Ms. Tritter had only made it halfway down the hallway before an out-of-breath Erica had come sprinting down from the other direction, her backpack hanging on to her shoulder by only one strap. Getting ahold of herself, she brushed two fingers past her bangs to put them smoothly back into place. Her eyes widened momentarily to see her brother perched in someone else’s hand, but she quickly recognized Ms. Tritter as a faculty member and relaxed. After a brief introduction and half-hearted apology from his sister, Peter watched Erica dash off in the other direction to reach her next class in time, allowing him and his towering goddess of a math teacher to make their way toward his English class.
Somehow, Peter felt less embarrassment entering this class late than he had the previous one, mostly because it was only by a few minutes, but also because Ms. Tritter was an absolute natural at soothing out the situation. Once again, Peter could feel the eyes of every teenager in the classroom falling curiously upon him, and Ms. Tritter seemed sensitive to this, curling her fingers a little more tightly around her cupped palm to block out the stomach-churning sight from her tiny passenger’s vision as Peter hunkered lower into the skin of her hand, nervousness once again overcoming him.
Quickly apologizing for the interruption, Ms. Tritter gave the briefest of explanations to Mr. Garrison the English teacher before gently lowering her hand down onto an empty desk, allowing Peter to step out carefully onto the flat surface.
Peter was almost disappointed. Somehow, as he’d been carried to class in the soft, warm hand of this woman who just an hour ago had been a stranger, he felt just as safe and content as when he was being lovingly held by his mother. Thanking Ms. Tritter for the ride, Peter sheepishly began unloading his backpack, keeping his eyes locked once again with his shoes until the onslaught of wandering eyes began to subside into subtlety.
“All right… all right… settle down…” droned the middle-aged English teacher, scratching a persistent itch on a receding gray hairline and rubbing pensively at a rubbery forehead. Peter could detect the years of experience in his voice, but just as well a sense of boredom with life. Clearly, Mr. Garrison was none too thrilled to be in this job at this point in his life.
“I’ve already taken roll call… so… I’m guessing you would be…” drawled Mr. Garrison, continuing on and locking eyes with Peter. Instantly, every teenager shifted in their seats to stare in wide-eyed wonder back at the little marvel struggling to regain his composure, his tiny cheeks flushing red with realization of how centered he had become in the room.
“P-P-Peter…” squeaked the lad, embarrassed at how quiet the word came out of his cold lips. Somewhere off in the far corner of the room, Peter heard a boy’s snicker. From the other corner, he heard a girl coo in adoration and pity.
“Sorry… didn’t catch that… I’m a little hard of hearing in my right ear, you see. One more time?” responded Mr. Garrison, coughing lightly into his fist and prodding demonstratively at his dangling earlobe.
“P-Peter… Peter…” tried the boy again, his name coming out just as quietly. More snickering ensued.
“That’s enough!” barked Mr. Garrison in the direction the muffled laughter had come from. “Sorry, son, little louder for me?”
Peter felt like his stomach was triple-knotting itself around his lungs. He felt his breaths becoming shorter, his vocal chords becoming less willing to function. He had never felt this much stage fright in all his life.
All at once, the things he had been thinking about for the past hour were hitting him. Being plucked from his math class by his unknown assailant and trapped in Lena’s clarinet, being late for class, dealing with the knowledge of his utter helplessness at the hands of anyone who meant him harm. It was becoming too much.
Intangibly, it was like there were two giant thumbs pressing down on his shoulders, causing his knees to wriggle uncomfortably against his will. A moment later, it almost looked like the colors of the room were clouding together. Spinning. He was becoming dizzier. Peter blinked a few times, wondering haphazardly if he was going to faint.
“Peter,” came the calm, sultry response from behind Peter that instantly electrified his bones and snapped him back to reality. “His name is Peter.”
“Thank you… um… sorry, I’m still learning names, obviously… you are?”
“Sharon,” answered the confident voice of the girl. Peter felt goose bumps rippling along his skin as he slowly turned to look over his shoulder. Instantly, he found himself face-to-face with the towering upper torso of the same girl he had encountered this morning in American History class. She raised an eyebrow at him as she tilted her slender chin down toward his level, her silvery-blonde hair catching the light just right as it slid past her smooth cheeks, giving her an almost mythical appearance that make the back of Peter’s throat go dry.
“Hey, short stuff,” she whispered easily to him, plush lips curling into a self-assured grin, her crystal-clear blue-gray irises practically cutting the boy down at his knees with a single drilling glance, before returning her gaze up to Mr. Garrison, nodding slowly.
“Sharon. Right. Thank you. And… now I have… Peter CLARK, here you are on the roll… all right, now… let’s start getting into this syllabus I’ve passed out…” continued the teacher.
As Peter nodded to Sharon in thanks and turned his head back up to focus on what Mr. Garrison was saying, he found his attention completely diverted away from the task at hand. Even as he stared ahead, hanging on the every droll word of his English teacher, he could feel it.
Sharon’s eyes on him. Wonderingly. Studiously. Hungrily.
Even without turning around, he could feel her staring subtly at him, her palms clasped together in thought, her lower lip curling partially into her mouth in thought.
Peter didn’t know what to think. He felt terrified and amazed at the same time by this titanic siren of a young woman. She almost didn’t seem human, her beauty making it impossible to pull one’s gaze away from her, yet her calculating and psychotically calm expression making it a painful experience. A powerful double-edged sword in the form of an unassuming blonde fifteen-year-old girl in her first day of high school. It made Peter’s stomach churn in more ways than one to think of her.
Peter wasn’t sure how long he had zoned out in these thoughts, but he was instantly shaken out of it to feel a soft, slender fingertip tapping lightly on his shoulder. He practically toppled over from the shock of it, cringing from surprise and leaping to the side as he turned to watch Sharon slowly retracting her hand back to her desk, looking somewhat unnerved at the tiny boy’s reaction to her simple touch.
“No need to spazz, short stuff, just wanted to get your attention.”
“Huh? Wait… oh… oh, sorry, um…”
“I just thought we should get going on the assignment thing.”
“What assignment… thing?”
Sharon rolled her eyes, smirking at Peter as she crossed her arms, glancing down at a piece of paper on her desk. “We’re supposed to fill out this icebreaker worksheet thing in the pairs of desks in front and back. Ringing a bell? You’re gonna have to learn to pay attention more or you’re gonna get eaten alive at this school,” she cooed, opening her jaws dramatically, wriggling her slimy, glistening pink tongue around between her dark cheeks, before clacking her teeth loudly together a few times, simulating chewing. “Not for real, obviously,” she winked.
Peter gulped hard. Just a joke, he told himself. Get it together. You need friends. You need them.
“Right… right, sorry. Sorry… Sharon,” he repeated a few times, getting his bearings, realizing he must have stopped paying attention for at least fifteen minutes of class if not more. “Um… what does it say?”
“Well… it wants our names… but I guess you’ve got that part down,” she said nonchalantly, her warm voice reverberating powerfully through Peter’s eardrums in a way he couldn’t quite describe. “Okay, I guess it wants… hobbies? I don’t even know why they make us do this kind of thing.”
“Yeah… yeah, me neither,” Peter agreed, trying to sound as friendly as possible, although in reality, having been homeschooled all his life, Peter had yet to encounter an icebreaker activity such as this.
“Listen, not to be rude or anything, but he wants both of us to turn in a paper, so… is there like some dinky little computer you need to use, or what? Because I’m not sure you could handle this puppy right here,” Sharon simpered, brandishing a fresh-from-the-box sharpened pencil between her smooth fingertips, skillfully spinning it around the fleshy crevices between each one. The thing was taller than Peter’s entire body.
Finally, grasping it between her thumb and pointer finger, Sharon drew the pencil closer to Peter in a swift stabbing motion, who ducked back just as the razor-sharp graphite tip prodded into his general direction. “You know, unless you want to… try it?” she asked in a pleasant voice, holding the dangerously pointed writing utensil nearer and nearer to Peter’s body.
Peter gulped and shook his head “no” politely, placing a hand on the bumpy yellow siding and pushed it out of the way. True, it was just a pencil, but the way Sharon was holding it in her powerful fingers, pointing it downward at Peter’s body like that, it might as well have been a recently welded battle spear.
Even beyond this, there was something in the way Sharon had presented the pencil so calmly, a faint glint in her eye, that made Peter uneasy.
“No, no… I think I’ll be fine… I just write it up on my own paper, and…”
“Yada, yada, I get it,” interrupted Sharon, bringing the pencil back to her own normal sized page and beginning to scribble her name down. “Still… it’d be awful cute. Probably kinda entertaining for me, too.”
“Yeah… haha, yeah, probably would be,” answered Peter, realizing how false his voice sounded, but was unable to help it. He plastered a fake smile on his face and folded his arms behind his back, trying to focus on stopping his knees from involuntarily shaking again.