No Pills

Sine x equals

In my next class, Geography, I find myself entirely at sea.

"Losing your bearings?" Noah smiles, noticing the confusion on my face. I nod. He lends me his notes, then goes oddly quiet. I avoid his gaze, reading.

" Mia," he finally says, turning my attention to him. Fortunately,  I have prepared for this.

"Mhmm?"

"Why did you do it?"

"Well, I was trying to see if I have enough belly fat to survive the apocalypse, so. "

"Urm, ok..." He scrunches his nose, looking both amused and disturbed at once.

I chuckle. "Ya. It's 'urm, ok'."

Thankfully, he does not press me about it. After this period, the next class I am supposed to have is called off, much to my relief.  I use my free time to study in the library, where many foreign faces have hidden to prepare for their entrance exams.

This is not to say that I am the only actual student; Anna is here too, snooping around the history section. When she catches me staring, I wave, and she nods, albeit distracted. Her eyes flicker in another direction, so mine stick to my books.

A couple of pages feel my concentrated gaze before it shifts back to her. She's still looking at whatever she saw a while ago.

Curiosity prods me to trace her line of sight, which ends at the physics section, where a lanky dude wearing fluffy bubblegum pink earmuffs is leaning on a shelf.

His back is turned towards me, but his kind-of-white,-kind-of-pink French braid tucks into the collar of his blazer in an all too familiar fashion.

As Anna sneaks up on him and covers his eyes from behind, my focus drifts back to my notes. It's probably just a  coincidence that I think I've seen him before, and, anyway, I am better off rather figuring out how to prove the derivatives of trigonometric functions. After attempting two examples from my study kit, I am still scratching my head.

"...Urm, so sine x will be equal -"

"- I SAID, DON'T TOUCH ME!"

Heads spin.

Sine x is abandoned.

Snapping my head up, the first thing I see is colour draining off Anna's face. It's hard to tell the guy's reaction, but his shoulders flinch as if she was yelling at him and not the other way around. The library quiets down, well, until someone quickly ices it by hooting,

"Yo, weirdo, shut up!"

And that's when Anna storms off.  The boy does not move.

I look back at my calculation. "Sine x equals none of my business."

*

More school days usher me into the frenzy only Spencer High students can make over writing examinations, although, to be fair, the announcement was given on such short notice that even I wonder -

Seriously?! Next freaking week?!! Are you betting on our failures?!

I am so not prepared. There is no time to think or do anything else apart from studying, which in itself should take more than a week. Heck, the only reason I am not freaking out is that no one is prepared either, except for nerds, of course.