All of Me

seventeen • perfect evening

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There's a slight chance that Gray and I have left this essay too late. We've barely touched it in two weeks except to make a couple of loose outlines and now it's due tomorrow, and it turns out a five-page critical book review is a lot harder when you haven't read the book. It's only seventy-eight pages. I have no excuse.

I think I should be more stressed about this but with Gray in the same boat, it's not so scary to be unprepared.

"You know what?" Gray rolls over on the end of my bed, where he's reading the damn book while I'm scouring the internet for as many opinions on the story as I can find. We're hoping that there's enough online that we can just pick and choose and cut down on our workload.

"What?"

"I think it would be a lot easier to write a report on why this book sucks, and is not worth finishing. It'd definitely be critical, and kind of a review."

"And a fast-track pass to a failing grade," I say, crossing off a review that turns out to be from a precocious middle-grader's blog. "I think we're best off doing exactly what he wants."

Gray groans. "How uninspiring. Just like this damn book."

I'm beginning to regret arranging a date with Liam for tomorrow. There's a high chance I'm going to have to skip class just to finish this thing. It's nearly five already, only thirty-one hours to go, and I know my motivation will drop as soon as I have dinner. Whatever Mom and Tad are cooking smells like heaven.

"We can do it." I hole up my notebook, where I've been jotting down recurring and important themes that keep cropping up in other reviews I've read. Gray isn't alone in thinking that the book sucks. It doesn't seem too popular online. "We've got our outlines and we've got points for them, and I've even got a whole bunch of quotes. We just need to flesh it all out in a couple of essays that are different enough not to be flagged as plagiarism.

"Ok. No biggie."

"Exactly."

"I was being sarcastic. It's a big biggie," he says. "This is only our first college assignment. How are we screwing it up already?"

"Because it's our first assignment." I poke him with my big toe. "And we're not screwing it up. We're doing fine. The only thing that isn't fine is your attitude," I say, shooting him a look. He wrinkles his nose at me and sticks out his tongue. Sometimes he seems like my counsellor but sometimes he just seems like a little kid.

He may be the smartest guy I know, and the only person with a perfect GPA who doesn't stress me out, but he hates essays as much as I do. I'm beginning to rethink declaring my major when I applied, but I had already been out of high school for a year and I was running out of time to apply for this year: I wanted to seem certain, not to mention the financial aid boost.

"Ugh." He harrumphs and rolls onto my foot, splaying the book across his face. "I just want to eat."

"Mom said dinner's at six thirty," I say, "so we have more than ninety minutes to go. So let's try to write two pages."

"Jesus! Two pages in ninety minutes?"

"It's really only one page," I say. "And the introduction will take up half of that. Just BS an intro."

He sits up with a sigh. The book drops into his lap, losing his page. I'm pretty sure he wasn't really reading anyway, the amount he's been complaining. "I'm gonna do it," he says.

"Good. If we do two before dinner, we only have three to do tomorrow and that's nothing."

"No, no, I mean I'm gonna do my critical review on why it's not worth finishing," he says. He holds up the book and taps the title. "I mean it. It's super racist. Crap like this shouldn't even be on the syllabus." Suddenly animated and grinning, he almost falls off my bed when he grabs his laptop, and he starts writing.