Staccato

Assumptions May Shatter

14th October, 2014

How can someone simultaneously be a nerd and an unapologetically, stoically rude person? How can someone be a nerd and yet have the entire school swooning over them, with them doing next to nothing to incite it?

Joshua Kwon, my best friend, is your typical Asian nerd, and he had accompanied Ethan to the recently held British Informatics Olympiad, and none in our school drool over Josh.

But they do, over Efrim.

I think it is because he is so unapologetically and stoically rude.

Because you see, he doesn't look like a nerd.

He looks more like a dropdead gorgeous fuckboy who might break your heart within seconds of talking to him.

It's the first period, and our homeroom teacher and algebra teacher Mr. Anderson was only congratulating Efrim for the gold medal he won for Trinity, when the speaker in our classroom crackles and the voice of our headmaster interrupts every class in Trinity and apologizes, before requesting everyone to take a moment to acknowledge Efrim's achievement.

Of him winning gold at the British Informatics Olympiad among the fifty finalists from seventeen different countries.

Every pair of eyes in the class glue to Efrim's heartwrenchingly beautiful face, and all he does is sit in absolute unamusement, doodling something on a paper with a fine hand.

But I try to sympathize with him, as I always do. Maybe he just hates the attention, is the reasoning my heart concocts for why he doesn't meet people's eyes and just smile for the round of applause that rings through the class for him.

Because he has won two other international Olympiads too in the field of computing and informatics, in the one year span from grade 8th to freshman year, plus numerous interschool tournaments, and each time he has received similar accolades and attention from the entire school.

Efrim is so rude that he doesn't even deign to look up at Mr. Anderson when he says, for a final time when the smatter of applause dies down, that he has made us proud.

How I wish I had telepathic abilities. I wish I knew what went on in that arrogant head of his.

What makes a person arrogant? An inflated sense of self worth? Or is it arrogance at all that afflicts Efrim? What if it isn't arrogance, but a sheer disregard for all forms of social etiquettes? Maybe he is, in truth, socially awkward and doesn't want anyone finding that out. Maybe he is a sociopath.

I hark back nine years to the past, and an innocently smiling Efrim fills my mind's eye, and I ache again, for the millionth time.

And once again, I just know that it isn't arrogance. And neither is it social awkwardness.

It is something deeper than anything that I can assume about him.

~*~

All these years, I have assumed one thing about Efrim that I have always thought was correct - he is someone who doesn't step an inch out of the line his dad set for him. Because if that were not the case, he would have tried to talk to me at least once during these past nine years, wouldn't he?

But I haven't yet learned one thing that I will in the future - that you can never correctly assume anything about a person, because almost always, you will be grossly wrong in your assumption.

I get the first kick in the teeth for all the assumption I've done until this point in my fourteen years of existence, as we stand in the chemistry lab doing titrimetric analysis, and I feel like a scientist doing what I know is the simplest titration of all, and yet, it's cool, because it's the first time we are doing it.

Now you see, I am usually a very neat and not-a-clumsy-person, but I look up and see Ethan, who was standing somewhere in front of me, for god knows what reason walking past my work area to the sink next to me and emptying the contents of his beaker into it, and while my slack-jawed attention was fixated almost drowsily to the ordinary sight of a pale hand holding a beaker and pouring liquid into a sink, my burette goes drip-drip-drip into my beaker way past the required volume, and there goes my experiment.

What happens next is a series of unfortunate events in rapid succession - I turn back to look at the solution in my beaker, darkened horrendously to a violent pink than the required pale-pink, I curse, reflexively yank the beaker from under the burette, the beaker rams hard to the burette, and breaks the burette clean from the clamp-portion down, with a sickening crack.

Sodium hydroxide rains down, spills over the counter and over my lab coat.

And my cheeks burn.

People turn and look at me, which I barely see, because I am trying to pick the jagged glass pieces lying shattered on the counter. Some are on the floor as well, which crunch under my shoes every time I move.

"Hey, don't pick them up you'll cut your fingers."

My insides jolt and go numb, as though struck with a thousand mega volt electricity.

My legs are quivering, cold blancmange.

Because I can recognize that quiet voice even if I were in the deepest comatose state.

And our chemistry teacher has immediately reached to our rescue, or should I say, to her (and her colleagues') preordained task of making sure we repelled like the same ends of a magnet.

"Ah we've got a real mess here," Ms. Donovan says, pursing her lips and shaking her head, "But it's okay. Efrim, get to your work quickly before you lose all the titrant, it's a leaky burette you've got there. And Noah, it's okay just shift to the next work station, the lab assistants will clean it up in a moment."

I pick my belongings and shift to the next work area, and I end up right next to Laurie, who looks up with a crazy grin at me before going back to her work, and I restrain an instinctive urge to smack her head.

When I look up, Efrim is already engaged in his work, standing there in his white lab coat, black hair messy as ever, and as always with not a trace of any emotion, any acknowledgement of what just passed between us, and as always, leaving me wondering whether the things I think about him is only me overworking my overthinking head.

~*~