Stunning. That’s the word Innes would use as he watched his best friend sort through her biology notes. He knew many of her odd ways, but every now and then she managed to surprise him. “Is that a receipt?”
“Hmm?” she asked, turning her large mismatched eyes up towards him while she stayed in a low, flat-foot squat. “This?” She held up the slip in question, offering it into evidence. “Yes. It’s all I had on me.” Oh, sure. “But I can’t remember which day it was. Hence,” she gestured in lieu of finishing her thought out loud.
The mess of notes and diagrams were fanned around her in a nearly complete circle, in an array of colors. Old handouts. A track meet schedule. Here and there the stray set were on actual notepaper. Innes pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a low, affectionate chuckle. He didn’t want to be critical, especially since he could tell she’d been diligent in actually taking notes, which was a vast improvement on last term.
“Thrifty.” Best he could do. He poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue, choosing his words. She would disagree, but her academic confidence was fragile, and she did not take blows to her pride gracefully. “I think I may have narrowed down the…” Problem? No, too loaded. “Challenge. May I?” He indicated the pages with a pointing of his lips.
“Sure.” She shrugged. “Go ahead. Not that it matters. I’ll never remember all of—Oh! There’s the missing date!”
He moved notes out of one three-ring binder into another, and set it on the floor. “We’ll start with rewriting them. It might be easier if you can read them, hm?”
She rolled her eyes with a dramatic sigh, in case he did not know how Herculean a task she saw this, and flopped to her back on the floor. “Fine. But then we get chili fries.”
“Yes, dear,” he laughed under his breath.
©b.r. hill-mann 2019
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