Take my heart

Chapter XV

A thump to his left makes him look up from the doodles on his margins, and he finds silver-haired Lee Jung hunched over his desk, forehead pressed on his papers. Connor shoots him a concerned glance, then looks around at the rest of the class. No one is paying attention. He weighs his instinctive compassion against the possibility of losing a hand, and decides to take the risk.

Connor pokes Lee's shoulder with the butt of his pencil. It takes three bumps before the boy turns his head around enough to glare at him through heavy eyelids.

"What," he mouths.

"You good?" Connor whispers, gesturing at Lee's evident despair in his posture. "Do you need help with a problem?"

With a groan, Lee straightens up and props his chin on a hand, narrowing his eyes at him.

"Are you talking to me in public?"

Connor falters, opens his mouth and closes it without a sound a few times, then gives up on understanding what that means. He glances at Lee's Calc sheets, emptier than his own.

"Wanna pair up with me?" he says. "Everyone else is doing it with a partner."

Not that Connor hadn't had several classmates offer to work with him, but he doesn't need any of them to know just how incompetent he is at some things. Lee, however, seems to be worse than him, and he's alone because everyone's a little scared of him.

"Did Darren pay you to interact with me? I'll kill him."

Connor frowns. "What the fuck kind of people do you think we are? I'm asking out of pure kindness, asshole."

"Why are you sitting next to me in the first place?"

Okay, that did have something to do with Darren. The boy himself didn't tell Connor anything, but it's a silent understanding between the four of them, the same way it works with Dawn. The moment Connor spotted Jung's silver hair among the class, he knew it would be his job to look after him here.

"Pair up with me, come on. Darren will be happy you're getting along with his friends."

Lee doesn't look convinced, but he must be, because he gives in without further argument. As it turns out, though, not even having both their brains on the matter helps all that much. Connor tries to explain the three problems he solved on his own, but there's not a lot of explanation to put behind improvising.

Fifteen minutes before the class ends, he turns the sheet around and draws the lines for a tic-tac-toe game. Lee raises a skeptic eyebrow at him.

"What's the point? We're not getting anywhere, I'm tired already," Connor says, tapping the pen on the crossed lines. "Let's take the rest of the period off, we can ask my other half to tutor us later. Much more advantageous."

"Your other..."

"Caesar," he deadpans.

Lee stares blankly at him.

"Ah, right, of course. You meant your best friend. Naturally," he says, and looks away to draw a circle on the center square.

"Whatever. So you're agreeing to let Caesar tutor us?" Connor insists, drawing an X on the top left corner.

Lee chews on his pencil for a second. "If you win this game, maybe."

"Best of three?"

Three games turn into fifteen, but Connor has the lead at the end, so Lee has no choice but to accept their offered help. He asks, at one point, if they shouldn't talk to Caesar first, but Connor waves him off. When's the last time Caesar has refused him? If worse comes to worst, he can say it's in compensation for the Prague trip, and they'll be settled. They agree to meet the next afternoon at Connor's.