Which was just fine with me. After today, I was feeling just a little territorial over my best friend.
“What classes are you doing homework for tonight?” I asked Hunter as we settled into the table. He pulled his laptop out of his backpack while I reached for the tablet and notebook in mine.
“I still have a few problems to finish for Calculus, and then I’ll probably work a little on my research paper for Psychology.”
“That sounds fun,” I said sarcastically. While I enjoyed writing for the school newspaper, research papers were torture. All those rules for citing resources and quoting people were confusing.
“Yes. This paper is sure to besuperfun.” He chuckled and opened his laptop.
As I watched him put his pointer finger on the power button, I wondered if his use of the phrase “super fun” here could work the same way as when he’d talked about his date with Addison.
I pushed that thought away because it was stupid and probably a bit obsessive of me to try to dissect every little thing he said. So instead of wasting even more time worrying about a date that was almost two weeks away, I pulled up my AP English notes, put my noise canceling earbuds in, and settled in for an hour or two of studying.
* * *
“Well,I think my brain is fried now,” I said after coming out of my studying trance an hour and half later.
I glanced over to see how Hunter was doing, but he was still hunched over his keyboard. The look of concentration on his face told me he was still in the zone and hadn’t even heard me.
His fingers clicked nonstop on the keyboard, so I figured he was probably in the groove with his research paper. But when I peeked at his computer screen, instead of it being open to the word processing software he usually used for his papers, I saw that he was actually typing away in his email application.
“Are you emailing someone a novel?” I leaned closer to get a better look at the few paragraphs he’d already written.
When my shoulder brushed against his, it brought him out of his emailing trance. He glanced at me with startled eyes. And when he saw that I was looking at his computer screen, he quickly clicked the minimize button to hide the window he’d been using.
“Uh, what did you say?” he asked, like he hadn’t really heard me.
“I was just wondering what you were emailing. It looked long.” I pointed to his screen that now showed the desktop photo he’d taken last year—the selfie of us sitting on the front steps of the school in our school uniforms, making silly faces for the camera.
“Oh that?” He glanced at the screen briefly. “It’s just…” He stopped, as if trying to think of something else to say. But then, he shrugged and said, “I’m just emailing myself some notes, so I don’t lose them.”
“Notes?” I asked, hoping he’d expound. “Notes for what?”
“Just for a project I’m working on,” he said.
A project he’s working on? “Like for school?”
“No…” He shook his head. “Just something else.”
Just something else?
Would this have something to do with the secret project he’d started working on last summer? The one that had him listening to all sorts of podcasts and reading tons of books and articles? The one he said had to do with a subject his older brother Sebastian had gotten him interested in?
Also known as the project he wasn’t ready to talk about yet…because he wasn’t sure what the results would be.
I’d assumed that whatever his summer project was had been completed months ago, since his nose hadn’t been glued to his phone quite as much these past couple of months…but maybe he was still in the middle of it. Maybe he’d simply been working on it when I thought he was doing homework.
“Are you close to finishing this secret project of yours?” I asked, hoping he might tell me more if I went at it from a different angle.
“I’m not sure.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I guess as long as it interests me.”
I frowned.As long as it interested him?
He’d always been a deep thinker. Liked to really dig into various subjects so he could understand how things worked at an almost molecular level.
But that still didn’t answer why he wouldn’t tell me what this project of his was. Or why he wanted to keep it secret.
Was it possible this project was actually an online relationship with another girl?
