Dancing Around // peter parker

36

Raindrops were slow. The first few at least. I watched them from my locker in the main hall, my math textbook in my arms. Cindy blocked my view just as it began to hit harder. She shoved her phone into my face, a grin behind the small technology.

"We're in," she said.

I shut my locker. "In what?"

She trailed behind me as we fell into line with all the others. "The game show." She passed her phone. It was an email that said congratulations on it.

I hand it back to her. "It's fake."

"It's not."

"How can you be so sure?" I tried to escape into my next class, but she held my wrist, holding me back. She dragged me to the side of the hall.

"I called. It's official and everything. We're going to get you know who you know what." She looked happy.

I sighed. "Okay, fine. When is it?"

"This Saturday."

"Why so soon?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Maybe they needed someone to fill in."

"Fine. This Saturday. We'll get you know who you know what." She lifted her fist up. I met it with my own and watched as she hurried off to her class. I really didn't want to do the game show, but I was afraid if I had said no, Cindy and I wouldn't have anything else to talk about. We didn't share any classes and didn't sit together during lunch. Without soccer, what else would we do? Talk about her coats?

I walked into my class just as the bell above me rang. I calmly walked towards my seat, ignoring Al as I passed him. I placed my textbook down first on my desk, before sitting in my chair. It always squeaked when I sat in it, so I tried my best not to move.

Our teacher walked up to the front, a smile on her face. She clapped her hands a few times before saying, "Alright, class, I have some news. Rather it's good or bad, that is up to you. Due to personal reasons, we now only have one teacher teaching the subject. You're looking at her. Starting today, we will have to merge classes from the past teacher, so everyone make room."

I rolled my eyes, looking at the empty seat next to me. The classroom already felt so suffocated for me, now there was going to be more people in the small space? It was like life was playing a cruel joke on me.

The door opened and new classmates walked in. All either looking nervous or giggling wildly. I placed my head down against my desk. Unlike everyone else who was around me, I didn't care who came in.

"Alright, everyone please find a seat. There should be plenty," the teacher said. I could hear chairs and desks moving around me, people chatting with one another. Then I heard someone plop next to the seat beside me. I lifted my head and saw Michelle sitting there. "Oh, hey," she said. She looked around us before shrugging her shoulders. "I guess we're desk buddies."

"I guess so." She pulled out a book from her bag, setting it on her desk. It was an old novel rather than our textbook. "Where's your textbook?" I asked.

"Oh, I don't need it."

"Then how do you follow along?"

"I don't have trouble."

"Oh." I placed my head back down on my desk, trying to find a comfortable place to rest on. The bulky book made it difficult for me to do that. I sighed, sitting up forward. I looked beside me to Michelle, to see she was already reading her book.

"Are you good at math?" I asked her.

"Yeah, I'm good at math."

"I'm not," I said. "I mean, I don't suck, but I need to study a lot just to pass the test."

"Oh."

"Yeah." I looked around us to see everyone else was talking to each other. Did I miss something? "What are we supposed to be doing?" I asked her.

"We are supposed to work on this sheet of paper with our seat buddies." She raised a piece of paper, showing me. When the heck did we get that? "It's okay, I can do it all on my own since you said you're not good at math." She placed down the sheet.

I grabbed it from her desk, looking at the questions. "No, even if it's hard. We can do it together."

She looked from her book to me, before looking back at her book. "Okay." She placed what looked like a detention slip in between the pages of her book as a bookmark, before shutting it. She looked at me. "Do you want to write our names?"

"Sure." I started to write her name, but she stopped me.

"Actually, it's just MJ now, but I guess you should still write out my full name."

"What? Really?"

She nodded her head. "It sounds cool, right?"

"Very." I wrote down Michelle 'MJ'. "What's your last name?"

"Jones."

I wrote Jones down afterward. Then I wrote my name. Turned out, MJ was very good at math. The time it took for me to read the problems, she already had solved them. I felt like she was lightyears ahead of me. I kept making her breakdown each problem and how she solved it so quickly. We were on the third problem when I heard Flash's whining in front of me. I looked in his direction to see he had pulled a chair next to Al and his partner's desk. I didn't even know he was in this class.

"I don't have a partner though," he told our teacher.

The teacher placed her hands on her waist, looking around the classroom, before smiling. "Ah, there, see, Peter doesn't have a partner either. Go sit next to him," she said.

My heart stopped. I looked to where the teacher was starting to see Peter in the back of the room, sitting by an empty desk. "Peter was in your class?" I asked MJ.

She nodded her head. "Yeah."

"I didn't see him come in."

"I think he came in late. Had to use the bathroom."

"Oh. He doesn't have a partner," I told her.

She looked back towards him as well, before looking towards the front. "He does now." I looked to where she was referring to. Flash walked from where he was to the back of the class, dragging his feet behind him the entire time. He plopped into the seat next to Peter, immediately putting his chin on the desk, completely uninterested.

Flash's brown eyes met mine for a moment. He raised up his eyebrows like he was greeting me with the gesture. I nodded my head before my eyes traveled next to him, to Peter. Peter was looking down at his desk. He moved his hand through his hair before looking up. I saw his coffee eyes again. I looked away.

I looked back down on the sheet of paper. I paid extra attention to the problem, letting every word sink into me, yet none of it was set once I had moved on. I didn't know what it meant. No, I did. It meant nothing. It couldn't mean anything. We were just in the same class, a few seats apart, but that didn't hide the fact that we were miles away from each other.

The semester would be over in no time, I just had to keep my eyes upfront.