Scene02
Scene 2¶
Group Assignment¶
School Corridor, Late Afternoon
[Celeste]
By the time Mr. Greeves started writing GROUP TASK on the board, the room had already made its decision.
It wasn’t an official decision, not one you could point to in a rulebook, but it lived in the way chairs angled away from the held-back boy, in the little coughs people used to cover their discomfort, in the speed at which everyone suddenly found the floor fascinating. I watched it happen with the same detached interest I’d watch a flock of birds turn as one body: instinct, cowardice, and the lazy relief of belonging.
And then—late, ridiculous—the boy himself came into focus. Not the role. Not the cautionary tale the room had agreed on. The person.
A quick flash: paper towels. A sink. Those startled doe eyes tipping up to meet mine.
Oh.
The wrong place, wrong door lad.
I’d stood in the ladies’ and looked straight at him, and my brain hadn’t filed him as anyone from class because in class he wasn’t anyone you recognised—he was just a space people avoided. That was the trick of it: you can notice what a room does to someone without ever granting them the dignity of being properly seen.
And once you’ve seen someone properly, you can’t pretend you haven’t.
Mr. Greeves tapped the chalk like it owed him money. “Alright. You’ve all had your practice test. You’ve all had your feelings about your practice test. Today, you’re going to make something sensible out of it.”
A few kids chuckled. Not because it was funny — because it was safe.
“Pairs,” he said, underlining it twice. “Pick a question from the set. Solve it. Then produce a one-page explanation that someone else could follow. If you can’t explain it, you can’t do it.”
There was the usual scrape of chairs, the low panic of social arrangements. Everyone moved fast, because speed looked like confidence. I didn’t move. I didn’t need to. People came to me.
“Celeste, want to—” “Celeste, I saved you a—” “Celeste, I already have—”I gave them my polite face and none of my answer. My attention drifted to the back left, where Charlie sat. The boy of wrong place, wrong door. He wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t particularly strange. He just sat in a way that tried to be smaller than the desk allowed. He was... uncollected. Like a thing people had decided was worthless and therefore never bothered to look at properly. Thin. Shorter than most of the boys, which seemed to bother them more than it bothered him. His uniform shirt sat awkwardly on his frame — too big at the shoulders, too loose at the waist — as if it belonged to someone older and louder.
I knew I should have clocked him before, in the loo. I just never noticed him in class. Nobody did. The held-back boy. The one who re-did Year 11 because maths had eaten him alive the first time. People said it with the same tone they used for a failed appliance: still doesn’t work.
I felt a fleeting twinge of guilt. Just because of not having noticed it was the same lad.
Mr. Greeves said, “If you’re still unpaired in thirty seconds, I’ll pair you.”
That was the real threat. Not the task. Not the maths. Being seen as someone who had to be assigned.
Charlie’s eyes flicked around the room: quick, skittish, looking down as much as he looked around, not begging, but scanning. When he realised no one was going to volunteer themselves to be his partner, his mouth tightened in a way I recognised. It wasn’t anger. It was resignation borne of experience. He’d already accepted his lot to be humiliated by the teacher as well as rejected by his peers.
This almost certainly had happened to him before. In this class. By this teacher and classmates. And I had been there? And not noticed?
“Time,” Mr. Greeves said. “Right. Charlie—”
“Me,” I said, before he could finish the sentence.
The room’s attention snapped to me like elastic. You could feel it in the air—the sudden recalculation. It made me want to smile, but I didn’t. Power is best used as if you hardly notice you have it.
Mr. Greeves blinked. “Celeste?”
“I’m with Charlie.” Not: can I, not: would you mind, but a simple assertion, to affect a course correction of the reality he’d been about to create.
A few girls exchanged looks. One boy gave a tiny laugh, like I’d just made a joke he didn’t understand. Someone whispered, not quietly enough, “Why would you do that?”
I turned my head just enough for the whisperer to know I’d heard. I didn’t even have to identify her. “Because I like getting full marks,” I said, pleasantly. “And I like working with people who don’t waste time showing off.”
Silence. A delicious, tidy silence.
Mr. Greeves recovered, puzzlement slowly fading from his face. “Alright then. Celeste and Charlie. Good.”
I walked my chair over without asking permission from the air. Charlie stared at me as if I’d sat down inside his head.
“You don’t have to do this...” he began timidly. I could read a powerful emotion in his voice and in his eyes: it's the girl from the loo! “I know.”
He blinked and swallowed hard. That lone word seemed to unsettle him more than reassurance would have. I placed my notebook on the desk between us and looked at the question set.
“Pick one.”
“I—” he began, and faltered. The page might as well have been written in smoke.
I watched him slowly collect himself and set himself to the task. He didn’t panic theatrically. He didn’t joke. He didn’t make excuses. He scanned. Not the way someone scans for answers, but the way someone scans for structure.
My eyes dropped to his own notebook as he moved it — careful, almost fussy, aligning the corners of the paper with the desk edge. I noticed his handwriting: neat, consistent, slanted slightly right, as if it had manners.
“You’re good at geometry, aren't you?”
His head came up sharply. “What?”
“Geometry. You're good at it. Your diagrams: very precise.”
He looked genuinely confused, as if the possibility of being observed outside his failures had never occurred to him. “I’m... okay, I guess.”
“You’re better than okay.” I tapped the question set. “Pick one with a diagram. A shape. Something that lives in space, not in a string of symbols.”
He hesitated, then pointed with his pencil. “This one. The triangle... with the angle bisector.”
“Good.” I nodded. “You do the diagram. Make it clean. Label it properly. I’ll do the algebraic part and write the explanation. Then you check me for logic. Deal?”
He stared at me. “You... trust me to check you?”
That was the real question. Not about maths. About hierarchy.
“I trust your eyes,” I replied. “They’re honest.”
His ears went faintly pink. Not in a flattered way — more like embarrassment at being assigned a virtue.
He bent over the page. His pencil moved and the triangle appeared with a crispness that felt almost calming. Clean lines. Honest angles.
While he worked, I listened to the classroom. The buzz of other pairs. The smugness of boys who’d paired up for safety, girls who’d paired up for comfort. I heard my name used in little asides, the way people taste words to see if they’re sweet.
Charlie drew his angle bisector and then paused, frowning.
“What?”
He pointed. “If you call that angle x... then this one has to be x too, because of the bisector. But the problem statement says this angle is thirty degrees, which means x is fifteen. Which means... your ratio is fixed.”
He said it softly, as if he expected to be corrected.
I looked where he pointed. He was right. The whole thing collapsed into a simple proportion. I felt a small, satisfied click in my chest. Not because he’d solved it. Because of what it meant: he was competent in a way nobody had bothered to find.
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s the spine of it.”
He glanced up at me, his hazel eyes quick, searching. “Why are you doing this?”
There it was. The suspicion. The defensive little gate he’d built, because people who were kind to him usually wanted something he couldn’t afford. I didn’t lie. I just chose the angle of truth.
“Because you’re being tested in the wrong language,” I said. “And I hate waste.”
His pencil hovered.
“Waste?” he echoed.
“Waste of ability,” I clarified. “Waste of time. Waste of people.” I kept my voice calm. “You’re not behind. You’re misallocated.”
He swallowed, and for a second his face did something raw, like he’d nearly believed me and it frightened him.
I leaned closer, just enough to make my next words private. “Also,” I added, “you’re going to owe me. Not like that. Practical.”
His shoulders stiffened. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I said, “I don’t do charity. I do investment.”
He stared at me, and this time there was something like understanding. Not full understanding. The first bud of it. Tiny. Alive.
Mr. Greeves wandered past. He glanced at our work, eyebrows lifting. “Good diagram,” he said, sounding surprised despite himself. “Nice and clean.”
Charlie’s hand tightened on the pencil, but he didn’t look up. He didn’t bask. He just kept working, as if praise was a thing that might vanish if he moved too fast.
When Mr. Greeves walked away, I said, lightly, “See? You exist. People just don’t like admitting it.”
Charlie’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one.
We finished the solution with no drama. I wrote the explanation in clear steps. He checked every transition like a quiet auditor. When we handed it in, Mr. Greeves nodded at me, then at him, as if he’d suddenly remembered Charlie was part of the room.
As the bell went, chairs scraped, and the flock of birds turned again. People flowed past us, and I watched Charlie do what he always did: shrink to let them.
I slid my notebook into my bag and stood.
“Charlie.”
He looked up, automatically attentive, as if my voice had become a cue.
“I’m doing something after graduation,” I continued, watching his reaction carefully. “A project. A place. It’s... not school.”
His eyes flicked away, then back. Hope, hidden under caution.
“I need people who can keep their head,” I said. “People who can do detail. People who can be invisible on purpose.”
He frowned slightly. “Why me?”
I stepped closer, so my answer didn’t have to compete with the corridor noise.
“Because you already know how to survive without applause,” I said. “And because if I don’t pick you, someone else will. Someone stupider.”
His breath caught—not romantic, not theatrical. Just the shock of being chosen without a joke attached to it.
He nodded once, careful, like he didn’t trust his own voice.
“Good,” I said. And then, because it mattered, because strategy without warmth is just cruelty, I softened it by a fraction. “I’ll tell you what it is tomorrow.”
He watched me walk away as if the hallway had quietly rearranged itself.
And it had.
Not because I’d saved him.
Because I’d placed him.
From DA¶
✨ Group Task ✨ [ Celeste ]
By the time Mr. Greeves started writing GROUP TASK on the board, the room had already made its decision.
It wasn’t an official decision, not one you could point to in a rulebook, but it lived in the way chairs angled away from the held-back boy, in the little coughs people used to cover their discomfort, in the speed at which everyone suddenly found the floor fascinating. I watched it happen with the same detached interest I’d watch a flock of birds turn as one body: instinct, cowardice, and the lazy relief of belonging.
And then—late, ridiculous—the boy himself came into focus. Not the role. Not the cautionary tale the room had agreed on. The person.
A quick flash: paper towels. A sink. Those startled doe eyes tipping up to meet mine.
Oh.
The wrong place, wrong door lad.
I’d stood in the ladies’ and looked straight at him, and my brain hadn’t filed him as anyone from class because in class he wasn’t anyone you registered—he was just a space people avoided. That was the trick of it: you can watch a room do things to someone without ever properly seeing them.
And once you’ve seen someone properly, you can’t pretend you haven’t.
Mr. Greeves tapped the chalk like it owed him money. “Alright. You’ve all had your practice test. You’ve all had your feelings about your practice test. Today, you’re going to make something sensible out of it.”
A few kids chuckled. Not because it was funny — because it was safe.
“Pairs,” he said, underlining it twice. “Pick a question from the set. Solve it. Then produce a one-page explanation that someone else could follow. If you can’t explain it, you can’t do it.”
There was the usual scrape of chairs, the low panic of social arrangements. Everyone moved fast, because speed looked like confidence. I didn’t move. I didn’t need to. People came to me.
“Celeste, want to—” “Celeste, I saved you a—” “Celeste, I already have—”
I gave them my polite face and none of my answer. My attention drifted to the back left, where Charlie sat. The boy of wrong place, wrong door.
He wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t particularly strange. He just sat in a way that tried to be smaller than the desk allowed. He was… uncollected. Thin. Shorter than most of the boys, which seemed to bother them more than it bothered him. His uniform shirt sat awkwardly on his frame — too big at the shoulders, too loose at the waist — as if it belonged to someone older and louder.
I should have recognised him in the loo. But no one recognises the boy the room has agreed not to look at.
The held-back boy. The one re-doing Year 11 because maths had eaten him alive the first time. People said it with the same tone they used for a failed appliance: still doesn’t work.
I felt a brief, sharp prick of guilt — not pity for him, exactly. Disgust at myself for being present all this time and letting the room decide what he was.
Mr. Greeves said, “If you’re still unpaired in thirty seconds, I’ll pair you.”
That was the real threat. Not the task. Not the maths. Being seen as someone who had to be assigned.
Charlie’s eyes flicked around the room: quick, skittish, scanning without pleading. When he realised no one was going to volunteer themselves to be his partner, his mouth tightened in a way I recognised. It wasn’t anger. It was resignation borne of experience — the calm acceptance of a humiliation he could already see coming.
This had happened to him before. In this class. With these people.
Mr. Greeves drew breath. “Right. Charles—”
“Me,” I said, before he could finish.
The room’s attention snapped to me like elastic. You could feel it in the air — the sudden recalculation. It made me want to smile, but I didn’t. Power is best used as if you hardly notice you have it.
Mr. Greeves blinked. “Celeste?”
“I’m with Charlie.” Not: can I, not: would you mind, but a simple statement — a course correction applied to reality.
A few girls exchanged looks. One boy gave a tiny laugh, like I’d just made a joke he didn’t understand. Someone whispered, not quietly enough, “Why would you do that?”
I turned my head just enough for the whisperer to know I’d heard. I didn’t even have to identify her. “Because I like getting full marks,” I said, pleasantly. “And I like working with people who don’t waste time showing off.”
Silence. Clean silence.
Mr. Greeves recovered, puzzlement fading. “Alright then. Celeste and Charles. Good.”
I dragged my chair across without asking permission from the air. Charlie stared at me as if I’d sat down inside his head.
“You don’t have to do this…” he began, timid and urgent — and I heard it underneath the words: it’s you. from the loo.
“I know,” I said. Not reassurance. Just truth.
He blinked, swallowed hard. That lone word seemed to unsettle him more than comfort would have. I set my notebook down between us and looked at the question set.
“Pick one.”
“I—” he started, and faltered. The page might as well have been written in smoke. I watched him collect himself in silence. He didn’t panic theatrically. He didn’t joke. He didn’t make excuses. He scanned — not the way someone scans for answers, but the way someone scans for structure.
My eyes dropped to his own notebook as he moved it — careful, almost fussy, aligning the corners of the paper with the desk edge. I noticed his handwriting: neat, consistent, slanted slightly right, as if it had manners.
“Your diagrams,” I said. “They’re precise.”
His head came up sharply. “What?”
“Geometry. You’re good at it.”
He looked genuinely confused, as if the possibility of being observed outside his failures had never occurred to him. “I’m… okay, I guess.”
“You’re better than okay.” I tapped the question set. “Pick one with a diagram. A shape. Something that lives in space, not in a string of symbols.”
He hesitated, then pointed with his pencil. “This one. The triangle… with the angle bisector.”
“Good.” I nodded. “You do the diagram. Make it clean. Label it properly. I’ll do the algebraic part and write the explanation. Then you check me for logic. Deal?”
He stared at me. “You… trust me to check you?”
That was the real question. Not about maths. About hierarchy.
“I trust your eyes,” I said. “They’re honest.”
His ears went faintly pink. Not flattered — embarrassed, like I’d assigned him a virtue he hadn’t agreed to wear.
He bent over the page. His pencil moved and the triangle appeared with a crispness that felt almost calming. Clean lines. Honest angles.
While he worked, I listened to the room — the buzz of other pairs, the smugness of boys who’d grouped for safety, girls who’d grouped for comfort. I heard my name in small asides, the way people taste words to see if they’re sweet.
Charlie drew his angle bisector and then paused, frowning.
“What?”
He pointed. “If you call that angle x… then this one has to be x too, because of the bisector. But the problem statement says this angle is thirty degrees. So x is fifteen. Which means… your ratio is fixed.”
He said it softly, as if he expected to be corrected.
I looked where he pointed. He was right. The whole problem collapsed into a simple proportion. A small, satisfied click happened in my chest — not because he’d solved it, but because it proved what I’d suspected: he was competent in a way nobody had bothered to find.
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s the spine of it.”
He glanced up at me, his hazel eyes quick, searching. “Why are you doing this?”
There it was. The defensive little gate. People who were kind to him usually wanted something — and he’d learned that wanting came with a price.
“If this is a joke,” he said very quietly, “I’m not in.”
I held his gaze. Didn’t sugar it. “It’s not a joke.”
His pencil hovered, suspended over the page like a test of whether I’d change my mind.
“You’re being tested in the wrong language,” I said. “And I hate waste.”
His brow pinched. “Waste?”
“Waste of ability. Waste of time.” I tapped the diagram. “You’re not behind. You’re misallocated.”
He swallowed, and for a second his face did something raw — like he almost believed me and that frightened him. I leaned closer, just enough to make my next words private.
“And if we work well together,” I added, “I’m going to offer you something after graduation.”
His shoulders stiffened. “What do you mean?”
“I mean work,” I said. “Training. A place where detail matters.” I let a beat pass, then added because it was the honest part: “It helps me too. I’m building something. I want people who can actually hold it together.”
He stared at me, and this time there was something like understanding. Not full understanding, but the first bud of it. Tiny. Alive.
Mr. Greeves wandered past. He glanced at our work, eyebrows lifting. “Good diagram,” he said, sounding surprised despite himself. “Nice and clean.”
Charlie’s hand tightened on the pencil, but he didn’t look up. He didn’t bask. He just kept working, as if praise was a thing that might vanish if he moved too fast.
When Mr. Greeves walked away, I said, lightly, “See? You exist. People just don’t like admitting it.”
Charlie’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one.
We finished the solution with no drama. I wrote the explanation in clear steps. He checked every transition like a quiet auditor. When we handed it in, Mr. Greeves nodded at me, then at him, as if he’d suddenly remembered Charlie was part of the room.
As the bell went, chairs scraped, and the flock of birds turned again. People flowed past us, and I watched Charlie do what he always did: shrink to let them.
I slid my notebook into my bag and stood.
“Charlie.”
He looked up, automatically attentive, as if my voice had become a cue.
“I’m doing something after graduation,” I continued, watching his reaction carefully. “A project. A place. It’s… not school.”
His eyes flicked away, then back. Hope, buried under caution.
“I need people who can keep their head,” I said. “People who can do detail. People who can be invisible on purpose.”
He frowned slightly. “Why me?”
I stepped closer, so my answer didn’t have to compete with the corridor noise.
“Because you already know how to survive without applause,” I said. “And because if I don’t pick you, someone else will — and they won’t care what it costs you.”
His breath caught — not romantic, not theatrical. Just the shock of being chosen without a joke attached to it. He nodded once, careful, like he didn’t trust his own voice.
“Good,” I said. And then, because it mattered — because strategy without warmth is just cruelty — I softened it by a fraction. “I’ll tell you what it is tomorrow.”
He watched me walk away as if the hallway had quietly rearranged itself.
And it had.
Not because I’d saved him.
Because I’d placed him — and left him room to decide whether he wanted to stay there.
Scene 27¶
✨ Group Task ✨¶
[Review, republish]
✨ Group Task ✨
[ Celeste ]
By the time Mr. Greeves started writing GROUP TASK on the board, the room had already made its decision.
It wasn’t an official decision, not one you could point to in a rulebook, but it lived in the way chairs angled away from the held-back boy, in the little coughs people used to cover their discomfort looking at him, in the speed at which everyone suddenly found the floor fascinating. I watched it happen with the same detached interest I’d watch a flock of birds turn as one body: instinct, cowardice, and the lazy relief of belonging.
And then... late, ridiculously late, the boy himself came into focus. Not the role or the cautionary tale the room had agreed on.
The person.
A quick flash: paper towels. A sink. Those startled doe eyes tipping up to meet mine.
Oh.
The wrong place, wrong door lad.
I’d stood in the ladies’ and looked straight at him, and my brain hadn’t filed him as anyone from class because in class he wasn’t anyone you registered: he was just a space people avoided. That's the thing: you can watch a room do things to someone without ever properly seeing that person.
And once you’ve seen someone properly, you can’t pretend you haven’t.
It wasn’t that he was ugly. He wasn’t particularly strange, just short and slight. Thin, shorter than most of the boys, which seemed to bother them more than it bothered him. His uniform shirt sat awkwardly on his frame — too big at the shoulders, too loose at the waist — as if it belonged to someone older and louder. He sat in a way that tried to be smaller than the desk allowed. He was... uncollected.
I should have recognised him in the loo. But no one recognises the boy the room has agreed not to look at. The held-back boy. The one re-doing Year 11 because algebra had eaten him alive the first time. People said it with the same tone they used for a failed appliance: still doesn’t work.
Mr. Greeves tapped the chalk like it owed him money. “Alright. You’ve all had your practice test. You’ve all had your feelings about your practice test. Today, you’re going to make something sensible out of it.”
A few kids chuckled. Not because it was funny, because it was what you did around Mr. Greeves.
“Pairs,” he said, underlining it twice. “Pick a question from the set. Solve it. Then produce a one-page explanation that someone else could follow. If you can’t explain it, you can’t do it.”
There was the usual scrape of chairs, the low panic of social arrangements. Everyone moved fast, because speed looked like confidence. I didn’t move. I didn’t need to. People came to me.
“Celeste, want to—” “Celeste, I saved you a—” “Celeste, I already have—”
I gave them my polite face and none of my answer. My attention drifted to the back left, where Charlie sat. The boy of wrong place, wrong door. I felt a brief, sharp prick of guilt — not pity for him, exactly. Disgust at myself for being present all this time and letting the room decide what he was.
Mr. Greeves spoke, louder this time. “If you’re still unpaired in thirty seconds, I’ll pair you.”
Even to me, that sounded like a threat. Not the task or the maths: being seen as someone who had to be assigned.
I watched Charlie’s eyes flick around the room: quick, skittish, scanning without pleading. When he realised no one was going to volunteer themselves to be his partner, his mouth tightened in a way I recognised. It wasn’t anger, but resignation. This was his lived experience. His face wore that calm acceptance of a humiliation he could see coming.
This had happened to him before. In this class. With these people.
Mr. Greeves drew breath. “Right. Charles—”
“Me,” I said quickly, before he could finish.
The room’s attention snapped to me like elastic. You could feel it in the air — the sudden recalculation. It made me want to smile, but I didn’t. Power is best used as if you hardly notice you have it.
Mr. Greeves blinked. “Celeste?”
“I’m with Charlie.” Not: can I, not: would you mind, but a simple statement, a course correction applied to reality. A few girls exchanged looks. One boy gave a tiny laugh, like I’d just made a joke he didn’t understand. Someone whispered, not quietly enough,
“Why would you do that?”
I turned my head just enough for the whisperer to know I’d heard.
“Because I like getting full marks,” I said, pleasantly. “And I like working with people who don’t waste time showing off.”
Silence. Clean silence.
Mr. Greeves recovered, puzzlement fading. “Alright then. Celeste and Charles. Good.”
I dragged my chair across without asking permission from the air. Charlie stared at me as if I’d sat down inside his head.
“You don’t have to do this...” he began, timid and urgent — and I heard it underneath the words: it’s you! From the loo.
“I know.”
He blinked, swallowed hard. That lone word seemed to unsettle him more than comfort would have. I set my notebook down between us and looked at the question set.
“Pick one.”
“I—” he started, and faltered. The page might as well have been written in smoke. I watched him collect himself in silence. He didn’t panic or joke or make excuses. He scanned: not the way someone scans for answers, but the way someone scans for structure. My eyes dropped to his own notebook as he moved it — careful, almost fussy, aligning the corners of the paper with the desk edge. I noticed his handwriting: neat, consistent, slanted slightly right, as if it had manners.
“Your diagrams,” I said. “They’re precise.”
His head came up sharply. “What?”
“Geometry. You’re good at it.”
He looked genuinely confused, as if the possibility of being observed outside his failures had never occurred to him. “I’m... okay, I guess.”
“You’re better than okay.” I tapped the question set. “Pick one with a diagram. A shape. Something that lives in space, not in a string of symbols.”
He hesitated, then pointed with his pencil. “This one. The triangle... with the angle bisector.”
“Good.” I nodded. “You do the diagram. Make it clean. Label it properly. I’ll do the algebraic part and write the explanation. Then you check me for logic. Deal?”
He stared at me. “You... trust me to check you?”
That was the real question. Not about maths. About hierarchy.
“I trust your eyes,” I said. “They’re honest.”
His ears went faintly pink. Not flattered: embarrassed, like I’d assigned him a virtue he hadn’t agreed to wear and bent over the page. His pencil moved and the triangle appeared with a crispness that felt almost calming. Clean lines. Honest angles.
While he worked, I listened to the room — the buzz of other pairs, the smugness of boys who’d grouped for safety, girls who’d grouped for comfort. I heard my name in small asides, the way people taste words to see if they’re sweet.
Charlie drew his angle bisector and then paused, frowning.
“What?”
He pointed. “If we call that angle x... then this one has to be x too, because of the bisector. But the problem statement says this angle is thirty degrees. So x is fifteen. Which means... the ratio is fixed.”
He said it softly, as if he expected to be corrected.
I looked where he pointed. He was right. The whole problem collapsed into a simple proportion. A small, satisfied click happened in my chest — not because he’d solved it, but because it proved what I’d suspected: he was competent in a way nobody had bothered to find.
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s the spine of it.”
He glanced up at me, his hazel eyes quick, searching.
“Why are you doing this?” There it was, the defensive little gate. People who were kind to him usually wanted something — and he’d learned that wanting came with a price. “If this is a joke,” he said quietly, “I’m not in.”
I held his gaze. “It’s not a joke.” His pencil hovered, suspended over the page like a test of whether I’d change my mind. “You’re being tested in the wrong language,” I said. “And I hate waste.”
His brow pinched. “Waste?”
“Waste of ability. Waste of time.” I tapped the diagram. “You’re not behind. You’re misallocated.”
He swallowed, and for a second his face did something raw — like he almost believed me and that frightened him. I leaned closer, just enough to make my next words private.
“If we work well together,” I added, “I’m going to offer you something after graduation.”
His shoulders stiffened. “What do you mean?”
“I mean work,” I said. “Proper work, with training. A place where detail matters.” I let a beat pass, then added because it was the honest part: “It would help me too. I’m building something. I want people who can actually hold it together.”
He stared at me, and this time there was something like understanding, the first bud of it. Tiny. Alive.
Mr. Greeves wandered past. He glanced at our work, eyebrows lifting. “Good diagram,” he said, sounding surprised despite himself. “Nice and clean.”
Charlie’s hand tightened on the pencil, but he didn’t look up. He didn’t bask. He just kept working, as if praise was a thing that might vanish if he moved too fast. After Mr. Greeves had walked away, I said, lightly,
“See? You exist. People just don’t like admitting it.”
Charlie’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one.
We finished the solution with no drama. I wrote the explanation in clear steps. He checked every transition like a quiet auditor. When we handed it in, Mr. Greeves nodded at me, then at him, as if he’d suddenly remembered Charlie was part of my team.
As the bell went, chairs scraped, and the flock of birds turned again. People flowed past us, and I watched Charlie do what he always did: shrink to let them. I slid my notebook into my bag and stood.
“Charlie.”
He looked up, automatically attentive, as if my voice had become a cue.
“I’m doing something after graduation,” I continued, watching his reaction carefully. “A project. A place. It’s... not school. It's real. It's work.”
His eyes flicked away, then back. Hope, buried under caution.
“I need people who can keep their head,” I said. “People who can do detail and who can be invisible, on purpose.”
He frowned slightly. I could read why me? as loud as if he'd shouted it. I stepped closer, so my answer didn’t have to compete with the corridor noise.
“You already know how to survive without applause,” I said. “If I don’t pick you, someone else will be chosen, and I doubt they'd be as good a fit.”
His breath caught: the shock of being chosen without a joke attached to it. He nodded carefully, still not fully trusting.
“Good. I’ll tell you what it is tomorrow.”
He watched me walk away as if the hallway had quietly rearranged itself.
And it had.
Not because I’d saved him.
Because I’d placed him — and left him room to decide whether he wanted to stay there.