Page 29 of Isn't It Obvious?
To:Elle Rex
RE:Fahrenheit 451Edited Episode
I gave it some polish to get people to click, but you’re why they stay, Elle. Take the compliment.
Yael bites her lip to stop herself from smiling stupidly at her phone, but it’s a losing game. She probably needs to come up with an explanation for her utter glee if she doesn’t want to accidentally out herself to everyone at Kennedy.
The rest of the day, she finds herself unable to stop checking. Like if she looksone more time, SEA will have vanished from the charts. Or she’ll finally be able to believe it.
And by the time book club rolls around, she does. It feels like her skin is buzzing. Like she’s glowing on a wavelength that nobody else can see.
Yael is still cataloging books (her productivity today has been astoundingly low) when Ravi arrives after school. Sheknows it’s him without turning to look; nobody else would walk in without saying hello.
She can feel the tension radiating off him every book club day. It doesn’t dissipate until the first student walks in, and it’s back in full force the moment the last one leaves. Like her very presence is upsetting to him.
But today she is buzzing, and there’s nothing Ravi can do to stop it. A glance at the clock shows there are still a couple of minutes left, and she uses them to drag the cart of her finished books over to theNEW ARRIVALSshelf and start slotting them into the spots she can easily reach.
When she finally faces Ravi, he’s looking at her like maybe whatever wavelength she’s on is in his visible light spectrum.
“You look happy,” he says simply.
She’s surprised that he notices, because she set her face carefully neutral before turning toward him. Even more so that he acknowledged it.Yes, and I don’t think even you could ruin itis on the tip of her tongue, but before she can say it, she notices him. The way the lines of his neck slope casually to his shoulders. How he sits in what’s becomehischair in the circle like it’s the most comfortable place in the world. “So do you.”
He shrugs. “Good day.”
“Me too. Please don’t ruin it,” Yael says, but there’s no real bite in it.
“Sure, okay.” Ravi smiles. “Please don’t ruin mine.”
“When have I ever?” she asks, saccharine.
He makes a show of furrowing his brow in thought. “I don’t know,” he says. “I volunteer Tuesdays and Thursdays, right?”
He’s clearly waiting for her to nod, and she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But she also wants to know what he’s going to say next, so she settles for a quiet hum of assent.
Ravi holds eye contact like it’s a game of chicken. “I’d say about every Tuesday, then.”
“Not Thursday, too?” Yael pouts. “I thought I was doing so well.”
And then, goddamn it, Ravi laughs. An actual laugh—it comes from his belly; the lines by his eyes deepen, his head tilts back, his mouth opens. His leftmost incisor just barely overlaps the front tooth next to it. Yael has never noticed it before.
“I might loveThe Black Flamingoeven more than the last one,” Zoe says, plopping herself down a couple of chairs away from Ravi. Her dirty, pin-covered yellow messenger bag makes a secondarythunkas it hits the floor.
Yael flicks her gaze toward Zoe immediately, but she can feel Ravi’s eyes still on her for several more heartbeats. Like he’s in no rush to look away. “I’m glad you like it,” Yael says. Zoe has said this about almost every single book they’ve read. She falls quick and hard for literature, just like Yael did at that age.
“Well, I mean, I have to get to the end first to know for sure. But it’ssogood,” she says. “I’ve never read a whole story in poetry before. When you said a hundred pages in a week I was like, no way, I have a precalc test, JQ is definitely going to spoil it for me and they’ll say it’s my fault, which will be even worse, but I read it the first night.”
Yael can’t help it; she beams. Getting buy-in for this club from administration took a semester of pleading. Principal Harrison had been convinced that the average teenage attention span couldn’t handle reading for class, let alone for pleasure. And maybe there’s some truth to it—Yael feels like her own attention span has suffered, and she can’t imagine what it would be like to be a kid now. But she also firmlybelieves that reading for pleasure made it easier for her to do the assigned reading when she was in school. That she has a crowd of eight to twelve twice a week is a win on its own, but the fact that they seem to be actually reading the books makes the hours she spent arguing with Principal Harrison worth it many times over.
“I did, too,” Ravi says.
“Yeah?” Zoe asks. “And?”
“I really like the flamingo motif—how he felt like the misplaced egg in the prologue, then later the bit about how when flamingos fight, it might look like kissing. Good imagery,” Ravi says.
“Imagery?” Jaxon walks in, hand in hand with Eli.
“I thought we didn’t have to do literary analysis here,” Eli says.
