Excuse my French

vingt-six. noblesse oblige

"Remind me why I'm here with you?" I said offhandedly as I flipped through my AP Government notes. "I mean, we literally share one class, and that's about it."

Luc looked up and shot me a puzzled look. "Because you're cool and I wanna hang with you, if that's okay?"

Ugh, it was literally an hour after lunch, and I was already hungry. And really, that was made worse because I was sitting in study hall with Luc Mercier, who never broke the rules and never brought food into the library, where we were studying right now. I'd totally exchange him for his sister, who had a perpetual supply of gummy worms in her backpack.

"This is hopeless," I complained, putting down my notebook. "I don't remember half the stuff I learned last week, let alone something from January." And I was super hungry, but I'd let my stomach announce it for me.

Growl. Oh, there it was.

Luc looked completely and extremely amused as he chewed on the eraser of his pencil (and somehow made it look sexy, but at the same time, I took note to not touch that pencil, ever). "I'd bring you snacks, but—"

"We're not allowed to, I get it," I said, rolling my eyes. "You know, you've got to live a little."

He snorted. "What are you talking about? And no, I'm definitely not a goody-goody, so don't pull that card on me."

I shook my head. Honestly, even I didn't know where I was going with that point. It was probably from the sleep deprivation. Yeah, that was it. After all, it was Wednesday afternoon, and my first exam was next Monday. I guessed I did somewhat have the right to be a bit loopy. "Just give me some food."

"You know I can't do that, Audrey." Luc's eyes were laughing at me as he calmly picked up my AP Government notes. "Ooh, how do you study from these? You know you're allowed to use your laptop to take notes, right?" His fingers had been drumming on his laptop keyboard ever since we'd started studying, which was about fifteen minutes ago.

I glanced around. All the other students in the library were discussing their notes too, and the librarian didn't seem too irked by it (pretty much everyone was tired during the week before exams, and that included everyone in the staff). I was allowed to talk, right? I rubbed my eyes. My contacts really were not helping the fact that I hadn't had enough sleep.

"I can read my own handwriting, thank you very much," I said, yanking my notebook back from him. He didn't need to know that I could only read my handwriting about half of the time—the rest of the time, I survived using a very complicated guess and check and decrypting method.

Luc ran a hand through his hair, which he did a lot when he was studying. It was cute, seriously, because his hair was like a rumpled field of grass (that was dark brown, of course, instead of green). "Mm, I doubt that."

We focused on our notes in silence for a while (five minutes, to be exact), before I got bored of trying to read my own scribbles. I tapped my pencil against my notebook.

"Stop that, would you?" Luc snapped, looking up from his statistics textbook. "I'm trying to focus here."

"Well, it's already hard to concentrate because everyone's talking right now," I pointed out. I looked around the library, which was full of juniors, mostly, talking. The chatter had turned into an ever present rumble in the background, which was pretty comforting. I didn't know how Luc felt about that though.

He ran his hand through his hair again, this time gripping a little more tightly. "Well, you all need to shut up."

It really wasn't my fault that I had a short attention span (and I couldn't sit still in one place for ten minutes or more and be expected to stay docile and silent). I poked Luc's shoulder with my pencil. "Talk to me, Luc," I whined.