her. "Do you want to call it a day then?"

"Yeah," Shawn nods and closes his notepad and Spanish book. "You're really good at Spanish, though. How do you make sense of it all?"

"It's my first language," Camila shrugs, "I was born in Cuba and lived there until I was six."

"Damn," Shawn comments, "I wish it was my first language. Then I wouldn't have to go through all of this stress. Anyway, same time next week?"

"Yeah, sure," Camila nods and packs her things away. "You weren't as bad as you think, though."

Not waiting for Shawn's reply, Camila looks up at the clock and realises that it's nearly four, and Lauren will be arriving to meet her.

"I was still pretty bad, though," Shawn pulls his backpack over his shoulder and nods to the door. "How are you getting home? Do you need a ride?"