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The wild-haired kid struggled to keep his beret on as he ran, his hand pressing it to his head while his other arm clutched the strap of the bag slung over his shoulder. When he caught sight of the library entrance, his face lit up, but upon spotting a girl there, he stumbled to a halt.

He nearly tumbled head over heels in his effort to stop during the momentum of his run but just barely managed to regain his balance at the last second and recompose himself. From there, he continued toward the doors as a walk (albeit a very long-strided, quick-paced one) as if he were the picture of confidence. Nevermind that he expected a group of angry schoolmates to come barreling around the corner after him at any second. This girl didn't need to know that.

"What's up?" he greeted her as casually as he could, raising a hand as he passed her by and strode into the library. It was only just after he entered through the doors that he realized the girl he'd passed must have been his partner for this library chore. Freezing in his tracks, he slapped a palm to his face. Stupid.

Turning around, he pushed back through the doors and unceremoniously grabbed the girl's arm to pull her into the library. He didn't even have time to explain because at that point he could already hear the guys after him scouring the hallways. Jack hoped desperately that the girl would come without making a fuss at being grabbed or at his less-than-gentlemanly behavior because he wasn't sure he could have afforded to cause a scene right then and there.

Jack blinked and stared for a moment, half listening for his pursuers beyond the library doors and half inspecting the girl before him. With her long, wavy hair, bright chartreuse eyes, and her complexion ruddy from blushing, she was pretty fetching, but he felt her angry expression somehow only added to her cuteness.

"Uh, hi," he whispered, seeming to either have not heard or be ignoring the question posed to him for the time being. "You're...what was it...Roxanne? No. Re...Rebecca! Rebecca Winslett. Right? Yeah, sorry about that. I'm Jack, the guy who's supposed to help you out with this library stuff." As he spoke, the first year student gradually attempted to steer Rebecca away from the door.

"So, uh, why don't we get to work now that we're both here? No time to waste, right?" Heading over to the area where people returned their books, he grabbed a nearby cart and began loading it with the books that had been turned in. At least if one of the other guys outside decided to pop their heads into the library, he could hide behind the main desk or the cart. Or, once they actually started putting away books, behind the shelves. It was one reason he was so eager to get started.

"That's me," Jack confirmed with a single, sheepish laugh. He was glad she didn't seem to mind nor question his 'enthusiasm' towards beginning their task. As a partner, she seemed ideal to work with; not griping about how he'd grabbed her or making a big deal about his behavior or why he had acted in such a way. He'd almost thought he was in the clear and that he would have been able to get away with staying silent for the duration of their chore when the girl spoke again, causing him to jump slightly.

"Uh, yeah," he agreed, anxiously rubbing the back of his neck at her comment. "I love books." It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't really why he was in such a hurry to get to work, either. Upon noticing those piercing chartreuse eyes on him once more, however, he realized she wasn't likely to just let him slide. The reason she had probably refrained from asking questions or giving him a hard time so far wasn't because she didn't care but because she was probably trying to be polite. At least until she must have realized he wasn't about to volunteer any explanation about anything himself.

Jack sighed. On one hand, he was intrigued that this girl wasn't like most other people their age that he knew - selfish and inconsiderate without a care about anyone or anything other than themselves. He, too, would not deny being one of the people he included in this category, but he considered it human nature and healthy enough. If one started caring too much about other people, they could end up getting themselves into trouble.

He dearly hoped that Rebecca wasn't the sort who cared more about others than herself. Not her sake, of course, but because it would have been inconvenient for him to have to explain himself to her if she chose to get nosy about his business. He might have caused problems for himself, but they were easy enough to solve when he didn't have to worry about other people getting in his way trying to solve them for him.

"So, uh...you done this before?"

Glancing over at Rebecca's reply to his question, he saw the book she had placed on the very top and smirked. "Yeah, that's true." It was difficult to tell if he was referring to not having trouble with their chore or having enough to start shelving them, but he didn't bother clarifying and he went along as if his response had been meant for both.

It didn't seem the guys were coming in after him after all, so he finally allowed himself to relax a tiny bit and the tension in his body and demeanor eased up a little. He came up beside the cart and helped to push it as Rebecca started them along. When she spoked up again, though, he glanced her way with an innocently clueless look as if he'd forgotten all about the entrance she mentioned.

"What? Oh, that," he added with a foolish grin. "Well if you really want to know..." Still helping the cart along, he picked up the book of riddles with his free hand and waved it at her. "...I asked them one of these."

Meeting her gaze when she realized what book he'd been holding, Jack's grin softened into a tamer smile and sighed. "Don't know why you're so interested to know, since it doesn't really have anything to do with you, but I guess I at least owe you an explanation."

As much as he prided himself on observing details, the first year male hadn't missed the girl's pause when she'd read the title of the riddle book before placing it on the cart. He hadn't been certain about her interest in it then, but her reaction to his waving it at her now had confirmed his suspicions. It seemed like this girl had beauty and brains - or a love of riddles, at the very least, which was something he shared.

It surprised him because he didn't know many others who enjoyed them like he did. Though he hadn't intended on divulging anything at all about the little scene outside the library, the realization that she seemed to appreciate riddles changed his mind. Perhaps she would appreciate the irony of his predicament as well.

"Okay, so today we were assigned a group project in English Composition and these four guys just came up to me to pretty much strong-arm me into being a part of their group." Placing the riddle book back on the cart, he took a couple of other books that belonged to the section they were nearest to and checked their spines to find their placement on the shelf. "I don't know why they had to pick me - maybe I seemed like an easy target or something - but I'd seen those guys around and I knew enough about them to see the way things were going to go if I did join their group. They were going to sit back and make me do all the work."

Locating the proper place for one of the books, he moved the others on the shelf aside to make space for it and put it neatly back before working on finding where the second book went. "Well I wasn't going to just let them use me like that, but there were four of them and fighting isn't exactly my strong point. So I told them I didn't want them as a group because I wasn't confident in my ability to accomplish our given assignment with them as my group because we didn't seem compatible on a mental level.

"Before they could work out I was insulting their intelligence, I set a condition. I said that if by our next class they could solve a riddle I gave them, then I would concede that I'd underestimated them and would be a part of their group. If not, though, I'd find my own group." Though his gaze was on the books and shelves in front of him, a mischievous glint came into Jack's hazel eyes. "They agreed. So the riddle I asked them was, 'why is a raven like a writing desk'."

At Rebecca's exclamation and accompanying giggles, Jack nearly blushed, grinning sheepishly and shrugging. "What can I say? It's not like I'm all that strong physically, but I gotta defend myself somehow, right? Being able to run sure comes in handy, though..."

Wow; this young lady may have been a second-year, but even so, she was sharper than he'd guessed. It seemed his suspicion that her love of riddles indicated an exceptional level of intelligence - at least in regards to perception and observation - was confirmed when she called him out on his strategy. Beauty and brains indeed.

“Yeah...since the conundrum was first mentioned by the insane Mad Hatter in the nonsensical Alice in Wonderland, it wasn’t technically supposed to have an answer at all. I was betting they wouldn’t even be able to guess or know one of the improvised ones because if they had the brains for that, then that meant they wouldn’t have bothered trying to bully me into joining their group in the first place. And I warned them against using the internet to look it up. But, uh...I guess more people in our class were fans of Lewis Carroll's work than I realized.

“When the guys were trying to figure out the answer, a girl overheard and laughed at them because she knew the riddle was supposed to be unsolvable. And aside from the humiliation of being laughed at by that girl, they didn’t much care for being made fools of by me, so...yeah. Here I am, hiding out in the library, doing chores and lying low while trying to come up with a strategy for survival tomorrow when I have to face them again.”

Retrieving another riddle from the cart, he considered her question regarding his ‘go-to’ answer. “Well, supposedly in the 1897 final revision of Alice’s Adventures, Lewis Carroll wrote that a raven is like a writing desk because both ‘can produce a few notes, though they are very flat’ and that they are ‘never put with the wrong end in front’. Since ‘never’ was spelled N-E-V-A-R in the early issues of the revision, that meant the word ‘nevar’ was the word ‘raven’ with the ‘wrong end in front’ since it was spelled backwards.” The redhead sighed. “Not like that’s gonna be enough to keep me alive another day, though.”