Excuse my French

vingt-trois. à propos de bovary

"Dude," I whispered to Lila one day in English Lit, "our finals are coming up in three weeks. Three weeks."

"Shh," Lila said back to me, holding a finger up. "I'm going to miss a very important point about the Greeks and their notions of honor."

I glanced over to Olivia, with whom I would have exchanged a glance, but she was too busy taking part in the discussion. Right. I should really do the best I could to boost up my class participation grade (even though it was rather late in the game). So I resorted to letting out a very heavy, dramatic sigh and trying to pay attention to whoever was speaking at the moment.

People were being so uptight today.

I was just in the middle of writing down the example of Achilles and Hector's body when Lila poked my arm with the eraser of her pencil. I turned to her. "What?"

She wasn't even really looking at me since she had gone back to writing something. "My brother wants you."

All right then. I looked up to where Luc was sitting two rows in front of me, flanked by Eli and some other guy on the rugby team I didn't know too well. He was turned around just enough to face me (after all, he did have a reputation to keep up among the teachers). His light eyes sparkled.

"My pencil," he mouthed, pointing at something underneath my desk. (At least he hadn't pointed out my feet, which he'd mentioned, on several occasions, were fairly large. I'd smacked him afterward, taking a page from his sister's book, to show my agreement.) I glanced down. Sure enough, his favorite #2 pencil was lying right next to my black flats.

How the hell did he get it all the way here? He was probably just calling for attention, and as usual, he got what he wanted.

I leaned down to pick it up grudgingly (it was rather difficult since the pencil was about four inches long and my arms were kind of short) and held it up above my desk, raising an eyebrow at Luc.

Ugh, I was totally missing so much valuable class discussion notes.

(But again, luckily, my best friends were both very, very skilled at catching me up to the things I missed in class. After all, they did know that I was prone to wandering off to nowhere in particular in my mind. Plus, they were both really good at it—as in they were the sole reason I was still getting A's in class at all.)

Luc grinned and nodded, fiddling with his eraser in his other hand. "Toss it," he mouthed, holding his hand open to catch his pencil.

That was a risky suggestion since my flawed throwing abilities could land the pencil either halfway across the room or in the bush of Avery's hair (Avery, who was sitting in the row between us, had hair that looked like a mix between a bird's nest and an afro). Luc seemed to already realize this since he mouthed again, "You can do it."

I could see the wariness in his posture—for good reason. All right. I could totally do this. I steadied my arm, checked on the teacher (whose back was turned to us), and threw the pencil forward.

Well, at least it flew over Avery's head. But it hit Luc (almost point first) straight on his left eye, and he happened not to be very discreet about it.

"Shit," he hissed, holding his eye with one hand and his very stubby pencil with the other. "Goddamn—"

The teacher turned around abruptly, cutting off whoever was contributing to the discussion. "Mr. Mercier!"

I sat up, shaking my head with a little smirk, and copied the last few lines of notes I'd missed from Lila's notebook.

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