Charm and Consequence (Novella) - By Stephanie Wardrop Page 0,7
to me and I take it, I feel a little jolt run up my arm like the time I touched the electric fence at my uncle’s farm to see what would happen.
While I usually loathe preppie, entitled males—witness one Michael Endicott—there’s something wildly appealing about Jeremy Wrentham. Like Michael’s, Jeremy’s family is important in this town. They don’t have a street named after them like the Endicotts, but Jeremy’s dad is a corporate lawyer and his mom is on a lot of the town beautification committees that my mom wants to be invited to join. But Jeremy is more human than Michael.
While Jeremy's clothes are as expensive and classic as everyone else’s around here (maybe more so) he wears them in a way that announces that he doesn’t really care about that. Jeremy’s a study in slightly disheveled elegance every day, with the cuffs of his shirts slightly frayed or a tiny moth hole in the shoulder of his sweater, whereas Michael always looks like he’s just stepped off an ironing board, having just been pressed and starched himself. Jeremy seems so at ease in the world; when he’s sitting half sprawled on a bench in the cafeteria it’s like he’s lounging in the den at home. When he’s talking to someone, it’s so effortless, whether it’s a goggle-eyed freshman girl like Cassie or Vito the maintenance guy or the school principal. He always seems like he belongs wherever he is and with whomever he happens to be with.
He’s smiling at me and his hand lingers in mine.
“Endicott and I are both Pemberley School dropouts,” he says with the kind of smile that would make him a very successful serial killer. Anyone would follow him into the back of even the shadiest looking panel van, or down a dark alley. Anywhere, really, if he smiled at them like he's smiling at me now.
I fear I may be blushing.
“We didn’t leave for the same reasons,” Michael says as he picks up the books from the table.
“No, no!” Jeremy laughs. “You and I are not the same.”
“No. We’re not,” Michael agrees. He gathers his things into his black messenger bag and says to me, “I want to make bio before the bell. Are you coming?”
“In a minute,” I say. He hesitates for a second, then walks away.
Jeremy shakes his head in amusement. “Same old Endicott,” he says.
“I recently heard him described as ‘socially retarded’,” I offer and Jeremy laughs harder. “What’s with the ‘Endicott’ and ‘Wrentham’ stuff?”
“A Pemberley thing, I guess, to call each other by our last names.” He leans on the table and appraises me with a smile. “What year are you in, Georgiana?”
“I’m a junior.”
He nods as if this makes perfect sense to him and a bright golden bird’s wing of hair brushes across his eyes. “Well, nice to meet you, Georgiana,” he says and takes my hand for a second. “I hope I see you around more.”
I just nod dumbly and leave the library without checking out any of my books. But I feel a lot better suddenly. And I’m not sure why, because Jeremy is so totally not the kind of guy I usually like. And guys like Jeremy don’t usually pay much attention to me, to be honest. I have to admit it I like it. And the idea of Jeremy Wrentham actually being interested in me keeps my brain occupied enough so that I don’t think about Michael Endicott or what he thinks of me for the first time in days.
Even in bio class when he’s sitting right next to me.
***
November rumbles in with a series of thunderstorms and freezing rain, as if the gods of late summer and winter are fighting over who gets to control the weather for the next few months. I start working on a second Alt article, this time concentrating on the health benefits of going vegan, since no one else seems to find it an ethical dilemma at all; meanwhile, our group works on our next English class presentation. I do not consult Michael about my presentation topic, and we don’t talk much in bio, either. We still sit together and we have our I-draw/he-writes split for the last of the plant labs, but we haven’t really talked much since the library incident. If he’s at all interested in my “character” or whatever he was trying to tell me in the library, he has a weird way of showing that interest: by alternately ignoring me, glowering at me in