“Considering we are not under house arrest, we could also go out to a bookstore and pick something up if we wanted to. I doubt I’ll read, but if you want to, that’s cool with me.”
“I want you to read something you’ll like, too. I can’t read by myself while you do nothing. That would be rude.”
“It wouldn’t be rude, I have other stuff I can do. I need to check in on social media at some point this weekend anyway so no one thinks I died.”
I roll my eyes, but let the topic go so we can get started on our homework.
Opening my notebook to a fresh page, I ask, “On a scale from 1 to 10, how nerdy is it that I’m excited to do homework with you?”
Hunter looks at me and smirks. “Off the charts.”
“Well, I am,” I say unashamedly as I dig out my own copy of Gatsby. “Wanna start with English? I haven’t really been looking forward to this assignment, but I guess it’s good strategy to get the thing I’m dreading most out of the way first.”
Hunter cocks an eyebrow at me as he opens his laptop. “You’re dreading the writing assignment most? Wouldn’t have guessed that. You love to read.”
“I do, but I don’t love this book, and I really don’t love the assignment the teacher gave us.”
Technically, we have a choice between two options for our assignment, but I don’t like either of them. We can either write Gatsby’s letter to Daisy—there was a pivotal letter given to her in the book, but the reader never got to find out what it said—or rewrite the ending of the book.
“Know which one you’re going to do yet?” Hunter asks.
I nod. “I’m going to write the letter from Gatsby. You?”
“I’m going to rewrite the ending.”
I pause to look up at him in horror. “What?”
He looks over, frowning slightly when he catches sight of my face. “What?”
“You’re going to change the ending of a book you didn’t write?”
He regards me warily, then types his password into his laptop. “That’s the plan.”
I shake my head, turning my attention to my notebook and grabbing my pen. “I’m not sure we can be friends anymore.”
“Friends?”
Ignoring his disbelief, I go on. “I don’t believe in changing the ending of books, even if I don’t like the way things turned out. Hunger Games is a perfect example. Obviously, I don’t like the way that trilogy ended and I wish she would’ve taken it in a different direction, but I still wouldn’t change it.”
“You wouldn’t put Katniss and Gale together if you could?” he asks, his skepticism clear.
I shake my head. “Nope. They’re not my characters. I have my opinions about them, but they’re influenced by all the crap I bring to the table, you know? There are obviously a lot of people who don’t feel the way I do about it. Beyond that, even though I love the books and I’ve read them multiple times, I only have a partial understanding of the characters and their journey. I can’t know the characters as well as the person who created them and wrote their story. Socrates had this opinion about books, he didn’t like them because you can’t have a conversation with a book, you know? You can’t clear anything up. You can’t ask the characters how they feel about things they don’t share with you, you can’t ask them why they do the things they do or what they would do in some situation they don’t encounter on the pages of the story.” I’m really just getting started, but when I look up at Hunter and see the clear amusement on his handsome face, I realize I’m about to launch into a full blown book rant. “Anyway… that’s why I don’t much appreciate either of these assignments. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.”
Hunter shakes his head, his eyes still glinting with amusement as he shifts his gaze to his laptop. “I love you.”
I smile cheekily. “I love you, too, friend.”
He slides me an unamused look. “You know, I was gonna let that slide…”
Before he can pick it up now, I ask, “Out of curiosity, why did you choose to change the ending? That seems like a much more complicated option. I picked the letter because it was easy and I want to phone this one in.”
“Well… I didn’t consult Socrates first,” he teases.
My cheeks warm.
“But my reason’s a lot simpler. I just want to give the guy a chance to pull his head out of his ass and find someone better than Daisy to chase after.”
“Daisy is kind of the worst,” I say, a little apologetically.
“He didn’t really love her. I don’t need to have a dialogue with a page of text to glean that. He was infatuated with the idea of her, but that’s not love. He would’ve ended up miserable if he would have actually got her. She did him a favor by marrying that other guy, showed him where he stood. It’s too bad he didn’t see it that way, accept that she’d shown her true colors. He could’ve moved on. He could’ve found someone who actually cared about him, someone he loved deeper than the surface-level bullshit he felt for Daisy.”
I nod, agreeing with pretty much all of that. “How are you going to get around Wilson’s motivation?”
He glances over at me. “What do you mean?”
“Well, if you want Gatsby to get a chance to meet someone else, you’re obviously saving him. But Wilson is still who he is, right? So, how are you saving Gatsby without sacrificing another character’s established motivation? If Gatsby flees, that’s out of character for him. If Wilson doesn’t come after him, that’s out of character for him. This is why it’s hard to change an ending. It has to make sense, or it’s going to drive me crazy.”
Hunter smirks. “Do you want to do my homework for me, Riley? It might be easier. I certainly wouldn’t mind.”
I pout. “No. I don’t even like the assignment.”
“You’ve thought it through more than I have,” he says. “You can even half-ass it. Mrs. Dowd loves me. I’ll probably get a better grade than you even if yours is a thousand times better.”
I roll my eyes. “No kidding. She’s the worst.”
“I don’t think she likes women,” he says.
“Not ones who aren’t nuns, at least.”
“It’s decided,” Hunter says, closing his laptop. “You’re gonna do my English assignment for me.”
“I don’t think we decided that.” I flip to the chapter where Daisy gets the letter so I can make a few notes. “I’ll be your critique partner if you want. You can bounce your ideas off me and I’ll help you iron out the wrinkles, but I’m not going to do all the work for you.”
Hunter grabs his phone and kicks back to theatrically dig in on me doing his work for him, but when he does, his expression shifts.
I do a double-take when I see him scowling at his phone screen.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
His gaze flickers to mine. He seems to instinctively turn his phone screen away from me. “Nothing.”
I scowl. “Nothing?”
He’s lying.
“What is it?” I ask, not even waiting for him to feed me more bullshit. “Or, who is it?”