Page 25 of Hilarina and the Ogre

“She’s bothering you too.”

“Not really. I like our matching bags.”

Hilary sighed. “Wipe that goofy look off your face.”

“You’ll have to wait for my high to come down. Are your hands shaking too? I must really be in love with you after all.”

“You’d better not always be this stupid going forward.”

But maybe it was too late. “I don’t even want to read in class anymore,” Trenton admitted. “I just want to be looking at you.”

Hilary told himself it was a joke. Just a joke. “Then let me read in class. I’m so bored I could die.”

But he didn’t stay bored. About two minutes into the next class, Tatum Woodson, the idiot who sat behind him, began kicking the back of his chair. Not loud enough to make a sound, but enough to send a micro-jolt through Hilary’s body with every impact. It was maddening. “Quit it.”

But Tatum pretended not to hear him, and the kicking continued. It lasted only until the next bell, then Trenton took Hilary over to his side of the room and said to Lea, the girl in front of him, “Switch with him.”

Surprisingly, Lea didn’t put up much of an objection. Then again, Hilary wouldn’t have said no to that look in Trenton’s eyes either.

Things quieted down for a bit after that, though they were late for their last class of the day. It was Ermhart, always a stickler. She seemed to materialize in the classroom at the exact moment class was slated to begin. If another teacher was going overtime, she’d walk in anyway and start setting up for her lesson. Well, her eyes shot like a laser toward the door as it opened, and before they could take a single step inside, she hit them with a cold, “You’re late.”

She hadn’t even finished writing the date on the board, which meant she’d only gotten into the classroom about ten seconds before them.

“We were getting our books,” Trenton said.

It was the first time Hilary had heard his friend address a teacher, and he wasn’t the only one surprised. Ermhart blinked, but recovered quickly. “You should have gotten them at lunch.”

“With all due respect, Mrs. Ermhart, I really don’t want to scrub semen off them again.”

Quiet. It brought perfect quiet. Hilary could hear his own pulse beating in his neck. And then Ermhart lost it. “Krinkle’s office. Now.”

Trenton bowed his head in acknowledgment and did an about-face, stepping back into the hall, leaving Hilary to scramble as he followed.

He waited until the door had shut behind them to hiss, “What the fuck, Trent!”

But Trenton was ready for him. “You thought it was gross too. And it’s not like she’s going to clean them for us.”

“You lump. She thinks WE’RE the ones jizzing on them.”

That, apparently, had not occurred to the boy. “Ew, why?”

“Because you brazenly told her so, that’s why.”

Trenton opened his mouth to retort and stopped. He scowled. “This is why I don’t talk to people.”

They were in trouble, and the stupidest trouble they’d ever been in—all thanks to a certain ogre idiot. But Trenton’s scowl was so irritated, so off-kilter and flummoxed, that Hilary had to laugh. “Keep that in mind for the future.”

Trenton’s scowl deepened, cutting into his face. If smiling made him look younger, the scowling turned him into a middle-aged fart. “Who would do that to their own textbooks?” he demanded.

“I don’t know, a pervert? You’re asking the wrong person.”

“I’m a virgin too.”

As always, Trenton was ever-ready to prove there were no words in the world he wasn’t brave enough to speak, which meant that now Hilary was the one who was stuck. His mouth worked uselessly for a couple of moments before he managed, “Who said I was a virgin?”

“Aren’t you?”

“You don’t have to say it!”