The Story of Tonight

Chapter 1

*nine months before* [1]

It was the first day of my last year of school. Outside the door I stopped for a split second, to lean my head back and let the warm September sun shine on my face, before I headed in my school's direction.

It wasn't a long way, only about ten minutes, and I always enjoyed this walk. I even calculated my set alarm to give me the maximum amount of sleep when I wanted to take this way. That's why now I had exactly ten minutes until the bell would ring to introduce the first classes. Today though, I decided to make the route a tiny bit longer and take the way through the park. If, maybe, I walked a little bit faster than usually I could still make it to my classroom right in time.

I felt like the calm atmosphere of the park would give me what I needed to-... To what? I kept going as I thought about why I seemingly subconsciously chose this route. What had happened, that I felt like I needed a calm atmosphere? Was it-... No, I haven't had the nightmares in months, why would they start again now?

Though I couldn't quite figure where my uneasiness came from, I felt a sudden relaxation as soon as I stepped into the rather small but wildly grown park. I didn't hesitate to breathe in the fresh morning air. Instead, I speeded up a bit, which didn't prevent my look to drift at the old trees with their -due to the heat of the past summer - dry leaves and knotted branches that stood aside my path as well as small islands of wilting flowers on yellowish, burnt grass.

Exactly seven minutes later, I left this nearly savanna-like barrenness and all of a sudden found myself back on the streets. Immediately thousands of noises enter my ears and instinctively I duck, quickly finding my paths through the masses of people that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

Somehow I managed to stay calm until I saw the school building right around the next corner. The last few meters I passed with a hectic ease I wouldn't have expected from myself in this situation. I rushed down the already pretty empty hallway towards my classroom, the door to it still open. I entered the room the exact second the bell rang. But what was that? On the window seat, second row, on MY place, there already sat someone. At first glance, I only noticed dark, probably black hair and a quite tanned skin. It was a boy, I had never seen in my classes or in school generally before.

Though, this first glance would be all I'd get for that moment, since Mrs. Stormvine, my teacher interrupted my staring with a quiet but determined: "Class has already started, Mr. Groff. Time to take a seat, don't you think so?"

So, without further ado I took the only seat left, the one in front of him. Front row, of course. Of course my year had to start like this. I turned sideways a little, back towards the windows, to grasp another glance of the apparently new student. The new student who had taken my seat.

He had an unbelievably soft face with dark brown, nearly black eyes and slight smile on his lips, as if he was just observing the scene, being superior to everyone and everything around and found the whole thing incredibly amusing. I wanted to make clear to him that we had to swap seats for next class, but somehow the intensity in his look erased all chances for an appropriate sentence coming up to me.

The exact moment I wanted to look away and turn back to the blackboard, his look touched me and for the fraction of a second, we hooked eyes.

That was the moment I started falling.

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[1]Annotation of the author: I'm usually not too much of a fan of this kind of retrospective, but I felt like it'd kinda fit in here... Anyway, enjoy! :D