Down to the Bone by Thirteen

SEPTEMBER
     
    The Neanderthal was searching for a book, which Liddy, flipping through her own text, found amusing. He looked as if he’d never ventured into the college library, let alone up into the rarified, fourth-floor towers that housed the reserved volumes. His confusion was explained, in part, by his football jersey.
    Liddy removed her glasses and finessed a lock of dark hair behind her ear before taking another glance at the jock. It was really unfair to call him a Neanderthal. He didn’t look that far up the evolutionary ladder. Not that he wasn’t a fine specimen, all shoulders and muscled limbs. Good bone structure, too. He had hair the warm yellow of a campfire and a charming dimple in his chin. Not Neanderthal then. Homo habilis, perhaps? The handyman of genus homo, a crude tool maker, one step above Australopithecus.
    “Jarr-ett!” The exasperated voice belonged to a tanned female, long hair dyed honey bronze. She appeared out of the stacks like Eve from the garden and leaned herself on the edge of Liddy’s table. She took no notice of the occupant.
    How sweet, Liddy snorted to herself. The caveman has his own one-million-year B.C. babe.
    “You left me,” the girl pouted, canting forward until her skirted ass was high, like a puppy asking to play. Her pert breasts nearly popped out of her cropped top.
    “I have to find this book,” her still-evolving boyfriend said.
    “Why can’t you get the information off the internet?” the girl whined.
    “Because it’s not on the internet. The fucking thing’s not even in print anymore.” Was that exasperation? Liddy wondered. Trouble in paradise? Poor Homo habilis.
    “There’s nothing to do up here,” the girl complained, stretching back her legs to show off their incredible length.
    Now that wasn’t at all true, Liddy thought. With all these books a bored young lady could surely find some occupation. Build a house maybe, or make paper dolls.
    “Let’s go to the Coffee Bar for an iced mocha,” she coaxed.
    “You can go if you want,” the jock told her.
    B.C. Babe didn’t like that. “There’s a dance at Club Savage tonight, a pizza-and-movie party at Sigma House, oh, and the basketball team is having a kegger at the lake. Which do you prefer?”
    Liddy barely stopped herself from shaking her head, and on a school night, too.
    “You decide,” her guy said.
    “Maybe I should go out, make a few phone calls, see who’s going to be where,” B.C. Babe wondered aloud. Without waiting for his response, she pulled out her cell from a cute little, suede purse and made for the stairs.
    “Suit yourself.” The jock didn’t even glance back. Liddy covertly watched him search both sides of the stacks again. He pulled out and checked his own phone, doubtless for the book’s number, and sighed with frustration. Liddy went back to her biological anthropology texts. Time to study the real Homo habilis.
     

     
    Jarrett Evans couldn’t stop glancing at the geeky girl. He didn’t usually visit the libraries on campus, this one least of all. It was a brick monstrosity filled with narrow staircases and tall stacks that were barely wide enough for his broad shoulders. The situation was especially bad up here, in the “Ivory Towers” as they were not-so-imaginatively called. Geek Retreats was their other name. The hanging lamps were harsh and tended to flicker and the air smelled of must and moldy leather. What few tables there were seemed to be hidden away in shadow so that patrons bumped into them.
    Which was why he hadn’t noticed the girl at first. She’d been as shadowed as the table. It was only when Crissy leaned provocatively across it that Jarrett caught sight of her. She had dark hair and a plain, almost elfin face made a little more interesting by square, Clark Kent specs. She never looked up once, even though Crissy was practically sprawled across her books and Jarrett was right there, not a foot away. He thought at first that she might be