Finding Tristan ✓

3: Unease

"Fear is not real. It is the product of thoughts you create. Danger is very real, but fear is a choice."

Kylie

I laced my fingers together and rested my hands on the table. I sat in the back of the room. I was currently in my last class of the day, which was math. "I hope that I have answered all of your questions. Tonight's math homework will be pages one hundred twenty-six through one hundred thirty; even numbers only."

Mrs. Milton dismissed all of us with a nod and let us start on our work. She went to sit back at her desk. Ashley glanced at me from across the room. I gave the red head a knowing look before waving at her to come join me. I lifted up the lid of my Mac and entered my password.

I pulled up the online copies of the workbook from my teacher's home website. Turning up the screen brightness a little, I feel Ashley take a seat beside me. "Kylie, Tristan didn't show up in English class today. But somehow I saw him in the hallways on the way here." I pursed my lips and stopped working on the problem I was on.

"Maybe he had an appointment and had to come into school after?" I say quizzically.

"Either that or the doofus skipped class," Ashley muttered dryly. She huffed and crossed her arms,"Not only that, he's such a slacker. He hasn't started grading my essay yet, even though I already finished grading his literally two days ago; stapled to the rubric and everything."

"Speaking of that, Tristan wasn't at lunch with his friends today either!" She exclaimed and ran a hand through her red velvet hair. I was wondering what kind of relationship those two had with each other. But I figured that they were just partners paired up for a simple English paper. I knew that Ashley wasn't interested when it came to small talk.

I rolled my eyes and set my pencil down. "First of all he is not a doofus, this is my crush that we are talking about. We don't know about a single thing that he does after school hours. He could have a job or be facing personal problems outside of school. And you can't really call him a slacker if you personally don't know a thing about him." That made Ashley bite down on her tongue. And my best friend knew that I was right.

"But what about you? You don't know a thing about him either, yet you decide to crush on him," Ashley shot back quietly. I frowned in distaste.

"Yeah, I don't, but I'm not going to judge him even if I do find out more about him." We both went silent for a brief moment. Conversations in the classroom had died down. Majority of the students decided to really focus in on the work. I stared back at the Mac screen and copied down the next problem onto my paper.

I gently chewed on my bottom lip in deep thought. Once I was able to figure out the steps, I transferred my work onto a separate sheet of paper. When I came to my final answer, I placed a box around it using my pencil. I suddenly felt my phone vibrate in my pocket for the second time today. I secretively pulled it out and set it on my lap underneath the table.

I felt my heart race, hoping that I wasn't going to be caught with my phone out by the teacher. In the corner of my eye, Ashley's back was facing me. The red head had her legs crossed and she was doodling in her composition notebook. I felt air get caught in my throat when I discovered that I received another message. It was the same unknown number from this morning.

Hello, Kylie.

There's no way that I had given out my phone number out to anyone else. Unless if maybe this person was referring to a different Kylie, but I am sure as hell that it wasn't possible. I let out an inaudible breath and wrote back to the person: