Not Today | ✔️

Chapter Four.

"Little darling, the smile's returning to the faces..."

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"You're doing it wrong."

"What?"

"Your paper. You're doing it wrong," Evelyn repeated, peeking over the top of her book to stare over Tristan's shoulder at his laptop.

"I've only written down my name and the title of the essay," Tristan said, giving her an unimpressed look. "What exactly did I do wrong, genius? Are you going to correct the spelling of my own name?"

"No. You're not using the right format, genius," Evelyn countered.

Tristan furrowed his eyebrows, glancing at his screen. "What?"

"The format, you're using the wrong format. Your font is too small, you're not using the right spacing, and if you don't follow the rules of the format, you immediately get points off," Evelyn explained.

"Oh," Tristan said, frowning and looking slightly stumped.

"Do you know the format?" Evelyn asked gently after a moment.

"Obviously, which is exactly why I'm using the incorrect format," he snapped with a roll of his eyes, but she noticed more than his tone. She noticed his rapid clicking of the pen. The bouncing of his leg.

"Here," Evelyn said, putting her book down to come up to Tristan and help him with his paper.

As soon as she neared him, her hair accidentally brushing against his shoulder, he immediately stiffened, causing Evelyn to furrow her eyebrows. She adjusted her glasses before changing the parts of the format he'd gotten wrong.

"You need to follow the format for the citations, too, so let me know if you need help, okay?" Evelyn said, adjusting her glasses as she turned to look at Tristan with a soft, friendly smile. She was as close as she'd ever been to him and she realized, for the first time, that he had a delicate dusting of freckles just under his eyes, along his cheekbones. Cute.

Tristan eyed her warily before giving a curt nod of his head. Evelyn gave another small, close-lipped smile in return, before walking away from where he was sitting and returning back to her novel. Evelyn looked up from her book not terribly long after, adjusting her glasses as she focused on Tristan. He was clicking his pen repeatedly, his body tense, except for his right leg, which was still bouncing up and down rapidly underneath the table. His body language was screaming that he was feeling a mixture of frustration and perhaps anxiety.

Evelyn pulled up a chair, situating herself right beside Tristan. He looked at her and it wasn't full of irritation at her, for once, but at his paper.

"May I?" she asked quietly, gesturing towards his laptop and notes, asking to take a look at it.

He hesitated, looking like making the decision was a heavy, complex one instead of a simple one. After a moment of searching her face as if he were looking for some answer to an unspoken question, he dropped his hands from their position on the laptop and ran one down his face in frustration as he nodded.

Evelyn grabbed the sheets of paper, clearly ripped from a notebook, judging on the attached fringe, and adorned with messy penmanship, with multiple creases in the paper, and some misspellings. She then turned the screen of the laptop towards herself and read the notes, trying to focus on the material, instead of the lack of order in the notes, and then what Tristan had written in the document.

A few times, she nodded, slightly impressed. Tristan's problem wasn't with the information he had, it was about putting it all together. He had all the puzzle pieces, it was simply a matter of finding a way to fit them together.