what a woman! i.

trois

RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING

The bell rings and everyone starts packing up for lunch. Bailey and Tatum Fernsby keep on giggling at a joke Tatum was telling.

"And then he said 'dude, that's not what glory ho-'"

"Miss Bailey? Can you please stay a little bit after the bell?" the attractive teacher, Mr. Pedroza, asks the older Fernsby sister.

Tatum snorts loudly and coughs on the power of the snort. Bailey slaps her little sister's back multiple times, purposefully not being gentle.

"Uhm, yeah. I'll be there in a minute," Bailey says, blushing like a small tomato. Tatum could tell Bailey's hands were getting sweaty because she felt it through her shirt.

Tatum collects herself with one last cough and throws her backpack over her shoulder.

"I'll probably be at the library," Tatum whispers to her sister teasingly. "Unless you get caught up."

Bailey slaps her sister.

Hard.

Luckily, it was only Tatum's forearm that was damaged. The younger of the two rubbed her arm and kept in a scream of pain.

"I am so getting you back after this."

●○●

After asking multiple people for directions, Tatum finally found herself in the library and to say the most, she was very disappointed. The library had only four shelves of books and Tatum could see that most would be read for an assignment in English. 

"Is there anything I can help you with, Miss?" a deep, wheezy voice asks her from behind. Tatum spins on her feet and looks at a long desk with the sign 'Librarian' on it. An older, Asian man with a wide smile was sat behind the desk. 

"Uhm, yeah, actually. Are there any murder mysteries?" Tatum asks nervously, she usually got weird stares from her novel choice. The man just smiles wider and nods.

"Do you want a caper like Janet Evanovich or noir like Raymond Chandler?" the Asian man asks her. Tatum tries to hide her surprise by the man's knowledge of murder mystery genres. The man walks passed her and she stays for a second before catching up with him.

"I personally like the locked-room ones, but my wife likes the historical ones. My children think our book choice is quite weird, but I think of it as imaginative and different," the man babbles as he leads her to a door labeled 'staff only'. 

"Come, come. My favorites are this way!" the man says in a gleeful tone. Tatum enters the room after him and finds at least 8 more shelves of books that looked completely untouched. She smiles softly and takes a deep breath to smell the old book smell she loved soo much.

"I never got an answer on which type of book you would like, Miss," the man says, nudging Tatum's elbow. She looks at the man, he had to be about half a foot shorter than her. She never really knew many people shorter than her unless they were below the age of 13.

"Oh, uh, I like the classics like Edgar Allan Poe-"

"Have you heard of The Da Vinci Code?" the man asks, suddenly becoming excited. Tatum shakes her head and looks back up at the bookshelves. The man scatters off to the fifth shelf and looks up at the fourth row. He grabs a book with a red cover and scatters back over to Tatum.

"I am trusting you to take care of this book with your life," the man says very seriously. Tatum uncomfortably takes a few steps back from the man and nods her head like her life depends on it.

"Great, now I better let you be. There are only five minutes of lunch left, enjoy!" the man says while leading her back to the front of the library. She smiles kindly and waves to the man before exiting the library. As soon as the door closes, she lets out a breath of relief. 

"Cool book."

"Whadda fuck, Keith!"