You Are the Shell to My Tortoise | ✓

61

"Why do you have the key?" I said, staring as Nolan unlocked the door to his clubroom.

He pushed the door open. "I'll tell you next time."

"Wait, why can't you tell me now? Are you like, the club president or a super important club member or something?"

"Hurry up and come in," he said, grabbing me by the hand and tugging me into the room with him. "We shouldn't stand out here for too long."

When I stepped in through the doorway, the first thing I noticed was the giant telescope placed in front of the center windows. I couldn't quite make out the details because the lights were still off, but from what sparse outside light that reflected off of it, it looked pretty sleek.

Their clubroom felt a lot more spacious than ours, even though we were using the same kind of room. It probably had to do with the fact that we were hoarding tons of books that were so numerous, not even our cabinets had enough space to store them.

It was weird being inside a clubroom this late at night—the latest I'd ever stayed in my own was before dinner, since we never had night meetings. Moonlight spilled through the window and onto the floor, reaching across half the length of the room. The whole atmosphere felt different.

"What if someone comes in?" I said, as Nolan closed the door behind us.

"No one will. We have fixed meeting days, and today isn't one of them. We should leave the lights off in case they draw attention." He walked up to a tall stack of chairs leaning against one of the walls. "Want to sit down?"

I went over to him and took the chair he was offering me. "Yes, please. Thanks."

"Anyway," he said, grabbing another chair and hefting it up to his side with one arm, "let's sit there."

"Okay."

I followed him to the mostly white telescope and watched as he set his chair down in front of it. Then I placed mine adjacent to his.

However, Nolan remained standing. After reaching over and throwing the window wide open, he returned to the telescope. As he bent his head down and peered through the finder, he began fiddling with some knobs on the telescope.

Since I wasn't as into astronomy as Ryan was, I'd never really paid much attention when he was using his telescope.

"What are you doing?" I asked, plopping down onto my own chair.

"Just looking for something," he said. "I'm still listening to you. You have a lot of questions to ask me, right? Go ahead and ask—I'll answer them."

"Yeah!" I pulled my phone out from my small messenger bag. In anticipation of tonight's meet up, I had prepared a bunch of questions I wanted the answers to.

The second I unlocked its screen, though, Nolan raised his head and looked in my direction. "What are you doing?"

"I'm pulling up the list of questions I want to ask. I just want to make sure I don't miss anything, you know?" I paused. "What's with that reaction? What did you think I was about to do?"

"I don't know—that's why I asked," he said. "You seem to love turning on your phone's flashlight in dark places."

I couldn't help but smile a little. It felt like we'd been over this topic so many times.

"Okay, let's start with that. Why do you hate it so much when I turn on my flashlight?"

"Chelsea." Nolan looked up from the telescope again. "Do you even know what a vampire is?"

Frowning, I said, "Uh, yeah. Of course I do! You drink blood, right?"

"And?"

"And ... you're afraid of garlic?"