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TO THE SOUND OF Professor McGonagall's stringent voice ringing precise as freshly painted nails tapping against marble tiles, Sawyer colours in a blood-black sky to her doodled comic at the bottom of her Transfiguration textbook, vaguely cognisant of the soft scratching of Oliver's quill as he takes notes diligently. It's not that she's bored of the subject. In theory, Transfiguration was the least dreadful subject in Sawyer's opinion. Her attention span just seems to have collapsed twenty minutes after the class had begun—a deboned, spineless creature made of phantom skin left on the ground to be stepped on and walked over.
Life crawls forward. Slow and stagnant, encased in a glass chrysalis with the light frozen in stasis, watching through the cryogenic lens of falling dust as the world revolves on its axis, as people pass in periphery—it feels more like the prelude to an unknown future rather than the present. Feels too static, holding down the fort on your own head, keeping the light on the torch you used to want to snuff out. But one blink at the wrong moment and you're suddenly somewhere else in a different time surrounded by strange faces in the hallways, on the Quidditch pitch, looking back at you in the mirror. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Moving from Point A to Point B. Life is about searching for something, they say. Everybody's always puzzling together the pieces life serves them, constantly sifting through keys and locks and broken clocks for clues leading them to a grand purpose. Some people search and search and never find what they've spent their whole lives looking for. Some people search and search and still don't even know what they're chasing down. It's all static. All this waiting. The worst part is that it's not supposed to be this way and yet it is. They call it structure.
Sawyer is starting to lose feeling in her legs when a scrap piece of paper drops onto the corner of her desk, over her own parchment bearing sloppily scribbled notes she'd stopped taking halfway through Professor McGonagall's lecture. She stares at it for an endless second, unmoving, before slanting Oliver a blank look. Still pretending to be enraptured by McGonagall's lecture (though Sawyer knows it's really Quidditch and the many statistics and game plans swamping his mind rather than Human Transfiguration incantations), Oliver doesn't look back at her, but the slight quirk of his lips is all the indication he gives that he knows she's looking. For a moment longer, she keeps staring, expecting an explanation, but he keeps pretending not to notice.
It's been weeks since their first class together as desk mates and neither of them have crossed the no-man's land of silence. Until now.
Reluctantly, Sawyer drags her gaze back to the piece of paper. It's blank. She taps the tip of her wand against it, and, suddenly, ink bleeds across the paper. Lines form, four of them cross-hatching over each other. Nine spaces. A solid ring of ink makes a circle in the centre of the grid. Words in Oliver's neat handwriting begin to take form beneath it. Puzzled, Sawyer stares at it longer, fighting to hold down the moving letters, the writhing ink—projected not by magic, but by her own dyslexic brain—until she got the message.
