Peter sat-crossed by his older sister’s left knuckle as it perched on the edge of her plastic lunch tray. Holding a halved cherry tomato like a bowl, he dug through its sour contents with the tip of a disposable fork Erica had snapped off for him to use, combing past the seeds and juice.

                He wondered if he should tell her. How he should tell her. His sister insisted on him divulging potential problems, hadn’t she? That penciled etching of his nude form in Mandy’s sketchbook was still fresh in his mind from last period, as if he’d touched a stovetop while it was still hot and left his fingers singed. He couldn’t make a move without recalling it.

                For the first half of lunch, his sibling’s cadre of cooing matchmakers had leaned across the table, oohing and ahhing at his half-hearted explanation of last Friday’s game night with Lisa, eventually leading to another family date tonight, this time at Lisa’s house. They’d offered a few tips for first-time parent-meeting, but Peter’s mind clearly wasn’t on them, which was generally hard to accomplish given how close they normally crowded around him. Eventually they’d left him alone to chatter about matters more their size and speed, leaving Peter to prod at the fruit he’d plucked from Erica’s salad.

                “Hey, Peter?” Lena whispered gently from her seat to Erica’s left. She leaned in nearer to the table, brushing the dark locks out of her eyes. “You okay?”

                “Uh-huh,” he mumbled. He bobbed his head more times than necessary.

                “Rough day so far?”

                “Yeah, maybe a little, or… I don’t know. Just lots of… work.”

                “Ahh, I see,” she said. He couldn’t tell if he’d convinced her. “You’ll get the hang of it. I’m sure.”

                “Thanks,” he gulped, knowing full well that this particular problem wasn’t going to be solved with all the arithmetic in the world.

                Erica’s ring finger nudged into her brother’s thigh. She speared another mouthful of salad with her opposite hand and held the dressing-drenched leaves aloft, looking down at him with eyebrows cast up.

                Of course she didn’t buy it as easily as Lena.

                “What’s up?” he said brightly, attempting to steer her thoughts in another direction than suspicion.

                “You haven’t eaten a single bite of that, twerp,” she commented dryly as she placed the salad bite atop her tongue.

                “Yeah, yeah, I, um… maybe I’m just not-”

                “You can put it back on the plate if you want,” she said, prodding the tines of her fork at the squishy rim of her brother’s rejected meal.

                “Fine by me,” he said. He pressed upward on the base of the vegetative bowl, jamming the cherry tomato into the spears of his sister’s towering utensil. Abruptly she pulled it away and nibbled it over her teeth until its rubbery flesh was punctured with a squelch. She shrugged.

                “You want something else?” Lena ask. She picked up her spoon and began rummaging through the half-eaten array of her lunch. “I’ve got… half a tuna fish sandwich left… couple carrot sticks… peanut butter… hard-boiled egg… what do you think, anything sound good?”

                “I think I’m all right. Thanks, though,” he said with a wave of his hand.

                “Okay,” she sighed. Peering over the room, she made eye contact with another friend and excused herself quietly, placing her napkin over the tray and leaving Peter and Erica alone at their end of the cafeteria table.

                “You’re gonna wish you ate something when you’re in P.E.” Erica placed her fork back in the salad and rested both hands on either side of her tray. “I mean, probably. Do they even, like… make you do anything in there?”

                “Sometimes,” Peter said. “I wish they did more.”

                “I don’t,” Erica said.

                “Aw, gee,” the boy smarmed. “I didn’t think you ca-”

                “I don’t care. But if you twist an ankle kicking a marble or whatever it is she has you do in there, then guess who Mom’s gonna make carry you everywhere for the next month?”

                “I don’t think you’d have to worry about that,” Peter said drearily. “I’m sure you’d have help from-”

                “Right,” Erica grunted, not even needing to hear Jessica’s name. She rolled her eyes and rested her chin on an upturned fist. “Just when I think you’re the one who wins the award for annoying me the most, she goes and takes it away.”

                “Sorry to disappoint.” Peter sat up from the tray and ambled between his sister’s milk carton and a cup of peach slices. He peeked into the syrupy river around the golden fruit, spying his distorted reflection.

                “Whatever,” Erica mumbled.

                “Seriously, do you… know what I should do about her?” Peter questioned, finding himself slowly but surely encircling the real issue of the day that went far beyond his sister’s overprotectiveness and more into the territory of the possible improperly medicated young artist in his class with a penchant for the bare human form.

                “Uh… you’re asking me? I thought she gave you too much attention before.”

                “I figured,” Peter chuckled. Maybe he didn’t have to ask about Mandy at all; maybe there was a shortcut somewhere here where no one got hurt or was any the wiser. “But, I mean…  what do you think I’m supposed to do? To… you know… make her stop thinking about me like I’m helpless and stuff. To just go back to normal?”

                “Oh, that’s easy,” Erica said brightly. She forked another clump of lettuce. “Go back in time and don’t let her weird dancer friend stand on you in her sock like a weirdo creep. Problem solved.”

                Peter couldn’t help but grin at his sister’s brand of bedside tact.

                “I’m serious,” he said. Taking a last lap between the giant amenities on Erica’s lunch tray, he made his way back to the edge where her idle hand still rested in a soft fist.

                The seventeen-year-old rolled her eyes again at the doll-sized complainer beside her plate.

                “I don’t know! It’s Jessica. You’re gonna need to give her electroshock, probably,” Erica said. She twirled the lettuce-flowered fork against her lips, but didn’t open them to take a bite. Her opposite hand, still poised at the edge of the tray, drummed on the plastic cusp. “C’mon. What’s the deal? What are you bugging about?”

                “Huh?”

                “We’ve gone over this before. I know that dumb nerd look on your face when you’re worried about something. And I know you’re not really asking me what to do about Jessica. You and I both know you’d know how to handle her better than me, even if she can’t just pick me up like she can with you.”

                Busted.

                “It really is!” Peter defended. He forcefully perked up, standing at attention beside his sister’s hand. “I’m tired now, too, since she doesn’t like me sleeping on top of my pillow anymore in case I roll off and die in my sleep. There’s nothing else.”

                “Uh-huh. Look me in the eye and say that,” Erica demanded sarcastically. Her hand rose from the tray, palm turned into Peter’s back, and tipped him in the direction of her broadened iris.

                “There’s nothing else.” He didn’t blink.

                “Right. As if you’d win a single round of poker with that face.” Clearly unconvinced, the girl’s hand still disappeared from its place against Peter’s back. The salad lump disappeared between her lips and was shredded to bits within seconds as she glowered at him with her usual blend of disdain and affectionate tolerance for his presence.

                “Like you know how to play cards,” the boy snickered, turning his back just far enough to let his sister think it was safe to crack half a smile.

                He knew very well he wasn’t off the hook for long. It was just too bad Erica’s time travel advice couldn’t work on Mandy, either, because he knew that would make a far more valuable fourth-dimension mission.

                “…and I think we’ll call that last equation a wrap,” Ms. Tritter announced with that winsomely gleaming smile of hers. Crossing a four, she let the chalk stub land in the metal aisle beneath the blackboard and clapped the dust away from her palms as she looked out over the class. She squinted at the clock. “What’ve we got, eight minutes to the bell? Go ahead and go early. Get your books, talk to your friends in the hallways about math… you know, the normal thing.”

                A muted whoop broke out over the room as the students dumped their belongings into gaping backpacks and slung them over shoulders in one move. In almost no time flat, every chair was empty. Getting to leave early was a treat not often granted.

                Unfortunately, it was one Peter didn’t see himself quite getting to enjoy as he watched his monumental peers filing past his island of a desk. He smiled to himself, tapping the pencil tip against the heel of his hand as the low roar of gossip exited the room along with the rest of the students.

                “Sorry you can’t take advantage of the extra minutes off,” Ms. Tritter called to Peter with genuine jovial remorse as she hunched over her desk at the front of the room, sliding papers into folders. “But I’d be glad to give you a ride to English ahead of time if you’d like?”

                “That’s… all right,” Peter coughed. It seemed logical to minimize the time spent in a room with Sharon directly behind him, probably actively scheming on his very existence. “Thanks, though.”

                “Just wanna hang out for a minute, then?”

                “Sure.”

                “Okay.” She flashed him another warm smile and tossed her blonde curls as she crossed the room with a spring in her step.

                Peter nodded to himself, turning the page of his algebra notebook in his lap, and released a weary huff. The pencil tip was worn nearly to a graphite club, hardly useful now for sketching legible type. It was all right for his math notes, but if he had to write out anything for class later to be turned, he’d have to let his mother scan it onto the computer for submission, and his teachers would be forced to decipher the clunky scrawl of letters that smeared into one another like silver paint.

                He let the pencil guide his hand. A few strokes and he had a face, circular and distant like a dropped coin in the center of the page. Next came the hair, rough as it was, then the shirt, extending down toward the base, giving way to legs, then the ends of the dangling arms: hands, fingers extended, reaching, growing larger.

                Peter’s throat turned inside out and stretched up past his gullet as he realized he’d drawn a shadowy specter of a girl, standing above, only becoming indistinct the closer he came to her face. It wasn’t on purpose. All he was doing was sketching a human form, thankfully clothed, but nonetheless above him. He’d drawn countless pictures in his life, especially in his youth, always of a perfectly proportioned body that suggested his perception of humanity was no different, even if he had to look every man, woman, and child straight in the ankle.

                At once he became aware of his stunning bombshell of a math instructor towering above in her form-fitting black sweater, sliding backwards into the chair just in front of his table so she could face him. That cheerful glint in her eyes carried through even past the thick rim of her glasses, the sheen of her hair and the flash of her white teeth in contest with one another. Softly she inched forward, leaning her chin in nearer to the desk until her lowest murmur could be heard by the tiny student.

                In a mad flurry, Peter ruffled through several more pages of the notebook, accidentally tearing a couple in half. He was just a little more than absolutely positive that she’d gotten a look at the picture hew drew.

                Perfect.

                “Let me guess,” she said sweetly, her voice dipping even lower on the off-chance of prying ears through the wall. There wasn’t a trace of malice or pretention in her honeyed syllables. “Girl troubles?”

                Peter’s lip hung open just wide enough to look conspicuous. He gazed up at his teacher’s pretty bespectacled countenance, feeling an unavoidable and incriminating crease forming in his forehead.

                She wasn’t wrong, exactly.

                “I don’t mean to sound like I’m trying to embarrass you. I’m sure that’s the exact last thing you want to hear one of your teachers bring up,” Ms. Tritter snickered, hiding her face behind a hand as she ran her fingers into the wild mane of her hair.

                “No, it’s okay,” Peter sighed. He felt his cheeks burning. “I’m just, um… having a weird day.”

                “Oh?”

                “Yeah,” he said. Was he really about to spit this out? “She… this girl, I mean, that I know… she may have… drawn a picture… of me.”

                “Oh!” his teacher repeated, this time with the proper upward inflection. Immediately her entire face was infused with sunshine. She crossed her hands together on the edge of Peter’s desk, folding her elegant fingers one over the other. Subconsciously, Peter’s baser instinct couldn’t help but force him to notice a lack of a ring on her fourth digit, which only made him blush all the more.

                “Y-Yeah,” he muttered at last, recomposing. He forced himself to make eye contact. “Isn’t that something?”

                “Well, I’ll say it is. I think that’s a sign that she really cares about you. She must think about you a lot,” Ms. Tritter offered.

                God, I hope not, Peter’s skull echoed silently.

                “What’s her name?” the woman questioned, immediately winking. “Just kidding, of course. I wouldn’t try to get you to tell me anything like that. You know that, right?”

                “Ha-ha. I know,” he mumbled wryly. “I don’t mind, really.” Frankly, he was the opposite of embarrassed to let her know about Lisa. Who wouldn’t want to hear about Lisa? The girl was an angel.

                The girl who’d drawn that picture, though, was a much different story. He doubted anyone really wanted to hear about Mandy, except maybe a hypothetically very in-debt psychoanalyst.

                “Anyway, I can tell you have a lot on your mind and you don’t really feel like sharing your whole personal life details with some random lady who teaches you fractions,” Ms. Tritter continued. She opened her hands again, unclasping her fingers as she held them gently out in Peter’s direction. “I just want you to know, if you ever run into a situation… about anything… girls, grades, whatever… where you could just use a pair of ears to bend, I’ve got your back. Do kids still say that? That they’ve got each other’s back?”

                “Yeah,” Peter said, managing a real smile in the midst of his Mandy-flavored turmoil. “I’m pretty sure they do say that.” He stepped up as the bell rang. His teacher’s expansive, creamy palms stretched forward happily to receive him into their soothing grasp.