Five Meters

The class I’d been placed in was a horror. I didn’t belong there and nobody wanted me there either—that mutual indifference was at least honest. What kept me from losing my mind was knowing I’d see her in the break. In class my phone would buzz every ten minutes and I knew it was her. That was the entire arithmetic of the day.

My phone bill wasn’t going to survive it. Neither was my face—the permanent frown was becoming a fixture. In the first week someone had already gone to bat for me and won me the right to switch back to my old class. I turned it down. Couldn’t leave my best friend behind, the one who’s there no matter what, who does everything with you. But we’re not us without being relentless, so we got to work.

We hassled every teacher in every class. We showed up to the parents’ evening just to hassle them there too. We told them we were being bullied, that nobody liked us. That turned out not to be entirely accurate—not only did the other students warm to us eventually, but we ended up with three teachers actively competing to have us in their class. We only wanted the one. Especially me. Not because of the phone bill, not because of the frown lines. I wanted to be near her.

And it worked—this thing everyone had told us was completely impossible, rewriting the class registers and all the bureaucratic grief that comes with it, actually happened. We’re back. The coursework is real again; in the other class we’d been writing pointless accounting exercises in 24-point type in tiny boxes, which isn’t an exaggeration, while actual subject matter went untaught. Now we’re at the computers. And the best part: she’s five meters away from me, and everything is different. You have to try again, find things worth saying. You feel like a teenager. I’m completely gone on her.