The bell in the clock tower chimed in for the second time that day, and the sun’s bright rays glistened over the large school campus. In its light shimmered the bustling landscape of academics, and beneath its brilliance were several thousand students migrating to their classes and habitats. Despite how bright the morning was, a cool breeze blew through the area, keeping the air from growing too hot or humid.
In five minutes the third and final bell would ring and classes would begin.
A boy sat in a chair in the third floor classroom of one of the school’s various tall buildings. His seat was furthest in the back and closest to the window, so he sat with his legs crossed and watched the outside of the class from the window intently and peacefully. The boy had been in the room for a while now in the same position, watching the sun rise and the students migrate to the school. Christmas had passed the last month and the winter still brought with it a death rattle of chilly weather. This was the first day of school after the holiday’s break.
It was a not-so subtle attempt to continue the long-gone traditions and practices of the pre-Collapse world. After the Collapse, the worldwide disaster that changed everything, the world and its inhabitants had survived and eventually moved on. That’s the one thing human beings were specialized for – adapting to change. That was why it was so idiotic for the world as it was now to continually revive old world traditions and hail them as if they were essential to life. More often than not, they were simply worthless customs that were only perpetuated because those in charge of the world didn’t have the energy to come up with new ones to replace them.
School, even the one the boy attended now, was one such outdated practice. Another was the stiff uniform he had to wear. He hated it and he hated school.
Despite the chilly weather, the boy wore a simple reimagining of the school’s uniform, which consisted of black slim-fitting pants, brown loafers, and a dark jacket. The boy instead chose to wear a tailored jacket with a long coattail, and he wore it open, showing off his grey undershirt beneath it. The boy’s hair, short, uneven, and light brown, sat atop his short forehead and tersely concentrated face.
His uniform broke regulation, but he didn’t care and nobody else seemed to, either. What were they going to do about it? Ban him from attending school? That would only make him feel better and undermine the law that every person his age had to attend school, so expulsion was completely unheard of these days. Nobody could stop him, or anyone, from not following the rules – because to do so would be, in and of itself, not following the rules.
The first student shuffled into the classroom without warning, sighing and shivering. The boy did not move from his vigil and continued to stare out of the window, gazing at nothing in particular. He acted as if he was still the only occupant in the room. The newly entered student fumbled over to their desk and plopped books onto it before pausing in their movements. They seemed to notice the boy for the first time and walked over to him.
“Wow, you’re here early! You must be the new student…? What’s your name?” The student’s voice, bubbly and high-pitched, was undoubtedly from a female. The boy, slow to react to the question, looked to his right slowly and looked right in the inquirer’s eyes. He did not respond.
“Oh, my bad! It’s polite to give my own name first, isn’t it…?” The girl laughed nervously and hugged herself in order to build up some warmth. Goosebumps prickled noticeably from her arms, although it wasn’t clear if they originated from the coldness of the room or the coldness of the boy in front of her. “I’m Natalia Monomus. And you are?”
The boy simply stared at the newly dubbed Natalia, who had thrust her hand forward to initiate a handshake. She was a pretty young girl, with a softly formed face and shoulder-length curled black hair. Her lips, hands, and legs were petite and all shaded a light pink from her chilled state. Besides the uniform jacket, she wore a skirt with knee-high stockings to complete her wardrobe. In her eyes, the boy could almost see a swirl of genuine friendliness and happiness.
That sort of look was what he hated the most.
With a grunt, the boy turned his head back to the window and readjusted his stance in the seat. As quietly as he could while staying audible, he stated his name. “Arend Vitalis.”
Natalia stood in place, somewhat taken aback at Arend’s rude actions. Once again she chuckled nervously, and withdrew the hand she held out. “Um, alright then, Arend… Well, if you need anything, feel free to ask me, okay?” She looked down and then back at him from beneath her eyelids, but he neither moved nor said anything else to her. Natalia bit her lip and awkwardly stood where she was. Just as she was about to open her mouth and say something else, the door to the classroom opened once again and a group of chattering teens walked in and migrated to their seats. With a final glance back at Arend, Natalia turned and quietly sat at her own seat, two rows diagonally away from the boy’s.
After that, the rest of the class’s students trailed into the room and its seats were gradually filled. The boy, undisturbed by another classmate for the time being, continued sitting in his position and watched as the school lot quickly emptied. Just as the last visible student ran into a building, the final bell rang, and the class’s chatter quieted some.
The boy welcomed the level of quiet and the new peacefulness found in the school yard below. There were no longer any idiotic people scurrying around, no more disgusting practices taking place on the otherwise well-structured grounds. Unfortunately, that meant some of the people had moved to the class around him. He shook his head slightly and let out a quiet sigh. It looked like this school would be no different from the last.
The teacher, a handsome middle-aged man with stubble across his entire square jaw, entered the room a minute or two after the last bell. He greeted the class, handed out new textbooks, and went about taking down names from everyone in the room. The period varied little from petty jokes and vague directions on how the rest of the year would go for the class. Arend didn’t pay attention to any of it.
When the bell rang to signify that the class was over, little more than an hour into the beginning of it, Arend was the last to leave the class. The teacher, whose name the boy didn’t even bother to remember, called him over to his desk, but Arend ignored him and continued walking. He missed watching the courtyard already; there was a certain tranquility to be found in an area devoid of human presence.
Outside of the classroom, the hallway was already mostly empty. Arend walked through the thin crowds to his next class, the second of the five he had in a day. His hands were perpetually in his pockets. The boy made eye contact with nobody and spoke not a word. To do so out of turn would have filled him with complete revulsion.
The rest of his first day in the high school went on mostly as it did in his first period. He arrived last to every class, right before each bell rang, and sat in a seat in the back of every class. He spoke to no one, and bothered to look at few. As it was the first day after a long holiday, there was little work handed out, but he finished what was assigned quickly and with little effort. Due to his attitude and aloof looks, nobody else bothered to approach him, which was just as he wanted.
Arend Vitalis was, for the most part, completely alone. The view from the first class’ window, which was never again replicated in any of his assigned classes, was the only thing that Arend enjoyed, and he missed it greatly after he left the first class.
After the last bell of the day rang, Arend left his final class and began to walk towards the third floor of the second-year’s building, where he had attended the morning class. Within minutes, the students had mostly absconded from the campus, no doubt returning to their homes or participating in a social life. The small amount of leftovers who stayed for sports or club practices entered their respective buildings and soon closed themselves off to their work. In other words, the courtyard would be clear when Arend returned to his view. That was pleasing, at least.
He arrived at the classroom when the male teacher was locking up his desk drawer and gathering his papers. Arend did not expect him to be there and was surprised, so for a moment he stood in the doorway, frozen with his hands in his pockets. The teacher, who heard his arrival, looked up and glanced at Arend with joy.
“Oh! You’re the new student! Well then… You must have been shy, so you came to introduce yourself after class? How wonderful!” The man dropped his documents back on his desk and rubbed his stubble-decorated chin with delight. He was an aged man who didn’t like children very much, but found himself flattered in the fact that one of the students he taught needed his help. Arend didn’t remember the teacher’s name nor did he ever care to learn it.
There, in the teacher’s eyes, was that same look of hope and unintelligent joy that Arend had first seen hours ago, in the beginning of the school day. Just as before, it filled him with quickly boiling disgust.
Arend was silent and simply walked past the teacher after his moment of silent hesitation. He walked past the rows of seats and nonchalantly sat in his desk, turning his head and crossing his legs without removing his hands from his pockets, and only then began to reply. “I don’t want to talk to you, or anybody else.”
The teacher couldn’t seem to comprehend this stab to his egotism and he stammered a bit. “Well, what do you want from me, then? Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“…I thought that’d be obvious. I’m enjoying the view from this seat. There’s a lot to observe.” Indeed, the campus of his new high school was gigantic; it consisted of several multi-tiered buildings that sprawled across acres of courtyard and greenery. That was the type of care that a government-funded location would have put into it. Along with an overly-large budget, of course.
Within moments, as if to clarify his statement, Vitalis added, “I don’t need anything from you.” These words, simple and concise, had a strong and unprecedented impact on the teacher, whose face cycled from disappointment to dark anger. He was speechless and physically couldn’t respond to the harsh way he had been swatted away other than to go along with it. The room was silent as he continued the menial task of gathering his school documents into his weathered briefcase. There was nothing more for either of them to say.
For a brief moment, Vitalis felt nothing but disdain for the teacher, but this soon disappeared and his face took on its usual property of stone indifference. The quick burning fire had been swallowed completely by a tidal wave of nothingness, an endless torrent of pure emotionless void. He knew that this would hurt the older man more than any anger he could portray, and he was correct.
“Oh, I knew I’d find you he-ah!” As the teacher left the room, the door opened one more time, and Natalia entered the room. She faltered as the teacher paused, but was taken aback as he simply walked around her and stomped his way out of earshot. She was speechless herself as she looked after the man, who was usually quietly confident in himself, and then she looked inside the room. Just as she had predicted, Arend Vitalis was sitting in his seat and staring out of the window, and she knew immediately what had caused their instructor to leave in such a huff. She smiled a faint, nervous smile, and began to walk quietly towards the boy.
“So I was right after all. You know… I’ve never seen anyone like you before,” she whispered to him after a few moments of standing close to him and looking out of the window. She had been staring just as intently as he was, but could not seem to see the same things, for the outside did not hold her attention as strongly as it held his. She was content with this, for somewhere inside of her, she knew that he was somehow different and that she could never be what he was, could never see what he saw, although the origin of these feelings were new to her and honestly surpassed what she could have comprehended.
Natalia Monomus had never been in love before, never had been taken aback by a sudden and irreparable change to her normal life and her normal emotions, and she had never laid eyes on a figure who refused to be held down by normality. This was what she was expressing to Arend Vitalis in her short, breathless sentence. He understood it completely and immediately, and was filled with disgust.
Slowly Arend turned his head and looked up to Natalia, gazing right in her big naïve eyes, and gave her a piteous grimace that mirrored a great philosopher looking down on an ignorant child. Without exchanging more than five sentences, Natalia began to get a clear image on what and who exactly Arend was, and was not ashamed by how radically different he was from her. She shuddered slightly, her knees buckling, and she felt every emotion she had never felt before in her rose-colored, innocent life. The boy looked at her with curiosity, an archaic form of newfound inquisitiveness, with hatred. He understood everything she was going through – it was nothing new to those around him. Without a word being spoken between the two, he looked back to the window.
It took Natalia a minute to regain her senses and speak, and she did so while she curled her hair around the fingertip of her index finger. “What exactly are you looking at out there?” She suspected that the answer was not something she could understand, let alone something he could properly articulate, and in a way she was correct.
“I’m looking. Searching for… something. This is one of the last bastions of humanity in the world, and if there isn’t a trace of sustenance here, among these concrete structures, lifeless paths, and driven purposes, then it doesn’t exist anywhere.” He spoke smoothly and evenly, as if his words were rehearsed and scripted, but Natalia only heard a tone of painful weariness within him, like the motives behind his asocial behavior were a heavy burden that he and only he was destined to hold, and he had let her hold a hand beneath it as he let up its weight by just a fraction. She had been crushed by the weight and instantly felt a feeling of infinite exhaustion rush through her brain.
“I don’t understand.”
“…You never will.”
The simple words summarized everything to each other, and neither of them needed to speak anymore. Natalia began to find herself beginning to learn how to live near Arend’s nature.
The two stood in their spots without moving for hours after that. It felt like hours to her, at least. Arend sat watching, scouring the expansive courtyard, looking through what was visible to gaze at what was never to be seen. Natalia looked mostly at Arend, struggling with a beast she did not recognize and was never warned about, but occasionally looked out the window. She was only bored by the endless, unchanging landscape.
The tall clock tower in the courtyard rang eight times and Natalia shifted, as if woken up from a deep sleep by the noise. She looked around, suddenly uncomfortable with her situation, and shifted her bag’s strap on her shoulder.
“I have to go.” She spoke with apprehension, but Arend did not care, nor did he respond. She began to dig in her bag for something. “I have something for you that I want you to keep, forever,” she whispered. The last part had come from beneath her, out of her control, but that was fine with her. The words held finality that she did not comprehend, but she did embrace it. They both knew that she wouldn’t be coming to see her again, although only Natalia knew that it would be better for her own mental state. He could never love her back, and she wouldn’t love him if he would. None of what she was feeling or acting on made sense, but that was something she had accepted soon after they had met. The two had only been acquaintances – not even friends, that was another fact that both of them knew – for a day, but Natalia knew everything about him already, knew it in her heart and soul, as if it were something that all people only had to study briefly before grasping acutely and accurately.
After a minute, she pulled out an object and held it before her timidly. It was heavy in her hands, an object with a unique weight, but she would forget this uniqueness within moments of relinquishing it, because – in the same way she had simply known where Arend was and had simply known how she felt about him – she knew the object was never hers to hold. She never knew why she had the artifact, nor where she had gained it from, or how it got in her bag, but the fact was that she had always had it and now knew that it was time for her to give it up. It meant nothing to her but, at the same time, it had a meaning and stood for something, on a quality of its own. She did not understand any of it.
As she waited for him to turn, slowly as always, Natalia looked at Arend’s sharp, ever thinking features, his disdain and shunning of society, and fancied him to be a dream. He was a dream that she had been having for all of her life but never quite remembered upon waking up, an endless nightmare that would haunt her long after she cut ties with him. He wasn’t just quiet and antisocial, that she knew; his mind was thinking, endlessly, and he didn’t speak with anyone because he couldn’t, it was painful for some reason and ached to his very soul, and his features would occasionally shift ever so slightly as he struggled with internal issues and philosophies that he would never and could never speak with anyone. She had no proof of any of this, of course, but she knew it to be true. She had never been sure of anything else in her life like she was with Arend Vitalis this day.
He took note of her offering and turned, looking at her with those same dull, uncaring eyes. His eyes always looked about as if everything they saw was beneath them, and Natalia was no different. That gaze was unlike anything she had ever seen before, because unlike most others, Arend didn’t look at a person like they were worth his time, or worth any amount of oxygen, or even that they were human. He looked at everything like it was another burden that he was forced to live through, another pin that would be stuck into his cushion of existence, and he bore the pain without saying a word. This was how he looked at her, and she didn’t want him to look at her in any other way for as long as he lived.
She held out a simple golden pen, long and elegantly built in its simplicity. It did not sparkle or shine particularly, but it seemed to hold a bright sheen when held in Natalia’s pale hands, one that grabbed Arend’s attention and held onto it tightly. He knew what she was giving him, again understanding everything she did completely, and he removed his right hand from his pocket to grasp it.
The pen was surprisingly heavy, but its weight was perfect for his hands, and he found that he enjoyed holding it. He gave the pen a cautionary twirl in his hand before holding onto it tightly and returning his hand to his pocket, the pen in tow. Arend, still silent, looked back up to Natalia. She was gone.
Afterwards, Arend stood up from his seat and continued staring out of the window until he saw Natalia walking alone in the courtyard. She did not look up, not once, but he watched her until she left the large school gates and left the property. As soon as she left, he closed his eyes tiredly and turned away from the window. As he walked out of the classroom with slow, measured steps, he stopped by her desk and looked at a piece of paper that she had haphazardly left on it. On a whim, he pulled out the golden pen and began to write on the paper, not knowing what he was planning to express or even why he began to do it.
The pen did not write. Now he knew why its weight felt just right in his hands.