Tig may have been looking forward to the band’s next practice, but she wasn’t looking forward to that day’s tutoring session with Will.
Or maybe she was. Which was the problem.
She kept telling herself she was dreading it. But if she hadn’t been looking forward to spending that time with Will, alone in the library, then why had she spritzed perfume behind her ears that morning? And wondered when she did it if her gardeny smell would last all the way until after school? Most of the time, Tig never even wore perfume at all.
When she got to the library after school, Will wasn’t there. Tig sat down at their usual table and took a deep breath. She thought about her perfume and whether it still lingered behind her ears, but since there was no way she could smell behind her own ears, she took a paper bookmark out of the novel she was reading and rubbed it back there a few times. Then she smelled the bookmark. Very faintly, she could still detect hints of pear and raspberry, plus some other scent she couldn’t quite name. What was it? Sort of a musky, kind of . . .
“Why are you sniffing a bookmark?” Will said, standing behind her chair.
“What?” Tig said, jumping in her seat and quickly stuffing the bookmark back between the novel’s pages.
Will pulled out the chair beside her. “I asked why you were sniffing a bookmark.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tig said. “I was not sniffing a bookmark!”
Will laughed. “You were so sniffing a bookmark,” he said. “Don’t lie. I saw you!”
Tig blushed.
“It’s okay,” Will said. “I know why you were doing it.”
“You do?” she asked.
“Well, I think I do, anyway,” Will said. “Is it because you love the smell of books? Because I can totally relate. I’ve always loved the smell of books.”
“Me too!” Tig said. And she really did. She was just so surprised that Will did too that she kind of forgot what had started the conversation in the first place.
“You know they have scented candles that smell like old books?” he asked. “My mom has one. She’s where I get my weirdness from, I guess.”
“Do they really?” Tig said. “That’s cool!”
“But I do have one question,” Will said. “If you like book smell, shouldn’t you have been sniffing the book itself instead of the bookmark?”
“Oh,” Tig said. That was a good point. “See, what I was doing . . . is . . . I wanted to see if the bookmark smelled like the book . . . you know, from having been in the book all that time.”
“That makes sense,” Will replied.
“Yes,” Tig said. “Yes, it does.” Thank goodness. It suddenly dawned on Tig that she’d just told another couple of lies. Was this becoming a habit with her now? Funny how one lie bred so many more. All this had started with her lie about a bad algebra grade, and now here she was, lying about sniffing a bookmark. Weird how that worked. And I used to be a pretty decent, honest person, Tig thought. Didn’t I?
“How do you feel about area?” Will asked.
“I don’t know,” Tig said. “I guess I like it pretty well. It gets pretty crowded on McFarland Boulevard, though. That part kind of bugs me when my mom’s trying to get me to drum lessons on time.”
Will laughed. “I didn’t mean how do you feel about the area; I meant how confident do you feel about area, as in measurement—area, surface area, volume?”
“Oh!” Tig said. “I knew that. I was just messing with you.”
“Sure you were,” Will said. They both grinned. While Will began showing Tig how to find the area of a rectangle—which of course she already knew how to do—Tig shivered. “You cold?” Will asked.
“Aren’t you?” Tig replied. “What do they do in here, hang meat?”
“You want my hoodie?” Will unzipped his jacket and began taking it off.
“No, I couldn’t,” Tig said. “Then you’ll be cold.”
“I’ll be fine,” Will said. “Here. Take it.” He placed the jacket around Tig’s shoulders. She slid her arms inside and wrapped the soft cotton around her. It was still warm from his skin, and it smelled faintly like a walk in the woods on a fall day.
Tig took a deep breath. She drank in the scent and the warmth of the jacket.
And then she promised herself she’d find a way to end these tutoring sessions for good.