Peter was on time to his second period biology class, but was dismayed to find Lisa hadn’t beaten him into the room.  Most of the students were already present, and so with a sigh, the freshman stepped off Erica’s hand and unpacked his belongings onto the pitch surface of the lab table.  He tried to ignore the gaping emptiness of the chair next to his space, but it proved difficult as Mrs. Baker arrived, her arms stacked high with books and manila folders, and plunged into an introductory lesson on photosynthesis.

Lisa wandered in sheepishly about ten minutes late, gripping the straps of her backpack in a tight fist and dragging the laces along the floor.  The pudgy teacher’s dry-erase marker squeaked to a halt on the board as she turned to raise an eyebrow at the tardy redhead before returning wordlessly to the notes.

“Sorry I’m late,” Lisa said delicately.

“Just make sure you get what you missed from someone,” Mrs. Baker said contentedly without turning again.

Peter watched as Lisa shuffled her sneaker-clad feet on the way down the aisle, again avoiding his gaze as she slid into her seat as inconspicuously as possible and pulled a pencil out from behind her ear, where it had been mostly concealed by her cascading hair.

The freshman paused, setting his pad and graphite tip down in front of his crossed legs, too distracted now as he peered sheepishly up at Lisa’s face.  He searched desperately across the soft landscape of her face for a sign: maybe a glint in her eye, a quicker pace to her breathing, a deeper etching in her dimples.  Something, at least, to give him a starting point for wrapping his head around this stonewalling behavior.

But he saw nothing.  Not a twitch or a sigh.  She’d settled quickly into note-taking and tried to copy down as much as she could before Baker wiped the work away and replaced it with even more, and Peter could only stare at her for so long before he risked becoming lost too or worse getting caught with his attentions so humiliatingly squared on Lisa.  He wanted to raise a hand or try to whisper his friend’s name, but something stopped him, as though the redhead suddenly had an aura about her that made her untouchable in this moment.  It almost seemed to repel him.

When the freshman thought he could endure the strange divide no longer, though, Mrs. Baker finished doling out the monotone lecture notes and began passing worksheets back through the aisles on which to practice the material.  The stack of white sheets, buoyed on a sea of student grumbles and bored hands, at last reached Lisa, who accepted two sheets for her table and passed the rest back.

“Lisa?” Peter murmured hopefully.

At last she turned her head to acknowledge his existence, silently shattering the invisible barrier that had been gelling so frightfully between them.  Her eyes lit up at the sight of him, and her lip quivered, but the smile he’d witnessed slowly revealing itself to him over the past week was nowhere to be seen.  She waved her fingers in that graceful way, as though petting piano keys to lull out whispered notes, and gave Peter a pleasurable little shiver.  For a moment, things felt like they could be all right again.

“Hi, Peter,” she said a little too solemnly as she slid one of the papers closer to her lab partner.  Her voice was hesitant, like it had been at their first meeting eight days ago, and puzzled Peter immensely.  The way some of their conversations had gone in the class periods past, he’d seen her start to emerge from her shell and treat him without fear or judgment, like an ordinary person.

Especially after Erica’s unorthodox pep talk on the bus ride home the day before, he had been feeling just empowered enough to consider the possibility that Lisa might be willing to catch a movie with him.

That sensation was completely sapped now.  She almost resembled a cornered animal, interacting with him out of fear rather than the kindness he’d come to recognize.

Fear.  Over a boy so small she could hold him in her hand.

What had gone wrong?

                “What’s up?” he managed awkwardly after the girl’s eyes had returned to her paper.

                “Nothing, really,” she sighed.  Her green irises flashed to him again.  “How are you?”

                “I’m… fine,” he answered uneasily, reflecting on the irony of such a question from someone acting so peculiarly out of her element, even given her more reserved nature.  “You?”

                “I’m good.”

                “Are you… doing okay?” he tried quietly.

                “Yes,” she said briskly.  Her hand scooped the pencil up and set about scribbling out answers with enough speed that it was a wonder her writing came out legibly.  “We should probably get to work before she starts walking around to check on us.”

                “Yeah.  Yeah, totally,” Peter said, nodding as he hesitantly grabbed up his pencil tip again.  With stupendous fortitude, the freshman set about looking over the blank field of the worksheet and transcribing answers onto his tiny notebook pad so his mother could scan it later for Mrs. Baker’s aging eyes to read.

                About six very distracted answers down the sheet he realized he’d been filling in the spaces one number down.  Hardly the end of the world, but Peter had been staunchly meticulous so far in making his work clear for his teachers to read, in effort to avoid any level of resentment.  By now he took it as a personal character defect to have made such an error.  With a groan, he fished out the pink eraser Suzanne had sliced off of a pencil for him to use.

                It was unwieldy work using a piece of rubber the size of a healthy sponge, but after scrubbing out his incorrect placements, Peter picked the pencil tip back up and glanced over at Lisa, engrossed in her own sheet still.  He placed his dark utensil back to the paper, squeezing it tighter than he had before, and scratched in the first few letters before his iron grip on the thin piece snapped the tip cleanly in half, leaving his hands blackened with powdered residue.  Flustered, he gasped aloud.

                The destruction of Peter’s puny pencil was nearly silent, and certainly turned no heads in the room despite the tedium of the work, but he did notice Lisa’s hand pause with a distinct jerk at the sound of his surprised intake of breath.  She lifted her head up and inhaled deeply enough that her maroon sweater swelled a little, then turned to look at him again.

                “Everything okay?” she whispered, quickly ascertaining what Peter had done.  “Do you want another one?”

                “T-That’d be great,” Peter said, blinking numbly.  Erica carried a small baggie of extra pencil tips and other supplies for her brother to change out in between classes, but there simply wasn’t storage space in his backpack for more.

                Drawing another pencil from her own pack, Lisa bent the tip of the freshly sharpened lead tool against her thumbnail until it broke off.  She handily captured the tiny tip between two fingers before it could bounce into the void below the desk and steadily lowered it toward her lab partner.

                “I’ve only got two pencils, so you may be out of luck if this one breaks, too,” she said.  The girl allowed herself the slightest of smiles that let Peter know the person he thought he’d become acquainted with this week was, in fact, still in there behind the stone stoicism.  Reaching forward, he plucked the implement from between the tender give of her fingertips.

                “Lisa,” Peter said meaningfully, aching too much now from the silent treatment.  The redhead didn’t even have time to pick her own pencil back up before freezing in place, sensing the weight of the spoken word, and looked back to her friend, a forlorn glaze in her emerald eyes.

                “I’m sorry,” she said, breaking eye contact almost immediately.

                “What?”

                “I said I’m sorry.  Just for… everything.  I didn’t mean anything by it.”

                “By what?” Peter followed up in the same breath.

                “I didn’t mean to… bother you this week,” Lisa choked out.  She bit her lip.

                “To bother me this- what are you talking about?” he stammered, mouth hanging open now.

                She shrugged with resignation.  “You don’t have to be embarrassed or anything that I know about it.  Really.  I know all of this is so new to you, and I’m… kind of more used to doing my own thing, anyway.”

                “No, I mean… why would you think you were bothering me?” he asked, hoping in his mild horror his questions didn’t come off as demanding when she clearly was already so concerned with her lovely humanity being mistaken for something irritating.

                Lisa swallowed.  “It doesn’t really matter.  I talked to people in gym yesterday while you were off with Watson.  They told me.”

                “Who?” he pressed with exasperation, already fearing the answer.

                “Well… Sharon,” she uttered.  Almost as soon as she said it, Lisa frowned.  She seemed to notice the incongruous logic, as though she’d been under a temporary spell right up to this moment, and speaking it aloud had liberated her.

                “Sharon.  Sharon said that,” Peter repeated.  He’d seen it coming, but he still felt like he’d been flicked in the stomach, which for the diminutive freshman was a fairly major blow.

                “Y-Yeah.  She… said the two of you talked in your English class.  About how you’re new here, how you’re trying to find friends, that you said I kept bothering you in the classes we have, I…” she continued, her tone growing more sickly now.  “Oh, God…”

                “Lisa, I never said anything like that to her.  I promise,” he said.  Peter extended both arms, subconsciously imploring her to believe what was already clear to both of them as an easily grasped concept of Sharon’s deception.

                “I’m sorry about this too, then,” Lisa mumbled.  Her hand, flattened against the black of the lab table with her fingers spread out, slid over the surface of the table closer to Peter but stopped a few inches short.  “I shouldn’t have listened.  I don’t know why I even did, I… I knew she and her friends didn’t like me, but…”

                “No.  I… get it,” Peter said, accustomed to the silver siren’s masterful wordplay even by this early point in his exposure to her.  “I’m sorry too.  Next time, though, if you hear something about me, all you have to do is talk to me.  I’m easy to talk to.”

                “I know you are,” Lisa said.  Her fingers lithely lifted off the dark desk, hovering around Peter’s waist level.  Her index finger, fully extended, lowered itself gently into Peter’s upturned hand so that his palm was suddenly cupping the soft heft of the girl’s fingertip.

                The freshman’s synapses crackled with voltage that nearly shorted every fuse in his system.

                “Are we finished with those practice sheets yet?” Mrs. Baker droned as she strolled past the lab desks, not quite singling out Peter and Lisa, but obviously throwing most of her volume in their direction with enough surprise that it threw both off balance.

                Lisa, suddenly looking like she’d committed a serious federal crime, withdrew her finger from Peter’s hand.  The redhead granted her tiny friend one last, warm smile like she’d begun to show in the days prior and then picked her pencil back up, setting back to work with a slightly shakier hand.

                The five-inch freshman, meanwhile, held his gifted pencil tip in his fist and became quickly lost molding the sensation of Lisa’s tender touch into his memory, desperately hoping he didn’t look too silly with a goofy smile stuck on his face.