The Fragile Ordinary(25)

Tobias got up off his bed and immediately shut the door.

Okay.

I was guessing he and his mother didn’t have the best relationship. Or Tobias was just a dick.

I was suddenly very much aware of the smell of too much teenage boy in one room, and I realized why when I saw the two beds and the floor around the bed nearest the window littered with clothes and football stuff.

“I share a room with Stevie,” Tobias explained as I unwillingly stepped farther into the boy pit. The walls were a dark gray and covered in posters of football players around the messy bed. The walls behind and opposite the bed that was made and had no crap around it were covered in Lego and Minecraft posters. I raised an eyebrow, and Tobias smirked at me. “This is Kieran’s bed. Until Mom and I find a place, I’m in here with Stevie.” He gestured to the pit side of the room, “Kieran’s in with his mom, and my mom’s on the couch. It’s a little crowded.” He sat down on his bed, picked up his copy of Hamlet and his notepad from his bedside table and shuffled back against his pillows and the wall.

“Where is Stevie?” I asked instead, gingerly placing my bag on Tobias’s borrowed bed.

“You can sit, too.” He smirked at me, like he knew I was uncomfortable being this close to him.

I sat on the bed. I could feel Tobias watching me, and all I kept thinking was that this was probably the first time he had a girl in his room to do homework. I wondered if he could guess that this was the first time I’d been alone with a boy, or furthermore alone with a boy in his room.

I squirmed, wishing I was at home with the book I was currently reading instead.

“Stevie’s out,” Tobias finally replied, drawing my gaze to his. He narrowed his eyes at me. “Disappointed?”

Disappointed? That Stevie was out? Why would I be disappointed? “Excuse me?”

He seemed to assess me and then finally shook his head. “Never mind. Let’s get started.”

It was difficult to concentrate on anything but the fact that I was on Tobias King’s bed, sitting across from him, feeling his gaze on me as I took out the notes I’d already started making. To my surprise, as we worked, Tobias gave a lot more input than he’d suggested he would.

After about an hour of study we’d pulled a number of quotes from Hamlet’s soliloquies to back up our analysis of his character development. We worked easily with each other—another surprise—seeming to grasp Hamlet with a similar understanding.

“I’m going to grab a soda. You want one?” Tobias asked.

It was the first thing either of us had said that didn’t relate to Shakespeare, and I noted, to my further shock, that I’d lost the restless, squirmy feeling I’d had earlier. The easy way we collaborated had distracted me from my discomfort. “Um...sure.”

He got off the bed and left the room, and I took the opportunity to look around again. Tobias’s side of the room wasn’t neat as a pin—there were clothes strewn across a chair in the corner and piles of schoolbooks on the floor. But compared to Stevie’s side, it was tidy and clean. My room could get messy, too, especially when I was caught up in schoolwork or a series of books. Unlike Vicki and Steph, I had no one on my back telling me to clean my room. I wondered if it was the same for Tobias and Stevie, or if their mothers’ requests for them to tidy the room were continually ignored.

My curiosity over the boys’ situation annoyed me. Stevie was just a step up from a thug, and Tobias was not only his second cousin but apparently his friend. That really said it all.

But why then was Tobias here, doing his homework with me, when he could be out with Stevie causing mayhem or whatever it was Stevie got up to?

Tobias strode back into the room holding two glasses of Coke. “Here.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking one.

My eyebrow nearly hit my hairline when he sat down on the bed, this time so close that our knees were almost touching. I could feel the heat of his body, and I desperately tried not to blush yet again due to my stupid awareness of him.

“So why are you here?” I blurted out in an attempt to steer my wayward thoughts back on a decent course.

Tobias smirked. “Is that a philosophical question?”

See! Much more intelligent than he’d have other people believe. But why? “You’re obviously smart but you don’t seem to care about class. So why are you doing this presentation with me when you could be out with Stevie?”

He shrugged. “My mom has been giving me a hard time lately. I thought if she saw me pretending to put a little effort in at school, she might lay off. That’s why I asked you to come here instead of going to your house or meeting somewhere. If we studied somewhere else she probably wouldn’t have believed me about meeting up with you to do homework.”

I wasn’t totally buying it.

Reaching across the bed, I picked up the copious notes he’d made. “This is pretending, is it?”

He glared and took the notes back from me. “As long as we get it done, why do you care?”

“I don’t.” I looked down at my own notes. “I just think maybe you like this stuff more than you let on.”

“No one likes Shakespeare, Comet.”

My head jerked up, my eyes flashing in indignation. “I do.”

Tobias chuckled. “I stand corrected.”