Mischief from an earlier time

"So what's up, Mr. Francis Stanley Pruett?" it read, her soft, elegant cursive out of place on the carefully folded notebook paper.

I looked over at her and listened as Ken Norton, our speech professor, droned on about persuasive and forensic speaking and the subtle difference between snooze and bore. I smiled as he scanned the class's eyes, including mine, then took my pen.

I scribbled as he took the chalk and turned his back.

"You know what's up," I replied, replicating her secret triangle perfectly and tossing it, letting it skip off her book and bounce off the wall into her lap.

She took it and read, then rolled her, eyes, looking at me and shrugging as if to say, "No I don't."

It grabbed my crotch and made a pained expression, then, making sure Ken was busy, let my tongue hang out of my mouth as I stared blankly at her and rocked my hips.

Her eyes went wide, her ears reddened with her cheeks and she bit her lower lip, glaring as if to say "stop" as I fluttered my eyelids in mock ecstasy. I heard the chalk hit the tray and returned to my note-taking posture.

"And Frank, if I were to say that enthymemes were employed..." he asked, his hands on his hips.

"We would be talking about a forensic speech in which certain key elements were left implied," I said.

He smiled, and I realized he was just asking his go-to student, not really after me, but Marcie smiled when he turned away again and pointed, mouthing, "ha ha," and squinting with her tongue at her teeth as if having a little laugh.

I smiled and listened to Kenn for a bit, then started to fold a piece of paper when the original hit me in the head.

"Everyone was watching you," she wrote. "Do something else."

I smiled and wrote back, "Sure," then folded it all back together.

I also finished my own little magic triangle and wrote, "So, what's up, Miss Marcelyn Ann Stoddard?" I tossed it back to her when he turned for a bare second, then waited. Ken started writing on the board and I stood, looked at her and thrust my hips before sitting down.

The classroom rustled a bit and Marcie hid her head in her book, her ears beet red. Ken stopped and turned. The chuckles subsided and he smiled as I adjusted interestedly in my desk.

My own came back and read.

"I have a bottle of wine for our picnic tonight... or not," she had written.

We drank it at the break, sharing only a few sips with out classmate, a Texan who had given us all a harrowing story of eating pork and developing worms in her brain.

How do you not give someone like that something to drink? Even if you're a bastard, she is bound to tell you something amusing.

It didn't matter at the time. We decided to finish class drunk after downing the whole bottle in 30 minutes.

It was the best day in speech class... ever.