Comfy Closets

43|| Suggestions and Actions

“Well, I doubt things would stay completely the same.”

“Okay, maybe not one hundred percent the same, then. But pretty close. Look, this was what we were talking about. You’ve told me, so now you gotta tell the other. Ash is our friend, Z. I’m here for you, always.”

His lips straightened into a thin line, shoulders tensed, and eyes glazed in thought. But he nodded, nonetheless. It was his way of saying he was grateful for saying what I said. I nudged his shoulder playfully in response - my way of saying no problem at all.

Soon, he parted from me to join Ashton for English, and I sped up into a jog to catch up to Leah walking ahead. Skilfully weaving between people, I got to her side in no time and clasped her hand briefly in mine, under the cover of the crowd. “Hey.”

She smiled brightly at the sight of me, but a hint of concern remained. “Hey! You talked to Zach?”

“Yeah. He’s fine. I just wanted to talk to him about Ash.”

She nodded thoughtfully and continued ahead as I accompanied her, with my class just by hers.

As I let my gaze wander over the heads of the crowd, I spotted a particular face that stood out.

Charles was staring at us from the intersection ahead, standing to the side as his brown eyes didn’t stray elsewhere. Leah didn’t seem to notice, but I met his gaze and held it, curiously wondering about what was going on in his head.

When we were drawing near, he turned and left down the left corridor and I furrowed my brows. I was too far away to read the expression on his face, and for some reason, that bothered me.

I had no clue what that was all about.

______________________

The day dragged on tortuously; a quirk to Mondays that I never appreciated. Each class seemed longer than the last, with homework piling up to be dealt with later. I planned to deal with it much later.

Chemistry class with Leah and Ashton was the only fun part of the day, surprisingly. Since my best friend’s lab partner was absent today, he joined our group instead to conduct the assigned experiment. With two chemistry geniuses on my team, I really wasn’t needed to do any work. I stirred some random conical flask just to seem like I was doing something in case the teacher ever looked over.

The write up was easily finished by the three of us, and we ended up being the first team done. As we spent the remainder of the class chatting, Leah, at one point, decided that she was bored enough to doodle in pen. On my arm.

“I think this is the best one out of all of them,” Leah said proudly as she finished off the flying birds' silhouettes near my elbow. The rest of her drawings consisted of a big blob on my upper arm that was supposed to be a ‘delicate feather’, a simplistic lotus flower at my wrist, and the words ‘property of L’ in neat calligraphy running down my inner forearm. The last one was a joke that Ash suggested Leah write.

Damn that bugger.

The boy himself was busy finishing up a cute Pikachu drawing on my right arm, that admittedly looked rather accurate.

“Guys, I have soccer practise after this. I’m gonna have to wash most of these off,” I said, causing pouts to appear on their sad faces.

“You can’t just wash off Pikachu. I spent so much time on him!”

“It was only ten minutes.”

My girlfriend whined next. “You can’t wash off these two,” she demanded as she pointed at the birds and the writing. I rolled my eyes but nodded reluctantly in agreement.