"I'm stuck in this classroom to die."

[Yonagoda]

“You need a partner?” The purple-haired boy asked from the other side of the classroom, a smile on his face. Leah nodded and resisted the urge to ask the teacher if she could work alone again.

Five minutes later, as Leah meticulously highlighted every one of the boy’s grammatical errors, They spoke to each other again for the second time.

“Why creative writing?”

Leah looked up from her page.

“Huh?”

“I asked,” The boy repeated, putting the emphasis on the little ‘ah’ sound in ‘asked.’ “Why did you choose this class?”

“Uh…”

Leah wasn’t really sure, to be honest- because she’s never really been good at stringing stories together. She was good at coming up with little ideas, concepts that would've played out well in somebody else’s hands, but writing wasn’t something she was good at. Because it was communication, and Leah was terrified of that.

“I just like doing it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, um.”

She handed the page over, words covered with yellows and blues and pinks.

“You’re supposed to read it out loud, you know.”

And he was supposed to check her work for mistakes, but neither of them were doing their job, so…

“Can you please just lie to the teacher for me? I don’t want to read it.”

“Sure.”

Oh, wait, that worked?

“Your turn, uh…”

“Vasily.”

“Vasily.”

“Right. Yeah. Uh, you have a spare highlighter?”

Leah didn’t sigh, because it wasn’t polite, but there was a distinct speed and force in the motion of pushing her pencil case to him, a ballpoint pen spilling out and tumbling to the edge of the table. She yelped, and slammed a hand onto the pen before it could fall.

It kind of went back and forth like that. Vasily tries to ask a question, and Leah lies to him. Leah, very rarely, asks a question and he responds in a way that made it kind of clear that he didn’t really care.

All the while, she kept on staring.

“...”

“What?”

“Are you going to stop looking at my eye now?”

“Oh, I- I’m so sorry, I-”

“Hey, hey, it’s alright. It’s just contacts. The other one’s glass,” and to show, he ripped off the fabric and tapped, fingernails making a clear noise against the cold glass.

“Oh, um…”

“Cool, right?”

“Yeah, It’s kinda, uh, cool’s a word for it-”

She caught the eye of her teacher and looked back at the paper.

“Pay attention to class, you two- I know school can be boring sometimes, but this is for your future, alright? You chose this class, so you have to at least try-”

And he's on another tangent.

Two “sorry”s rang out, almost in synchronization.