Uncontrollably Fond

THREE

Chapter 3

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Sometimes the silence hums, and sometimes it screams at the top of its lungs. Now it so happens that it behaves like the latter, and it may or may not be driving Lisa slightly insane. She drums her fingers against her textbook just to fill in the empty gaps of nothingness, whilst staring at a particular tricky cosine problem that doesn't want to solve itself.

A table over, Andrew furrows his brows because Lisa is being too distracting, with her annoying tapping and annoying lip biting and annoying squinty eyes and annoying slight, just slightly, mussed hair.

You would think, with how much he prides himself in having a plethora of words in his arsenal, that he can think of some adjective instead of 'annoying'. But he always has―and he suspects he forever will, no thanks to his treacherous brain―lost a billion brain cells with every second he spent staring at Lisa.

She's still his damn kryptonite, even if he's no Superman.

The school bell suddenly shatters the carefully constructed silence in the fortress of crammers and over-achievers. Shoulders jump, eyes jolt, and hands twitch at the blaring abomination playing some kind of wordless Christmas carol―a-not-so-helpful reminder that the holidays are just around the corner of the bottomless pit of hell dubbed "final examinations."

The air thickens, as if every nerve ending in the room has become so tightly sprung, stretching further and further with every tick, tick, tick of the clock. It feels like the final countdown of their miserable student life as the level of dread rises up a couple more notches.

The degrees of misery are measured in the angles of bodies slumped over tables, scattered haphazardly around the room like the books that are cracked wide open, bleeding information into brains that are too full on either panic, hunger, or both.

Lisa would normally find it hilarious, but it hits her like a speeding truck that she has less than twenty-four hours to digest about twenty chapters worth of math. She also would normally whine and groan and rant and all those normal things student do to let out some steam on unsuspecting social networking sites, but she suspects calling her professors names won't really do much to make her feel better, what with majority of her frustrations sitting right in front of her.

If she fails tomorrow's exam, she's blaming it on Andrew. If he fails tomorrow's exam, he's blaming it on Lisa.

Andrew is just torn. Half of him wants to tell Lisa to shut up (never mind that she's not actually saying anything), while the other half wants to ask her to explain this stupid graph to him. Following that line of thought comes some very unwanted memories of her tutoring him back when they were a couple.

Lisa and Andrew are busy trying to look busy when someone's phone rings. The small room transforms into a pit of vipers hushing the offender, and when the ringing doesn't stop, the hissing evolves into a kind of growling that would put the lions in Africa to shame.

Lisa grins at the analogy until she realizes that she's the dead meat in the equation.

She forgot to put her phone on silent (another first).

She digs into her bag, but she's never been a neat freak like Andrew so she doesn't immediately find her phone buried in the deeper recesses of books and feminine products. She can feel her cheeks flushing from embarrassment, because "I Like Big Butts" is looping really, really loudly, and curses her room mate, Reina, for calling.

Andrew doesn't normally laugh at people's misery but this in front of his is pure gold. This is Lisa losing her composure and getting flustered, which happens as rarely as catching a Legendary Pokemon with a single Pokeball left in your arsenal. Something in his gut stirs and he blames it on his room mate's cooking. It's definitely not his inner self telling him that he used to be the one to make her flush like that.