“Yup. I can see the teacher better.” She watched Dad walk across the room and push the antique gramophone, normally in our attic, out of the way.
“Why would that be a good thing?”
“Are you kidding me?” She motioned her open palm to my dad. “Look at him.”
Uh-oh. “Um, Emily—”
“Isn’t he cute?” she continued. “Don’t you think he looks just like Harrison Ford—but, like, Indiana Jones Harrison Ford?”
I glanced at my dad, my nose crinkling as I took notice of his greying, light-brown hair and the creases he’d get around his kind eyes when he smiled. I guess he did sort of look like Indiana Jones. “Emily,” I whispered again.
“Yeah.” She sighed, dreamily gazing up at him.
There was no easy way around it. I had to tell her before she embarrassed herself further. “He’s…my dad.”
She spun around so quickly that I jumped. “You are kidding me. Oh my God, Ara. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m so sorry, I just, I didn’t realise you were—”
“We are so having a sleepover at your house.” She practically jumped in her seat. “I’ve had a crush on Mr Thompson for, like—” she flipped her head to one side, “—two years.”
My tongue pushed into the side of my cheek. I really did not expect that. I thought she might be a little humiliated at the least, but I guess it was better this way. “Two years, huh?”
“Yup. It’s why I take History.”
“That’s…disturbing.”
“Not really.” She shrugged, gnawing the tip of her pen. “You could look at it as though your dad is inspiring my education.”
I wondered if he’d feel the same way. Instead of rolling my eyes at her, I turned my head back to watch Dad writing the words ‘Religious History’ on the board.
“Oh, come now, it’ll be fun and you know it,” he announced to the groaners around the room, then turned back to write on the board again.
Emily leaned in. “He’s right,” she whispered. “He always makes boring topics fun.”
“I know.” I smiled to myself. “He even used to do all the voices of characters when he’d read to me.”
“He does that in class—” Emily laughed, “—when he reads direct from text books. Sometimes he puts on different accents.”
As I went to laugh, my eyes darted quickly from my dad to a boy beside me, who jolted forward in his seat, a scrunched-up piece of paper bouncing off his desk, landing on his schoolbag a second later. He spun around, presenting his middle finger to the boys up the back, while my dad remained oblivious, glancing from a textbook to the whiteboard.
“What a loser,” one of the boys said.
I turned away and leaned closer to Emily. “Do they know that by making that L sign on their own heads, they’re technically making themselves look like losers?”
She rolled her eyes. “They are losers.”
I let out a small laugh.
In the seat across from me, the boy scrunched up a sheet of paper, hiding it under his desk, keeping his eyes on my dad the whole time. I looked back at the jocks, who watched the kid with an amused kind of interest, until they broke formation suddenly, launching to their feet as he sent a paper cannon into enemy territory.
“Oh, crap.” Emily covered her head with her notepad, smiling. “He just started a war.”
I went to duck too, but Dad started in with something about Greek gods, forcing a cease-fire; the jocks sat down, and the boy knocked the ammo into his open backpack.
“Looks like they’ll live to fight another day,” I said.
“No,” Emily whispered under my dad’s lecture. “It’ll just be a lunch-room continuation.”
“Great. Food fight?”
She shrugged. “Probably.”
“Will David be in that?”
It was a simple enough question, but my newfound affections rested too thickly in the undertone. She turned to me quickly, grinning, and before she could say Oh, my God, you like him, I said, “So, does my dad know you have a crush on him?”
“No way.” She leaned back, her eyes wide. “I would be so humiliated.”
I scratched my temple, wondering how admitting it to his daughter was any less humiliating.
“So, how was the library, with David?” She kind of sung his name.
I froze, wondering which parts of my amazing morning I should leave out. “It was okay. He seems nice.” I nodded casually, but Emily’s smile grew.
“You like him.”
I cleared my throat, repositioning my chair. “I think he’s...a nice...kid.”
She scoffed in the back of her throat. And I knew, from the look on her face, exactly what she was about to say. “You so do like him.”
“Nope.” I wore the face of denial, but the cheesy grin in my eyes must have changed the wording on my neon sign to ‘Oh my God. I totally do.’
“I knew it.” She pointed at me. “I knew it.”
I grabbed her finger and pushed it down. “I do not like him.”
“Oh, I’ve seen that look before. You have Knight Fever.”
“Knight what?”
“It’s what we call it when all the girls swoon over David.”
“I’m not swooning.” I turned my face away.
“He’s charming, isn’t he?” She leaned on her hand, her thoughts a million miles away. “It’ll kill you, you know? Knight Fever. Have you heard the I don’t date speech yet?”
I drew a tight breath.
“Oh no. You have. Oh, I thought—” Her head moved slowly from side to side. “Well, now I’m sure he’s g*y. I mean, I was sure you had to be his type. Us girls have pretty much got it down to a science.”
“Got what down to a science?”
“The girls David Knight will and will not scope.”
“What’s scoping?”
“Perving, you know…checking out.” She shrugged.
Oh. “He scopes?”
“He’s a hot-blooded male, Ara? Of course he does. Just, very subtly,” her tone dropped its certainty. “Like, he never actually looks, but he’s nicer to some than others. So, we’ve grouped together a sort of profiling on him.”
“Okay, that’s just creepy,” I said, turning away.
“It’s not—” she paused when my dad glared at us, “—it’s not like that. It’s just a bit of gossip. We don’t have, like, a file on him or anything.”