Kissing Is the Easy Part

Chapter 26 The sushi and the grilled eels

She burst into quiet laughter. "Fine. Stop jabbing me."

I breathed a silent sigh of relief. We were going to work on this for many more days to come and I didn't want to fight every time.

"But you can't laugh at my suggestions or make me feel stupid again," she warned.

"Of course. I promise."

Flora seemed to brighten in an instant. She snapped my textbook shut and leaned toward me. "Okay, listen, I have some pretty good ideas about how we can do our presentation."

"Let's hear it."

"I think we should do a play," she announced with a smug smile.

"A play?"

"Yeah, you know, like a skit. Instead of reading to the class, we can act a year in medieval times. We can be a peasant, a noble or crusaders, and show what life was all about. The plights that we faced. How famine, plague and war affected us. Depends on what aspect we want to focus on the most."

I bit back the first snide remark that came to my mind. It sounded like the description on the back cover of an RPG game, minus the quest to locate hidden treasures and conquest the seven seas. I stalled for time, trying to come up with a rejection line that didn't sound like rejection.

"I don't know...Mr. Goleman doesn't strike me as someone with a sense of humor. I seriously doubt that he'll like it that way."

"I don't care what Mr. Goleman thinks. I'm not going to do a fifteen-minute presentation by reading out the contents in our paper and bore everybody's brains out," she said. "Flora Morgan cannot give a boring presentation."

Do you get paid for entertaining people? "I thought we could just do it with PowerPoint."

"Well, but now we have a better idea," she said, her voice dripping with authority. She narrowed her eyes at me. "Unless you're saying I can't decide how we do our presentation."

"No, of course you can decide. But can we go through this carefully? I mean, it seems like a lot to cover in fifteen minutes, and-"

"I don't care," Flora said stubbornly. "You can have your way on the contents of the paper we're handing in, but I'm standing my ground on the presentation. I think as long as the paper is good Mr. Goleman won't mind having a little fun."

A play? Seriously? I felt maneuvered. She knew I couldn't just flat out deny her suggestion after her little tantrum earlier, although it was truly the most absurd idea I had ever heard.

"I...can I at least think it over?"

"It's like gift-wrapping or advertising, really. We sell the same product, but we just do it with a backstory. We can add loads of historic fact into the construct of a play, you know? Imagine how boring TV commercials would be if people just did it with PowerPoint."

"Well, unless I'm selling a medieval castle here, I don't see how that's relevant."

Flora glared at me. "I knew you'd act like this. As a matter of fact Jan and I had quite a laugh talking over it."

I was so going to kill Janet for not talking her out of her craziness firsthand.

"Hey, I got an even better idea." Her voice dropped dramatically, and I just knew it meant trouble. "You can play the part of the knight, and I can play the part of the girl who mysteriously dropped out of the sky."

I stared at her. "What mysterious girl?"

"I'm from the modern city, and for some reason I'm sucked into the sky and land again in medieval times. You know time travel is so hot right now. And anyway, I can be so unaccustomed to ancient life, and the difference between now and then will be significant."