Your palms reside in your violin case. It requires opening, and the instrument inside it needs adjusting in five fast seconds before he gets the first chair. It’s yours, but he’s going to take it if you don’t get there first. His name’s Oliver, but you didn’t know that at the time.
Palpitations in your heart are faster than the steps of this boy.
It’s too late.
He begins to play his personal sheet music. In your seat.
When you see his profile, his eyes plunge daggers into your traits that you wished you hadn’t had at the time. The flick of his hand at the bow reveals that your 5th-grade heart is not feeling jealousy.
You want to say something to him, but a force holds you back. It's the glimpse of his Austrian hair and heritage that caught your attention-- but you haven’t realized it. Not just yet.
Though you can’t process his face, you can see something in his posture; an arch of self-absorption and self-esteem. It hauls your focus at the same beat of the metronome that Mr. Finnegan plays. His music suddenly touches you, one seat behind.
Two years gone. He sits on the other side of the Algebra 1 classroom. It’s a graveyard when the bell rings. Some kids come back from the dead when they leave every day.
You don’t.
Oliver is directly in front of you, his eyes are now clear. And you think his motives are too. Just another boy in the class with a piercing stare and not a spark of female sense.
You pay closer attention to him and notice his eyes aren’t only daggers. They’re swords.
You can’t resist but to tell someone “he’s the type of person in a work office that just looks at you because he doesn’t like you and thinks he’s better than you even though you and him are in the position,” you repeat your assumption of him to more than one person, “maybe he gets a higher salary, though.”
Mrs. The Devil put him next to you in the second marking period.
Your cheeks turn hot red at the sight of him placing a fat binder, where its spine conveyed the hand-written word; Mathematics. He also lays down a pile of superhero pencils inside a German Learning School pencil case. It catches your attention for a second, but not too long because you have to write the Do Now.
At the end of class, you eavesdrop on him and his friends. He tells them how he’s fluent in German but takes Spanish. It reminds you of yourself since you’re fluent in Spanish and you take German.
As the marking period progresses, Oliver speaks to you once every class. It can be a conversation about two-step equations. Or It could have been something he whispered to you, so that you glance back and smile at the sight of him leaning over to you.
The partner quiz comes up one day, and as every boy asks another boy, and every girl asks another girl, he asks you in a quiet tone, “So…do you want to be partners?”
You disclaim that you will be the reason that you and he will get a lower grade than his high standards.
But to the gaze of your eyes, his lips curve. Now, you can see that his eyes aren’t daggers with blood-drenched blades, except, an ocean reflecting the light from the sky.
He replies in a calm manner, “If you fail, we’ll fail together.
R.S Pizarro is a Hispanic teen writer from New Jersey. She has won a Gold Key from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Emerging Artist Playwriting Contest in her community's ICS Theatre. R.S Pizarro has also been published on TeenInk and will be published in the TeenWritersProject quarterly lit mag this summer.
