Uncontrollably Fond

ONE

Chapter 1

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This beginning starts with an end.

It's the kind of end that sends every foreboding thought shivering down your spine, the kind of end that's more heart-breaking than a "let's just be friends," the kind of end that screams: "it's the end of the world as we know it!" at the top of its lungs.

It's final exams week.

It's calm before the storm in the cramped study hall, the air laced in with anxiety that eats at what little knowledge the students have. A chill runs across the high walls, and it isn't because of the air conditioning―the blasted thing hasn't worked since the first day of school, though none of the students would know because most of them are here for the first time, like Lisa, first year in college.

It's the age-old dread that haunts the students, hanging over their too-heavy heads in constant threat. It shouldn't feel like a suspense-slash thriller movie, but it does.

If everyone wasn't so busy sweating bullets out of heat and stress they would notice the picture they paint; all the windows are open wide, letting sunlight dance on messy table-tops as chirping lullaby sings in the air. The room is filled with swirling particles of dust, highlighted by streamlines of light that hits every curve and line of their features just right.

Stacks of books loom over them, encased in wooden shelves that shut them inside their chaotic paradise. No one notices the beautiful contradiction they take part in, their anxiety obviously warring the room's peace as the clock tick, tick, ticks.

No one except Lisa, that is, though she'd argue and write a hundred page paper for you about how she is a no one if you ask about it. So please don't.

Lisa's eyes rake over the room, drinking the scene in. There's a girl over by the back muttering curses a mile a minute about how her mother will decapitate her head if she doesn't pass Calculus, and a friend seated beside her is trying to drown out the negativity with earphones blasting some indie rock band as he memorizes articles of the Constitution along with hums of indistinct lyrics.

A table over, a boy is slumped over his Biology textbook, eyes peeled wide open as his brain tells him how doomed he is with every synonym he could possibly think of. Every table in the temporary refuge is littered with crumpled papers, worn books, and lifeless bodies, sunlight glaring at students in hopes of bleeding some knowledge into them. The students are in varying degrees of sleeplessness, some running on caffeine while others are just flat out asleep on top of the desks.

To anyone it would look depressing, but to Lisa it's the funniest thing she has seen all year.

She snickers as she pulls up an empty chair to sit in, and some four-eyed girl glares at her noise.

Whoops.

The slow extinction of the college population really shouldn't be that funny, but Lisa keeps sniggering anyway, because her no-sleep-yet self apparently finds everything funny. She feels both drunk on tiredness and sober on awareness, the two blending in together so well that she has now given herself a massive headache.

Lisa hasn't noticed yet, but in a table across her sits Andrew. He hasn't noticed yet either, as he busies himself with nibbling on the highlighter cap trapped between his lips, eyes straining at the practical foreign words staring back up at him from his Economics textbook.

It's funny because once upon a time they breathed in each other's airspace; when they were together they couldn't not notice each other, and when they were over the same fact still held. Now, one year later after their break up, they are missing each other, both literally―as in, "I didn't see you there, and no, I'm not playing coy"―and metaphorically―as in, "I think of you more often than I would ever admit." Still, they didn't notice and later they'll interpret that in different crazy and funny ways, because while people tend to be weird Andrew and Lisa breaks the scale.