didn't have time/an internet connection to post yesterday, so i'm doing it now and i hope y'all are doing well. i went hiking three times this week and then i had classes and my schedule is CRAZY right now, so i apologize if i can't respond to comments and stuff right away. enjoy:

three

“Emily!” rang Thalia’s eager voice as she entered the room. “So, like, I was checking my mail, and then I happened to check yours, too, and I found this box thing, so I thought that I’d bring it up. You’re welcome.” She waltzed over to my bed, dropped the “box thing,” and then dumped her purse on the bed next to mine—on her bed.

“Thanks,” I said quietly, peering over at the peculiar box.

“Not to pry or anything”—this was how she always presaged her prying—“but who would send you a box in the middle of the week?”

“I have no clue,” I told her, standing from my desk to inspect the package. It was small and cardboard and instead of having the specifics about which dorm I was in and all that, it just said “EMILY ALBERT” and the school’s address. I was definitely curious, that was for sure. Thus, I picked up the object and cautiously ripped open the top. Within lay a book and a piece of paper. The book was Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. I read it last year as a sophomore. The writing was brilliant, though the suspension of disbelief threw me for a loop at times.

“A book?” Thalia scoffed, eyeing my actions. “Well, that’s a waste. But, like, you like that stuff, so I guess it’s nice?”

“It’s nice,” I assured her.

“Who’s it from?”

Instead of answering Thalia, I put the book on my bed and then tackled the task of reading the note that came with it. It read: 

       Emily,

             I hope you don’t find my sending you a book terribly creepy.

       I apologize if it’s perceived that way. Now, I’m sure that you’ve

       read Frankenstein in the past, but I saw it, and it was cheap, and

       I needed an excuse to send you this note. Presuming that I don’t

       get carted off for trespassing, you should definitely go meet me on

       the quad with the big clock tower around 5:00 PM. Please. I feel

       like chatting about Mary Shelley.

       Yours truly,

               -Oliver Dobson

When I was done reading, Thalia snatched the note away from me and read it herself. “Who the hell is Oliver and why have you never mentioned him to me before?” She gave me back the note and waited for my response.

“He’s a guy,” I lamely replied.

“Uh, duh,” she rolled her eyes. “Em, I’d like real details. The juicy—like, not Couture—kind, preferably.”

I ran a hair through my hair and tried to gage how much I should share with Thalia. Most of the time she was harmless, but occasionally she could go overboard if she was excessively intrigued by something. So I decided to play it safe: “He goes to public school.”

“Firstly, ew,” she said, for public happened to be the grossest thing in the world to her after dirt, bugs, and rodents. “Secondly, this is starting to sound like a forbidden love type of thing. Like, from Romeo or Juliet or whatever!”

“We’re not even really friends.”

Alas, Thalia simply wouldn’t buy that. “Right.”

“No, I’m serious,” I argued. “We met a little over two weeks ago—”

“Where?”

“The Bookstore.”

“Classic!”

“Anyway, we met, and then we went to The Diner—”

“On a date? Ohemgee!”

“No, for lunch. But, uh, that’s it.”

“Emily, Emily, Emily,” Thalia sighed, moving over to her desk, “you are so funny sometimes!” She sat down and then opened up her laptop, easily logging on to Facebook. “You have stalked him, right? Actually, never mind. You’re against social media because of the whole ‘college’ thing.” That wasn’t the only reason, but it was true that I didn’t really want colleges to not accept me for a minor misdemeanor that popped on the internet from my youth. Thalia, on the other hand, was perfectly content posting every little detail of her life, from drunken party escapades to rants on how much she hated her ex-boyfriends. Out of the two us, I was pretty sure that the colleges would appreciate my lack of an online presence over Thalia’s superfluous virtual existence any day. “Here, I’ll find him.”

“Please don’t,” I begged, though I knew that it was already too late. Thalia had already typed “Oliver Dobson” into the social site. She clicked on one of the names but silently deemed him not the right Oliver Dobson, leaving her to repeat the process.

“So, he lives around here, and you met at The Bookstore. What does he look like?”

“Average.”

“Oh-my-gosh, you are impossible!”

I smiled a bit at Thalia’s frustration and then reluctantly submitted to saying, “He has glasses.”

“AND?”

“Curly hair.”

She tapped away at her computer for a few more seconds and then exclaimed, “Found him!” Sure enough, there on Thalia’s screen was Oliver Dobson’s page. Thalia clicked on his profile picture to enlarge it. It was just a simple picture of him smiling while wearing a suit and bowtie. His hair was mussed up, and it looked as though he was at an event of sorts. Well, the suit and bowtie kind of gave that away. Unless Oliver was the type of boy who went to school dressed like that, which would severely worry me, for I knew boys like that, and they were the type you often severely worried about. But I was pretty sure that Oliver was simply at a function. “Well, he’s not, like, terrible,” Thalia assessed. “I would never go for him—mainly because of the public and glasses thing—but I can see you two together. It would be kinda cute. In, like, a totally gross way.”

“Gee, thanks, Thalia. But just for the record, we’re not even really friends.”

She clicked on his cover photo and then said, “Good thing he has friends. Like, since he can’t rely on you for that role.” The picture was of Oliver and four other boys, impishly climbing on a slide in what I assumed to be some sort of playground. They were all grinning and pushing each other, and it made me kind of happy to know that he had people like that in his life and wasn’t a total loner like I occasionally happened to be. “Oh! Girl alert!” Thalia exclaimed as she clicked on the next picture. It was of Oliver and a girl with vibrantly auburn hair. They were both laughing, and Oliver’s arm was swathed around her waist.

“I told you we were barely even platonic,” I said to Thalia, “see?”

“This is from last year, Emily,” pointed out my dear roommate of three consecutive years (a “threepeat,” as we called it). “Besides, she looks like a total skank!” The girl didn’t, actually, look like a skank. Thalia was just trying to be supportive. “Obviously, he’s trying to up his standards, and after a girl like her, I can’t blame him.”

“Can you, uh, close that now?” I requested. “This is starting to get creepy.”

“Yeah, one sec. Lemme just friend him.”

“NO! THALIA! DON’T YOU DARE!” But despite my protests, Thalia Thornton had already pressed the blue rectangle that would enable her to stalk my new acquaintance before our acquaintanceship even began to develop thoroughly. My heart was pounding, and the reason for that was absolutely stupid. It was ridiculous how much pressure and anxiety was involved in social media. Right now, I was internally and externally freaking out because Thalia had pressed a 2D rectangle made up of pixels. The act was so simple and base, yet I knew the consequences that could plausibly stem from it. For instance: Oliver accepting Thalia’s friend request, giving her full access to chat with him whenever she desired to do so. This type of freedom was a scary thing when given to Thalia Thornton.

“Oops,” said Thalia as a delayed response. “Oh, and look—he accepted!”

To my horror, a red number popped up in the corner of Thalia’s screen with the words “Oliver Dobson accepted your friend request. Write on Oliver’s timeline.” A message directly from Oliver was the next horrifying thing to appear. It was at the bottom of the screen, and Thalia keenly opened it, only to read, “Hi. Do I know you?” from Oliver.

Before I even had time to dictate a response, Thalia already had one typed out and pressed SEND: “Hi! Im Emilys roommate! She just got your package, and since Im very protective of her”—she wasn’t actually—“I needed 2 make sure that u werent a total loser.”

Oliver wrote back, “Did I pass?”

Thalia wrote, “No. But thats OK, cuz Emilys kind of a loser 2.”

“Right. Well, do you know if Emily’s planning on meeting me?”

I seriously couldn’t believe that this technological conversation was happening right before my eyes and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

“Of course she is!” sent Thalia. “In fact, shes headed there now! It was nice talking 2 u, Oliver. BTW, Id just like to let u know that my sisters current boyfriend is Italian, and he has connections, if u no what I mean, so dont hurt Emily.” By “connections,” Thalia meant to certain designer shoe brands, but Oliver didn’t need to know that.

“Duly noted.” I seriously couldn’t believe that he had just written that via Facebook. But this was Oliver, after all. “Tell Emily that I’ll be waiting.”

“Ya whatever. Bye.” With that, Thalia closed her computer and stared wide-eyed at me. “Well, he seems nice…”

“You better sleep with one eye open tonight,” I warned.

“Or what?” she snorted—being that she was Thalia Thornton, it was rare for her to ever snort. “Will you, like, suffocate me with a pillowcase? Stab me with a pencil? Draw a dick on my forehead?”

“Thalia, if I were you, then I’d definitely stop giving me ideas.”

“Okay, well, while we’re role playing, if I were you, then I’d change out of that pathetic sweater”—my sweater wasn’t that pathetic—“and into something that doesn’t scream, ‘loser.’ I mean, this poor boy has probably only ever seen you in sweaters, and that’s just not the impression we want to leave him with. If you want…you can borrow something of mine to wear. But nothing from Barney’s or Neiman’s!”

“Thanks,” I began to peal off my sweater, “but I think I’m fine.”

“Okay, well, I think that you should wear that semi-cute black jacket—the one with the toggles,” suggested Thalia. She had already moved over to my closet to extract it. With a satisfied smile, she handed me the jacket, just as I put on a simple long-sleeved tee. “You want to look cute, right? This is a date after all.”

“It’s not a date.” I slipped my arms through each sleeve of the jacket, not being able to deny that it was better than my “pathetic” sweater. “We’re just two barely-acquaintances who happen to be meeting on the quad.”

“In the middle of the week,” she added, “after he sent you a book and a note. Right.”

I didn’t have the energy to argue with Thalia anymore, so I just glanced at the clock, shocked that so much time had passed (it was 4:53ish). Quickly, I attempted to slip on a pair of Converse, but Thalia gasped, signifying that she would wrestle me to the ground if I left the room wearing the shoes. She picked up a pair of leather boots and tossed them to me. I reluctantly pulled them on, grabbed my phone from its charging station, and was about to leave, when I remembered the purpose of this gathering. So I picked up the brilliant book Oliver had sent me and then left the room, ignoring any and all words of advice in the realms of boys that Thalia was spewing at the last minute.

Upon exiting my dorm, I came to an empty hallway. It was five on a weekday. Obviously, it was empty. Everyone was either at some type of sporting practice, musical practice, club meeting, the library, or in their dorms, waiting for dinner, just as Thalia and I had been. So I had no issue bumping into anyone as I hurriedly strolled through the long corridor and then down a flight of steps. I came to the common room of the dorm and didn’t bother greeting anybody, because what was the point? My feet just continued to carry me out of the dorm building and into the brisk air of fall, until I was comfortably on the campus, headed towards the big clock tower.

The clock tower. For anybody who wasn’t greatly accustomed with Barnes Academy, it was the landmark often given as a sure indication that they were getting close. The clock tower itself wasn’t in use anymore, and it hadn’t been for at least twenty years. But the school would never tear it down, for when one Googled “Barnes Academy,” a picture of the clock tower was the first thing that came up. I was pretty sure that this was because it was a visually intricate and timeworn structure that reminded everyone that Barnes was established way back when, setting it apart from some of the newer, more alternative prep schools. It was located on the edge of the south campus, and as a general rule, we weren’t really supposed to go past it during school hours.

Currently, it was afterschool and I had finished all my homework for the evening, so I felt perfectly fine about going to the clock tower. Actually, “perfectly fine” was far from what I was feeling. Because right now, I wasn’t just going for a stroll around the campus as I often did. Nor was I meeting a random boy in a bookstore from a place of pure spontaneity and chance. Now, I was going to the clock tower to meet Oliver Dobson, which happened to be wholly weird, because he didn’t attend my school, and we had only met each other twice before, and it was kind of creepy that he sent me a book, the more I thought about. Especially Frankenstein.

I stopped walking only when I spotted his tall frame and tousled hair. He was by the fence that bordered the road, looking more out of place than a zucchini in a sea of nectarines (I was hungry—my analogies weren’t the best at the moment). There was just something so different about his stiffness in standing and nervousness in glancing around than what I was used to around here. Typically, boys on the quad felt right at home. Everybody did, for that matter. The school was our home, making the quads our backyards. But Oliver didn’t go to school here, so I couldn’t really blame him for feeling and looking so unfitting. If I had gone to his school, I probably would’ve reacted the same way.

“Oliver!” I called out.

His head jerked over in my direction, and he grinned at me in absolute relief, beginning to move in my direction. “I was starting to think that you’d decided to stand me up.”

“Thalia said that I would be here, didn’t she?” I laughed.

“She did, indeed.”

“I’m sorry about her, by the way. She grabbed your note, saw your name, and then proceeded to find you on the internet.”

“Funny,” he remarked, “the reason I sent you the note, was because I couldn’t find you on the internet.”

“I don’t do social media.”

“So I deducted. Which was why I sent you a package thing, and I’m really sorry if that creeped you out entirely.”

“It did,” he frowned, “but that’s okay.”

“I didn’t know how else to reach you.”

“And why exactly did you want to reach me?”

“Because, Emily Albert, over our past two encounters, I have found that I enjoy talking to you, and long ago I decided to not deprive myself the simpler pleasures of life.”

“Did you just try to pull an August Waters on me?” He wasn’t directly quoting TFIOS, but I was almost positive that I had read a quote extraordinarily similar to what he had just said. It didn’t surprise me that Oliver had read the book. We met in a bookstore. If he hadn’t read TFIOS, that would’ve been the bigger deal breaker. “You did, didn’t you?”

“Guilty as charged,” he admitted sheepishly. “But in all seriousness, I wanted to talk to you, and I didn’t have your number—this is my smooth way of asking for you number, by the way—so I figured that doing things the old fashioned way was the way to go.”

“You could’ve just written me a letter.”

“Yeah, but isn’t Frankenstein just grand?”

“Indeed, it is.”

“So, how about that number right about now?” He pulled his phone out from a pocket and invitingly handed it to me.

I took the phone, and then programmed in a new contact with my number and my name. Because I wasn’t in a terribly creative or clever mood (not that I ever was, really), I just saved it as “Emily Albert,” instead of something cute like “Emily Hotstuff Albert.” In my phone, Thalia’s name was under “YOUR SEXXIE ROOMIE.” I was pretty sure that Thalia could spell “sexy” correctly, but occasionally I doubted her literary aptitudes, so one could never be too sure. I thought that Oliver would appreciate my lack of a grotesque middle name, so I kept it short and sweet.

“If you expect me to ask for your number now,” I handed him back his phone, “then you’re going to be terribly disappointed.”

“Oh, c’mon! You don’t want to pull a Hazel and Augustus or a Girl and Boy from every other clichéd plot line and stay up talking and texting at night for hours?”

“No.”

“Then you’re the one who’s going to be terribly disappointed, Emily Albert.”

“I’ll just let Thalia text for me—she’s practically an insomniac, anyway.” In all seriousness, when Thalia didn’t take her regular dosage of melatonin, the girl could be up for hours. I was okay sleeping with a light on, so when Thalia was off her meds, she would just sit in her bed or at her desk, texting or internet stalking or doing whatever it was that Thalia Thornton did when she couldn’t sleep. I, on the other hand, was out like a light about two seconds after my head hit the pillow.

“No offense to your roommate, but I’d rather talk to you.”

I smiled. “So. What do you want to talk about?”

“Mary Shelley.” I thought he was joking when he wrote that on his note.

“What about her?”

“Her brilliance…” Evidently, he wasn’t joking.

And that was how I ended up talking to Oliver Dobson for a good hour and a half about the genius that was Mary Shelley, by the clock tower, on a nice autumn afternoon. We only stopped talking when a bell rang, signifying it was time for me to go eat dinner. Oliver told me that he had better get going, too, but he left me with the reassurance that he would call me. And text me. And maybe even message Thalia as a last resort, if I didn’t pick up. I told him that that sounded like a borderline-stalker plan to me. He laughed, and then we went our separate ways.