TURN: WASHINGTON'S SPIES IMAGINES

NOTEBOOK ( John André ) [MODERN]

It had been an entire semester.
One whole semester.
Sixteen weeks!

       And still, you hadn't been able to talk to the cute guy that always seemed to sit next to you. It's college so it's not like there were assigned seats. Yet every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday there he was. In the same seat as always. Once you even caught him move his stuff from the seat beside him when he saw you approaching, apparently having saved it for you.

       You had never managed to talk to him, your nerves getting the better of you. You hated that you could be silenced so easily, by something as stupid as your own consciousness sealing your lips closed forever. But then again, he had never talked to you either. Maybe he saved the seat for you occasionally and always sat next to you when given the choice because he knew you didn't talk to him, or smell bad, or do something annoying like crunch ice cubes in class like the girl a few rows ahead of you always seemed to do.
Whatever it was, he was always silent.

       You knew more about him than you cared to admit. You knew he was an ex-soldier, a nontraditional student working toward a degree in Literature and History. And yet he always seemed to be drawing next to you. He drew people, their professor, dogs, someone's bedroom. But he also drew the layout of the campus, the floorplan of an apartment, molecular structures. Some days he'd sketch out the periodic table or do pages worth of complicated mathematical problems, his neat handwriting looking almost like art. He would dot out constellations and on the next page would be design plans for some sort of complicated looking communications device.

       He never seemed to be paying attention and yet every exam he got back a perfect grade etched at the top. You wondered often how this genius ended up next to you in your Literary Criticism class. Because he had to be a genius. He just had to be. There was just no other explanation for his mastery of seemingly everything.

       It was your final class meeting of the semester and just like every other time, you took your seat in the usual spot and pulled out a book. You had just started reading when your quiet companion arrived. He sat down silently and didn't glance at you as he pulled out a notebook. Today there were series of complicated diagrams accompanied by complex math problems in it. You thought it might be physics but you weren't really sure. It wasn't really your area of expertise after all.

       You resumed reading after staring at his steady hand for far too long. His hand was nice. Pale, slender fingers gripped the pencil carefully. His palm was large but rough, calloused and scarred. Was is odd to be attracted to someone's hand? You didn't much care. You thought all of him was rather lovely.

       You caught a glance back over at his hand, still scratching down numbers and formula you couldn't even begin to hope to understand. Suddenly his hand paused and then he tilted the notebook toward you. You froze, eyes wide, and watched as the slender artist's fingers drew a smiley face.

       Next to that he scrawled the word 'Hello'. You glanced up from the word and found intense blue eyes already looking at you. He smiled and held out his pencil to you. You took it and quickly wrote down a message as embarrassment swept through your veins. Surely he was calling you out, a subtle 'stop looking at my shit'.