"You know Shakespeare?" Gabby asked, nerves settling in the pit of her stomach as she continued to annotate her hefty anthology of sonnets.
"I've heard of him, why?" Marcus asked, voice laced with amusement as he did his own revision in his room.
"And you know the test and the revision?" She continued, swapping her fine point pen for her blue highlighter and highlighting all the pathetic fallacy in Sonnet 18.
"What do you want, Gabby?" Marcus laughed, and she could hear his pen on paper, his rushed handwriting scrawling across rapidly.
"Can we move the study to mine? Well, Lorelai's." She asked, "I've called Demi and Leah and they don't mind, as long as you're okay."
"Sure, but why?" Marcus asked, chuckling at her manner.
"No reason, just easier and well, I haven't been- I thought we could invite Rory." Gabby blurted out, grasping onto the excuse as if it would save her.
"Hey, you remember the last time we let someone in our study group and we were ten and let Kenji Sakurada revise for history with us and he threw up on Demi's dad's new sofa."
"Aw Kenji. He looks good now, Switzerland does things to people." Gabby whistled, "Him and his parents came to my mom's banquet last year. He goes to boarding school and was telling me about these boys that go to his school-"
"Gabs, do I really wanna hear about boys you think are hot?" Marcus asked.
Gabby pouted, "I never said he was hot, I said he looks good now. There's a big difference. But anyway, you good to come here tomorrow?"
"Sure, I'll get Callum to drop us off. I'll pay him ten bucks and he'll pick up the girls too."
"Oh. Yeah, um. That's fine." Gabby stumbled over her words, cursing herself internally. "I'm just gonna go and ask Lorelai if it's all okay."
Marcus laughed, "Okay, weirdo. I'll see you tomorrow."
"Yup." Gabby gulped and hung up, immediately throwing the phone into the wall and resisting the urge to scream. Lorelai and Rory were out, she was home alone and left with her anthology of poems and three different highlighters in the same shade of blue. Nerves still pooled in her stomach, she grabbed a jacket from her hook by the door and walked out of the house, locking it behind her and pocketing her key.
