The morning after the darkroom Incident, I walked into my first class of the day to see the most shocking thing I’d seen in a long time. Nolan was actually sitting up in his seat, awake.

Sure, he didn’t look very peppy, or enthusiastic, and in fact he kind of had this dead look in his eyes, but his eyes were open. Behind him, Ashley was making wild hand gestures towards him at me, as if I wouldn’t be able to see what was right in front of me otherwise.

“I see it,” I mouthed to her, and she beamed, dropping her arms, clearly happy she’d achieved what she’d set out to do.

Derek and Melissa weren’t in class yet, which was a shame because I wanted to see their reactions, too. As I reached my desk, Nolan’s head turned towards me. He stared at me as I was sitting down beside him, but the blank expression on his face gave absolutely no indication of his intentions. Did he want to remind me of the grievous mistake I’d committed yesterday? Did he want to tell me he hated having me as his desk partner?

“What do you want?” I wanted to ask him for staring so openly at me without saying a single thing, but then I realized we’d been holding eye contact for the past minute and he wasn’t looking away, or smiling at me, or doing anything.

Why wasn’t he looking away? Was he waiting for me to greet him first? Okay, I could be the bigger person.

Forcing my mouth to curve upwards into what was probably a distorted smile, I said, “Good morning, Nolan.”

I shut my mouth immediately after, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of adding some line like ‘It’s nice to finally see you awake for once!’

Pausing for a moment, he blinked slowly before saying, “Who are you?”

For the second time that week, my jaw dropped at what I was hearing. “Who am I? Did you really just ask me that?”

Nolan frowned. “Am I supposed to know that?”

“Well, I don’t blame you for not knowing,” I say, feeling the words rush out of my mouth before I can stop them. “After all, we’ve only been desk partners for over a year. And we only just interacted yesterday, so, you know, I totally understand that my face is completely unfamiliar to you.”

A loud snort from behind punctuates the end of my sentence, and I turn around with narrowed eyes to see Ashley quickly turn it into a hacking cough. She wasn’t fast enough to hide her amused smile, however.

The confusion on his face baffled me. I was the one who should’ve been confused by this turn of events. Why was he acting like he’d never seen me before? I still remembered the day we introduced ourselves when we first got assigned to each other. Although he didn’t look particularly eager to talk to me, we did exchange names at the very least.

“We interacted yesterday?” he asked.

Why did he always ignore the important bits, like the part about us having been desk partners for a long time?

“Yes,” I said testily. “Do you not even remember the things that you did yesterday? Like skip gym class, for instance?”

The confusion on his face cleared up, giving way to annoyance. “That was you yesterday? You almost blinded me!”

“What?” both Ashley and I said in unison.

True to form, Nolan didn’t turn around to look at her or even acknowledge that he heard her. My phone started vibrating in my pocket, and I knew it was probably Ashley asking all kinds of ridiculous questions.

“Look, I’m really sorry for shining that light on your face,” I said, trying to sound calm. “I didn’t mean to, of course. But don’t you think it’s a little dramatic to say that I almost blinded you just because of that?”

He glared at me—and in that moment, his glares didn’t seem so frightening anymore. This guy who was glaring at me was also the guy who paid so little attention to his surroundings, he couldn’t even remember the face of the person who sat next to him every day; the guy who focused on the most irrelevant things in conversations; and the guy who got needlessly dramatic over petty things.

“No, I don’t think so.”

I was pretty sure some of the classmates around us, who were resolutely not looking in our direction, were actively listening in on our conversation; Nolan pretty much never talked to his fellow students. I did not want rumors flying around school that I blinded some guy—Nolan, no less—using some underhanded method.

I had to defend my own honor! “You know, normally people just shrug it off after a couple of minutes; maybe fifteen minutes at the most. I wouldn’t consider that blinding-worthy. And maybe you should’ve reconsidered hiding in a darkroom to skip gym class. Then I wouldn’t have had to use a flashlight.”

He looked unimpressed and opened his mouth like he was going to argue some more, but then instead heaved a gigantic sigh as if I was the source of all his troubles.

I glared at him, but before I could even think about what next to say to him, Derek was at my table.

“Wow, Chelsea, I could hear your voice before I even entered the classroom. It’s rare to see you so lively and energetic in the morning,” he said. “Usually you look like someone physically dragged you out of bed and into class.”

Then he took one look at Nolan and his eyebrows promptly disappeared into his wavy fringe. “Wow.”

“Yeah, that’s why,” I said, pulling my phone out now that I finally had the chance to check it. “Unbelievable, huh?”

Acting like Derek wasn’t standing there gawking at him, Nolan pulled out his textbook from his bag, opened it to a bookmarked page, and began reading.

“I should get to my seat. Let’s talk during lunch,” Derek said, looking at the wall clock. “Man, Melissa’s going to be late again.”

“She’ll come racing in a few seconds after Mr. McMillan starts the class,” I say dismissively, opening my texts.

Ashley’s first text had an atrocious assumption. ‘You BLINDED him??’

Thankfully, she’d heard me speaking to him—in a deliberately loud manner—and her second text soothed my ruffled feathers. ‘What a drama queen! The way he’s talking, you’d have thought you poked his eye out with your phone.’

I sent her a quick reply. ‘Right?? Can you see him reading his textbook right now? It’s so weird that he’s not resting his head on the table!’

And it got weirder, because when Mr. McMillan started his lesson (the beginning of which Melissa barged into the classroom, apologizing for oversleeping), Nolan didn’t doze off at all, not even for a few minutes. While he wasn’t taking down notes like the rest of us, his gaze did follow Mr. McMillan’s movements, albeit with marked disinterest.

To say that Mr. McMillan was astounded would be a great understatement; he kept turning his head every now and then, even when he had his back facing us, as if to confirm that his eyes weren’t lying to him. The other classmates kept stealing glances at him, and by extension, us, because he was sitting right next to me.

He was attracting even more attention awake than he was asleep.

I couldn’t help but think that Mr. Jameson was so wrong.