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At fifteen, school is difficult.
You keep your head down and catch no one’s eyes, because it’s what you’re used to doing. Eye contact seems to be a universal code for potential socialisation in the human codex. It’s all the same to you, really. Keeping your head down means you won’t have to see their eyes travel over your narrow face, over its paleness, over its oddness. Keeping your head down means you can burrow into the collar of your jacket, possibly hide your ears, which are always a source of attention. You wish you were invisible, but you’re not. You’ve had only two jibes at your ears, one remark about your stick-figure physique, and one incident in which your back got intimate with the wall. You’re grateful for that. For once the student body’s collective hate towards you is limited to your unfortunate physical appearance, not the fact that you like dick. It’s a step forward. Maybe. It’s an off-day. Probably.
“…would sit down in the second row, please, there’s a seat free.”
Your teacher’s voice and the other students’ unrestrained cajoling tear you out of your thoughts. Your body gives a brief jerk, and you hope no one’s seen that. Your eyes dart to your right—you sit at the end of the room, so there’s no one to your left—but everyone’s eyes are focused on the front of the room, so their attention isn’t on you. It still makes a hot wave of shame wash over your neck, and you huff quietly, bend more over the table to focus on your text. Bend more over because any resemblance to curling in on yourself makes you feel safer.
“Could you move a little more to the left, please?” comes a voice from beside you, so impossibly close. Your body’s flinch this time is awfully perceptible, and when you look up, there’s a boy standing at your table, looking at you expectantly. You freeze, your entire body goes rigid. What does the boy want with you? Have you said something out loud, accidentally? Something stupid? The shame spreads, settling in your stomach like lead. “W-what?” you stutter, ever the freak that you are. Your hands tremble a little at the way the boy keeps his eyes on you so focusedly, and oh, God, it doesn’t help that he’s gorgeous. An athletic body, broad shoulders, strong chest, and his jaw is almost what you’d say is square but it’s just so rounded that you think of chiselled instead. He is pale but beautifully so, not the same pallid shade as your skin. His is clean and smooth, and his lips are red and strange. Your eyes meet the sea-depths of his, and the word fuck sparks behind your eyelids.
Fuck indeed, because you’ve forgotten what he wanted.
“Move to the left,” he repeats, and his eyes leave yours at last, flicker down to the table. “There’s not much space left.”
You follow his gaze and look at the table you occupy. You’re sitting alone at a two-student table because no one else would sit with you—of course—and this boy wants you to move, so he can… what? Sit down beside you? It makes you blink, several times, trying to process the thought. Him sitting beside you. Him, beside you?
“Um, I, I—” “Do get on with it, Mr. Wylt; I’d like to continue my lesson, if you please,” the teacher says impatiently and, well, now everyone’s eyes are on you. The mortification is instant and hot in your chest. You nod quickly and shove your stuff to the side, hands uncoordinated. You’re going to do something wrong. You’ll make pens fall down, and then you’ll have to push your chair back to bend down at retrieve them and that’ll make an awful noise and the teacher will be annoyed with you again. And you’re sweating so much under your thick hoodie that you’re scared you’ll begin to smell and the boy will pull a face and say something and everyone will laugh at you. You will—
“C’mon, sit down here,” someone calls from another row, and you can hear the sneer in that voice. “No need to sit beside the loser!”
Loser. That’s what you are, right. Residential loser Merlin Wylt. Skinny freak. With a black, dry humour that no one understands. Wears long sleeves in summer. Reads too many books. Poofter. Dumbo. Weirdo.
“I’ll sit here if I choose to sit here,” is all the boy says, and his voice carries a sudden bit of arrogance that wasn’t there before. You keep eyes head down, rearrange your stuff on your side of the table, and the ensuing catcalls from the other students makes you close your eyes briefly. When you open them again you steal a glance to your right and the boy’s still standing there. He’s laid his hand flat on the table. He’s looking at you, a strange something about his mouth that you can’t place. “You’d still have to pull your chair over, you know.”
Of course you still have to pull your chair over, because you’re still sitting in the middle of the table, taking up all the space now that your things don’t anymore. How can you be so dumb? Everyone’s still staring, and even though you rationally know it’s only a few seconds your head transforms it into an eternity of shame, and you wish the ground would open up beneath you to swallow you whole. You can do nothing right. You always do things wrong. You’re useless and stupid. Your eyes dart up to the boy’s face, an abundance of apologies already waiting to fall from your lips like restless birds waiting to take flight, but you still, for a second, when you return to his blue.
His eyes, you think, his eyes are kind.
“Sorry,” is the only thing you say then, smoothly without a stutter, and you don’t know how the myriad of apologies suddenly become singular, but maybe it has to do with the way the entire room around you seems to fall silent as the boy disregards the other students and focuses on you only. Normally, being the object of such scrutinity would make you sick with anxiety, but… he’s calm. He’s calm, so calm, like a rock in the roaring sea. Your ship throws an anchor out and it touches the ground, steady, steady. You hold his eyes as you move the chair to the left, and he nods, once, and settles down beside you. There is no sound but your own breathing, and his, beside you.