Chapter Text
Dan’s pen glided across the bottom of his exercise book, thin blue lines spidering their way across the crinkled paper like veins in a piece of marble. These lines were slightly less random than that though, instead twisting and turning and branching off each other to imitate the shape of a tree outside the window. He absent mindedly twirled his biro between his fingers before scribbling in a few more leaves where it was looking a bit sparse, curving the shape to travel gracefully up the margin of his page.
“Dan,” he heard a voice hiss from beside him. He looked up to see his best friend Pj nudging his arm, obviously after trying to get his attention for quite a while.
“Mr Howell, good to see you’re with us,” Mr Robinson spoke from across the room, sternly peering through his spectacles and making Dan groan. “Maybe you can explain to us, what the difference is between a positron and a proton?”
“Uhhh…” Dan thought for a few seconds, racking his brain trying to remember what they had learned that lesson. To be perfectly honest, he hadn’t been paying attention at all, his focus instead mostly taken up by the rattling of twigs against the window and the way the sunlight caught the hair of the girl in front of him. He was lucky there was even space left in his exercise book to write, as most of the delicately ruled pages were instead filled with sprawling doodles rather than scientific diagrams and explanations.
“I don’t know.” He concluded, much to the rest of the class’s amusement.
“I see,” Mr Robinson said, fixing Dan with a pointed stare, along with everyone else in the class seated in front of Dan who were all kindly turned around to face him. They slowly turned back to the front though as their teacher began explaining the correct answer, Dan also returning to his previous state and zoning out again, this time finding a lot more interest in the way the second hand of the clock had a slight bend in it, and noticing the way that Sandra Marshall’s brown ponytail curled slightly and ended in a golden shimmer.
The bell rang, signaling the end of the lesson, and they all packed up and left for the end of the day, a few people smirking at Dan as they passed. Luckily Mr Robinson wasn’t all that strict, and Dan was able to escape the room that afternoon without punishment, unfortunately not without a towering pile of homework though.
“I don’t know why you’re even taking Physics,” Pj remarked as soon as they were out of the room and walking down the corridor, the pair of them heading towards the exit to walk home.
“It wasn’t really my choice,” Dan grumbled in return, scraping his feet along the ground as he thought of his father who had been ready with a list of boring subjects to study as soon as he was old enough to choose. Of course he did alright at them, but there was only a certain amount of freedom left when you already had your entire career path set out for you. “I just wish I was doing something I actually found interesting,” he continued, running his timetable through his mind and having to physically hold himself back from groaning out loud.
“What, you mean like Sandra Marshall?”
“Shut up!” Dan elbowed Pj in the ribs, a blush sweeping across his cheeks. “That’s not what I meant,” he laughed.
“Yeah, but I’m sure you were thinking it,” Pj teased, smirking at Dan’s flushed complexion. It had been obvious for weeks that Dan fancied her, and Pj couldn’t help but poke fun at it since Dan had admitted his true feelings.
Dan thought about her sweeping hair and dazzling eyes, and how nice she seemed when she was talking to other people, but then remembered they hadn’t even had a proper conversation yet. “I wish I actually had a chance to talk to her though, I’m so bad at talking to girls.”
“No you’re not,” Pj said, turning to look at Dan as they neared the doors. “You haven’t even tried… just find something you have in common and ask her about it.”
Dan thought for a few seconds but turned up blank. “Like what? The fact that we both don’t know what an electron is?”
Pj laughed, rolling his eyes at Dan. “I heard she likes drawing, maybe ask her about that”
Dan thought for a moment about how he could go about it. Somehow he thought it would seem a little strange walking up to a girl he had barely talked to before and telling her he’d heard she likes drawing, and so does he, and how that somehow meant they should go out together.
“How am I meant to bring that up? And how do you even know that?” Dan quickly added, slightly surprised that Pj knew more about her than he did.
“Oh, she does an art class with one of my sister’s friends… you could probably sign up for it if you wanted?” Pj said nonchalantly.
He had hardly finished his sentence though when that very thought crossed Dan’s mind.
“Yeah! … maybe, well… I can’t just turn up out of the blue, can I?” Dan tried not to sound too eager as he pounced on Pj’s words.
“Probably, it’s run by Mrs Avery down beside the library so it shouldn’t be too much trouble.” Pj smirked at him, giving him a knowing look. “Although I’m sure it would be because you are totally interested in drawing, not for any other reason?”
Dan laughed, shaking his head, “I’ve actually wanted to try out art classes for a while now… Shut up!” He grinned at Pj as he rolled his eyes, but still made a mental note to stop by the building on his walk home that afternoon and pick up a pamphlet to have a look.
The walk was pretty long, and Dan usually caught the bus, but since the library was quite a long detour from his usual route, he decided to go the distance on foot. That gave him time to think about it.
Although his father had always insisted on a prestigious profession like a lawyer or engineer, Dan had always found it hard to imagine himself sitting behind a desk or studying for years of his life for a job he really didn’t feel like doing.
In his head, it sounded stupid to start an art class just because he fancied a girl, but he guessed that was because it was stupid. Why would he waste money and time doing something he didn’t want to do, just to impress someone he would probably never have a chance with anyway? The answer, however, was because he actually wanted to learn to draw properly, and he was kind of excited about having a way to express himself and do something that he felt he was good at already.
In all the classes he took, he did pretty well, but that all felt forced and unnatural. Drawing, however, kept creeping into everything he did almost by accident, most of his pens running out not from writing pages and pages of notes, but instead from doodling along every margin and twirling on the back of his hand.
As embarrassing as it was, most of the time he spent working on each assignment was in formatting the page to look nice, and perfectly ruling and hand drawing all his diagrams. He was proud every time, sitting at the back of the room during maths, that he was able to capture the likeness of a person sitting ahead of him, or perhaps the jar of rulers on the teachers desk, but whatever he did, there was no hiding the fact that drawing made him feel happy.
He had never before considered lessons though, or thought of it as anything more than a casual hobby, but by the time he reached the shabby little studio near the town centre, Dan was utterly convinced. Finally, he would have a chance to express himself the way that he wanted and learn something that he might actually enjoy.