Let It Be

Chapter 2

The next week, I found myself in an all too familiar situation: staring around the cafeteria blankly. 

I was planning on sitting with Mina and Dylan again; I was starting to enjoy them and they were kind and inclusive of me. They were funny, I'd never had friends that were so interesting and vivacious. Honestly, it was exciting.

But that particular afternoon, the high school from the town over had sent their Academic Club over for a meeting. The place was jammed pack. I simply couldn't find a seat.

I was about to give up and go visit the library instead, feeling so very pathetic and alone, when I finally spotted an empty chair. I started to make my way over to it, but hesitated when I saw who was sitting next to it.

Sam Durand, Hartford High's very own reject.

This is what I didn't understand: Sam was average height and lean without resembling a bean pole, with dark hair and an expensive white car. He seemed perfectly normal, but everyone avoided him like the plague. 

Sure, he was quiet and always alone. Sure he spent every spare minute of the day casually reading. And, sure, Dylan had told me that Sam was older than us all, already nineteen while the rest of us seniors were seventeen or eighteen, and nobody knew why.

He wasn't the dark, brooding type of alone, he was just the pull-up-a-seat-and-disappear-into-a-novel type. He looked and dressed perfectly normal, with normal shirt and dark jeans and Vans. He had that clean-shaven, geek chic thing going, with the way he always had a paperback tucked in his back pocket and those trendy glasses. 

The only real things that set him apart were that he was always alone, looked slightly older and more mature, and he always had this set in stone bored expression on his face. Like he was annoyed with something, but that something was some part of regular life that was always going to happen, and he wasn't pleased with the way it was going so far.

But despite the fact that he was extremely handsome, everyone left Sam alone. And I mean he was quite handsome. He definitely scored on the top five most-attractive guys at the school, and I felt so lame when the weak butterflies set off in my stomach every time I saw him. 

They were weak butterflies, so it wasn't too bad. But still. I wasn't used to it and didn't know what to do with it.

I sat by him in three classes. Three. He was usually planted, as excluded from people as possible, by the empty desks in the back of the class. Voilà. 

I hadn't gotten any words out of him yet, though I hadn't really made an effort to chat with him. He graced me only with brief gestures and expressions when extremely necessary that made it seem like it was giving him pain to dole out any sort of attention to me.

Oh well. It beat going to the library.

Sort of.

Sam stared at me as I pulled out the chair next to him, plopped down with my backpack and took out my usual soda. Was that bewilderment I saw behind those glasses?

"What do you think you are doing?" he asked, the first words he spoke to me after the some forty hours we'd spent sitting next to each other. 

But it was the fact that he had a slight accent threw me ever farther off. What was that, French? Why would Sam have a French accent?

"Um," I said, trying not to let him see how intimidated I felt by his stare. Now that he was looking at me, I could see his warm brown eyes, making me flustered with their beauty. "Sitting."