Catching love notes

chapter 4

Chapter 4

I’m staring intensely at the clock. Tick, tock, tick, tock.

 Each second goes by painfully slow. Way too slow. Maybe it’s because it’s the only thing I’m properly concentrating on? I guess I should be listening to the teacher standing at the front of our class room. She’s describing our project in more detail, but all I hear is a droning background noise. I’m trying to listen but every time I try to meet her grey eyes, mine are torn away and drawn to the clock.

We have all been sitting in our designated seats for nearly forty-five minutes. I can tell everybody is getting a little restless. People have started fidgeting and asking snarky questions.

“This seems like a waste of time, everybody in our class knows how to manage finance! It just seems to us that you can’t be bothered to teach us something relevant or what we already don’t know. We are not the red class.”

This comment was made by a guy with burning ginger hair at the front of the class. His uniform was messy and his hair was tussled in a sexy-just-got-out-of-bed way.

But failing.

 Miserably.  

I felt empathy for our teacher as her breathing tightened, she puffed out her cheeks and chest in annoyance. Her face glowing with rage and her features pulled into a scowl. 

“Look, Michael. You only just moved up to this rank by one mark. ONE!”

She smiled smugly, and then said. “It would be a shame if somebody couldn’t balance their finance at the end of the month, failing this project gives you an automatic U for sixty-five percent of your maths grade and twenty-five percent for your ICT grade.”

A hushed tone fell upon the class, murmurs of whining came from all directions but I wasn’t interested in what was being said. I was confused. I thought this place was a college?

Why and how was Michael in the lower rank before? We have only just started the year. He couldn’t have been moved up so quickly. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

“This college has a brothering school. Think of it as a little brother. It’s a school, like what you went to, but with the same structure as this college. We had a red, blue and gold system to determine peoples rank based on their testing ability. High test marks equals a high rank. ”

I turn towards the guy next to me with the enchanting blue eyes, Nathan. I purposely sat facing in the opposite direction to him, as its bad to admit, but I don’t trust myself. He’s beautiful, making me look like a sack of potatoes in comparison.

 I could stare at him all day.

 I guess that explains why he was in a blue uniform. It was really nice of him to explain that all really clearly to me. I look down at my hands in my lap and smile like an idiot. He’s a nice guy. A real nice guy. One exists.

“Stop making that weird face retard, I’m trying to listen.” He said in a whisper, poking my cheek.

Ok maybe not such a nice guy then.

Wait I said that out loud.

“Yes, you did, now shut up retard!” he said while playfully rubbing his hand across my face to silence me.

The teacher gave us a sheet to fill out for the last fifteen minutes of the lesson. Nothing really interesting, just a few questions on what our daily expenses and inflows are. Basically what we spend our money on and if we receive any. Then goes on to ask us questions on how we manage it. Do we have a system to keep track blah blah blah.