Drawn Out Dreams. [A Zarry Fanfiction.]

Chapter One

“Zayn…Zayn Malik!” The English Literature teacher’s sharp call came like a sudden loud noise to Zayn’s mind, and Zayn quickly shot up in his chair and looked up at the middle aged female like a deer in the headlights.

The female teacher looked over her sixth form student with a slight frown, her grey eyes looking down at him from behind her small spectacles. It always startled him when the teachers would suddenly snap at him. It happened fairly often, although he didn’t understand why. His hand closed around the black pen in his hand that he had been doodling a couple of birds with, as if to protect it, as the teacher stared down at him.

“Would you pay attention, please? If you won’t contribute to my lessons then you may as well listen.” She spoke up once more, before readjusting the glasses on her nose.

He gave a small nod, hoping that she hadn’t noticed his notepad that was wide open on the desk. When she looked back to the year twelve A Level group, he thought that she must have not have seen it. He did sit a few tables away from the front. She started to talk once again about something or other, and for a few moments Zayn watched her as she walked up and down a little, a habit that he had picked up in his English Teacher’s behaviour. His brown eyes seemed to pick up more than what the others picked up.

He glanced around the class, firstly glancing at the two boys closest to him. He was unsure of their names, but he knew the ginger one spoke with a slow, gravelly voice that never failed to capture his ear's attention. It made Zayn smile to hear it. Sometimes when he was upset during an English class, he’d hope that the boy would raise his hand to answer a question for the teacher, so that Zayn could hear the way his words would come out in a slow, accidental poetry.

So far, his favourites words for the boy to say were ‘y’alright?’, ‘Shakespeare’ and then the odd ‘erms’  and ‘ums’ that he would speak mid sentence when put under pressure from the teacher. Zayn always noticed how his ginger hair fell in sloped ruffles, like a dog's ears. 

The brunette boy next to him, only about an inch taller than the ginger, always had one habit, which would interest Zayn amazingly. Whenever the lesson went silent, there would be a slight tapping coming from the boys’ desk, and it was the brunette’s fingers tapping away on the desk in some perfect rhythm. Then it would change into another beat, and leave Zayn amused for ages after hearing the brunette drum his hand against the desk.

He had tried a few times to repeat the boys’ actions, but it never worked out well. The boy seemed to be able to do it almost subconsciously, which would sometimes earn him an elbow nudge from the ginger boy next to him. That would make Zayn have to resist the urge to chuckle.

The two boys that sat in front of him really were funny at times, but Zayn had no interest in making any kind of friendship with them. His mind wasn't clicked into the routine of stepping forward to talk to people; to engage. He had drawn them once, on a bad day, so that he would be reminded of the funny banter they would have, and it would cheer him up. That was as far as he had ever gone to growing close to the two boys.

Zayn didn’t understand other people. There were many reasons because of this, little things that he had picked up as he grew up around them, but the main reason was because none of the others ever seemed to like him. Zayn didn’t understand why he should talk to people that don’t talk to him. He didn’t really understand why he should talk at all, and that’s why he didn’t.

When he talked, he was just never understood, unless it was his Grandma. She was the only one who understood him, and that’s why she was his world. He thought about the cups of tea they would share and the cake she would make for them both as they talked after school, and he grew excited, his brown eyes glancing at the clock. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet, he still had a while to go until he could see his Grandma, or as he called her, his Nana.