Page 106 of To Love or to Lose
I’m just grateful we did it together.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
132 days until graduation
Spending my Saturday night in Meet in the Margins is not unusual, but being here with Jameson is.
Ever since our last time in this bookstore, I haven’t found the courage to spend more than an hour or two here at once, out of fear that I would run into Jameson again.
Now though, I’m not afraid of being civil with him. It no longer makes my skin crawl to sit across a table from him. It might help that we are both hungover, also.
Jameson approaches the table, two coffees from the Meet in the Margins Cafe in his hand. He holds one of them out to me, and I notice by the label that it’s my usual order.
It’s not like plain, black coffee is necessarily a hard order to remember, but the fact that Jameson knows it in the first place makes my stomach flutter just a touch.
“Thank you,” I say, sighing into the first sip.
He nods in reply. “Let’s get started on this speech,” he says, setting his backpack down on the floor next to his chair and his coffee on the table.
The speech.
The one that has been haunting us since the beginning of the year is finally rearing its head in, and while graduation is still a few months away, it’s going to creep up on us quickly.We need to get a first draft started, even if it’s not the definitive version.
I pull the binder I’ve been collecting since freshman year out of my bag and lay it on the table. “I’ve been saving statistics, and I think these could help us compile all the points we want to include,” I say, pushing it toward him.
“Twenty-seven years, is that right?” he asks, opening the binder.
“Since the last female Valedictorian? Yes.”
“And even then, she was accompanied by a boy,” he hums, flipping through the pages quickly.
To others, it looks as if he’s mindlessly skimming, but I’ve seen Jameson read before. He’s reading every word and retaining more of it than almost anyone else could.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t help you be the one to break this cycle, Genevieve,” he says in the most heartfelt way possible.
“That’s why we’re writing this speech—to prove that there is more to Fairwood Prep than the patriarchy of assholes who only get good grades because they play football,” I remind him. “The system of Fairwood may have screwed me over, but I will not allow it to continue to screw over the hard-working girls that are to come after me.”
“Great, so obviously we can’t bring up the issues straight out the gate or else they will cut the volume to the mic, so we need to be strategic,” he says, shutting the binder and pulling his laptop from his backpack.
“Agreed.” I nod.
After at least an hour of working on the speech, getting most of the outline and points we want to hit out of the way, I’d say we’re ahead of schedule to have it done by graduation.Now, we’re sitting in the bookstore, silently reading over what we have done so far.
“How many books do you think are in this giant store?” I ask.
She answers quickly. “Somewhere around eighteen thousand books.”
I look at her with widened eyes, “Have you counted?”
“One day, I got bored while I was sitting here trying to procrastinate. I wanted to calculate how long it would take me to read every book in here.”
“Did you figure it out?”
“Thirty bookcases, all having twelve shelves, averaging about fifty books per shelf. Typically, I can read a regular sized book in about two and a half hours. Considering most of thesebooks are hefty, I rounded it to three. Multiply that all, it gives you about fifty-four thousand hours.”
Before she can think about the amount of days, I answer, “Two thousand, two hundred and fifty days.”
“As a kid, I used to wish I had enough spare time while I was in here to read all the books on at least one of the shelves.”
