Margot’s Rumour

Meeting Up

Margot was not pleased! 

The person she was trying to avoid was meant to be her partner, so a project that seemed long, complicated and worse would take weeks to do. Probably it would have to take place outside of school hours.

She was a little bit thankful  Mr B had paired her with Santiago. When Steve and Dan started arguing who would get to have her as a partner, her mind had gone blank. What would she say, how would she turn them both down? Who in the class could Margot possibly pick that wouldn’t just flake, forcing her to do all the work. She was sure, even before being forced to partner with Santiago, he was probably the only one in the class that would at least pretend he was helping. Because he had never asked for her notes or answers to homework. But she also was too embarrassed to ask him to be her partner.

Now she knew why Mr B had asked what she thought about Santiago when she walked into the class. He had called her over to his desk and said, “Margot, you and Santiago, what do you think?”

Margot had nearly thought for a moment that Mr B knew that Santiago and she had spent the night in bed together. But it was clear that no one at school knew. She was pretty certain if gossip that shocking was going around she wouldn’t have heard it first from a teacher in 5th period. Margot was fairly certain from past Santiago conquests that it would have been first-period news. Like when he left Stacey at that party. 

She was happy she had just responded with, "cool?"  She had meant it as a non-committal response, maybe even a question.  She didn't know it was committing 6 weeks of work with him. 

----

“Group up!” Mr B shouted. And the desks started to move and the noise increased with groans and chatter of last night’s hockey game. 

“Hey!” 

Margot jumped; she hadn’t moved yet, but she was fully expecting that she would have to go over to Santiago’s desk.  But here he was.  There standing in front of her desk pulling a chair over and casually throwing a leg over it as he continued. “Margot blink if you’re a hostage?”

Margot blinked again and looked again at Santiago. 

“There you go! So what exactly do we need to do? Do you think we really need to read 3 books for this project, I barely read 3 books a year.”

Margot felt herself relax. He was talking about school work, not about waking up in bed together. She could talk about school work all day. It was easy. More so because she was very excited about this project. 

“Well technically no. What we need to do is find a story arch and show it in various works over time and from different cultures. Like Romeo and Juliette, the star-cross doomed lovers from Shakespeare. It’s been redone or retold in different ways. Like it’s Tristan and Iseult and it’s also West Side Story.” 

“Okay let’s use that.”

“We can't, that's the example Mr B gave, were you not listening?”

“No; I wasn’t. He goes on too much when he talks about films” 

Margot giggled, “he really does! Well, I guess we could think of a style or movie trope and narrow it down that way.  So many of these will be movies, it will save us reading and committing too quickly to a bad theme.”

“Sounds great, let’s go to my house this afternoon. We have so many streaming sites. And we can pick a style. They also have that if you watched this you'll like suggestions.”

—

Margot was still taken aback by, Santiago’s Netflix and Chill style towards their homework. She wasn’t certain when school ended if he would still be in the mood, or if something better would come up. But as she placed her books in her backpack, Santiago closed his locker next to her and said, “ready to go? I’m parked out back.”