Once again, Scott was running late to class. Well, that was what he got for setting his alarm literally ten minutes before he needed to get going. He knew some people spent, like, an hour or two getting ready in the morning but he couldn’t even conceive of that. Especially if he had to stare at himself in the mirror the whole time, or think about what he looked like. Ew.

Instead, his routine was to splash some water on his face, vaguely rake his fingers through his neck-length hair, and pull on the closest available clothes. In this case, the closest pants ended up being the jorts he made the other day, and the closest shirt was some free tech t-shirt he got from a career fair. He shrugged and went for it. It had been pretty warm lately anyway. Might as well benefit from that jorts action.

He slid into a seat at the back of the lecture hall about ten minutes after class had actually started. Fortunately, it was another big lecture so it’s not like anyone was gonna notice he was late, and this professor mostly just went through slide decks that were also posted online. There wasn’t even much of a reason to take notes. Really, the only reason he actually showed up to class was because he knew if he didn’t then he would get more and more behind on watching the lecture recordings.

About halfway through the class, he realized the dude sitting next to him kept glancing at his exposed lower legs. They were admittedly blindingly pale, but at least they weren’t super hairy or anything. Thanks, mom’s side of the family and those classic Korean genes. He also, like, didn’t grow any armpit hair. One of his friends in high school had been convinced he shaved them, but, seriously, he didn’t.

Anyway, he hoped he wasn’t making the random guy uncomfortable. Maybe all the pale, untoned flesh was grossing him out. Scott often got grossed out looking at himself so that would be understandable. He mentally cursed Aylin for talking him into wearing clothes that covered up less. There was a reason he usually went for a classic hoodie and jeans combo, and let his hair fall in front of his face. The less of him people saw, the better.

Scott was just getting up at the end of class, waiting for a row of people shuffling down the nearest aisle to open up enough of a gap for him to squeeze in, when the guy said something to him. Scott often kinda tuned out the world around him and just generally wasn’t the most observant, so he completely missed it. Especially cuz the large room was full of the constant hum of a bunch of college students having hundreds of conversations in parallel. 

“Sorry, what?” he said to the dude.

“Hey, did you take any notes for this lecture? I was kinda zoning out.”

Scott shook his head. “Sorry, dude. I usually just look at the slides online.”

The dude shrugged. “Fair enough. I’ll probably just rewatch the lecture then. Thought it was worth asking. Oh, I’m Randall, by the way.”

“I’m Scott. Nice to meet you.”

A momentary look of surprise flashed across Randall’s face. Scott wasn’t really sure why. But a moment later he shook it off and continued. “Would you want to maybe study together? Exchange numbers or something?”

Scott could use more people to study with (besides literally just Aylin), and he also thought maybe Randall was trying to befriend him. And he wasn’t about to turn that down, given how bad he was at trying to make friends. He was always stopped by the fear that he was annoying or inconveniencing people by trying to talk to them, so he usually waited for others to initiate conversations. And that didn’t happen very often.

“Sure!” He and Randall briefly exchanged phones to enter their numbers. After they swapped back, Randall said, “Okay, cool! Uh, I’ll see you around?”

“Yeah, see you!” Scott said before heading down the aisle that had finally cleared out. He turned and gave a half-wave to Randall as he left.

Far too quiet for Scott to hear, Randall muttered to himself. “Damn, can’t believe I met a real-life femboy. This is pretty pog.”