Free Avalon High by Meg Cabot

straight ahead, even as he did what he did next. Which was to hand me the rose. “For you.”
    I looked down at the rose—so tiny and pink and perfect—in astonishment.
    “Oh,” I said, suddenly consumed with embarrassment. “I couldn’t. I mean—”
    He turned his head to look at me then, and I saw laughter on his lips.
    But not, strangely, in his eyes. His gaze was strong and steady on mine, the way his voice had been earlier that day, when he’d spoken to Rick. It was clear the time for joking around was done.
    “Elle,” he said. “Just take it.”
    I took it.
    It was the first flower any boy had ever given me.
    Which was why, even after he dropped me off at home and drove away, it was hours before my heart started to beat anything like normally again.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.
    As I studied up on old Arthur for my World Lit project that evening—which wasn’t easy, considering that I’d put Will’s rose in a vase by my bed, and my gaze kept straying over to it every two minutes or so—I found out a few surprising things. Such as the stuff from the musical Camelot —which my mom loves, and has made me listen to ten thousand times—like how King Arthur performed all of these heroic feats, basically bringing his people out of the Dark Ages and defending them against the Saxons and stuff? And how he had this arranged marriage with this princess named Guinevere, and how she eventually ditched him for his favorite knight, Lancelot (who, in turn, ditched Elaine of Astolat, the Lady of Shalott, forGuinevere, causing Elaine to become the subject of my mom’s new book)?
    That stuff probably really happened.
    Except that Lancelot didn’t end up killing Arthur over Guinevere: Arthur’s half brother (or son, according to some translations), Mordred, took care of that. See, Mordred was all jealous of Arthur’s accomplishments, and of him being such a beloved king and all, so he plotted to kill him and take over the throne—even marrying Queen Guinevere himself at some point, according to a few sources….
    The Pendragons were way dysfunctional as far as families go. Jerry Springer would have loved them.
    Wild horses wouldn’t have gotten me to admit this in front of my parents, but the whole Arthur thing was kind of cool. The reason there’ve been so many movies and books and poems and musicals written about King Arthur—not to mention high schools like Avalon named after the mythical island he eventually went to die on—is that his story is a good illustration of the heroic theory of history: that an individual—not an army; not a god; not a superhero; just a regular Joe—can permanently alter the course of world events.
    Which is why, according to another one of my mom’s books, there’s this whole society—I am not making this up—of people who think that Arthur, whose body was sent to the now nonexistent island of Avalon by the Lady of the Lake, is actually asleep, not dead, and is destined to wake again only when he is most needed.
    Seriously. This band of losers calls itself the Order of the Bear, the Bear having been King Arthur’s nickname. They think that Arthur’s going to wake up one day and lead the modern-day world out of the Dark Ages and into a new age of enlightenment, just like he did fifteen hundred years ago. The only thing keeping him from waking, according to the members of the Order of the Bear, are the forces of darkness.
    Um. Okay.
    I tried not to let my skepticism about the existence of forces of darkness show in the outline I wrote for our report for Mr. Morton’s class, though.
    And I definitely didn’t mention to my parents that I was doing a project on King Arthur. Because I knew that in their enthusiasm for the subject matter, they’d start chucking source materials at me until I ran screaming from the house.