New To Love

New kid

It was just another normal day at school. 

I had slowly dragged myself from my bed, shoveled down my breakfast as though it was some sort of competition, then threw on my uniform and headed out. I had braced the morning frost (even though it was only October) and finally made it to school, and there I could breathe a heavy sigh of relief at the sight of my friends laughing, chatting and contemplating the day's subjects in our usual corner of the yard. Everything was just normal.

However, as I approached the growing chatter of my fellow colleagues, I noticed something; something different. 

"Here we go again," I thought to myself as  I looked over at them,  and they are there in the corner, standing with their back to everyone else, hunched protectively over their bag, sorting through it with rhythmic accuracy, carefully checking their equipment in much the same manner as I do on a regular basis.

"Who's the new kid?" I ask as I walk over to my friends, who had already fallen silent upon my arrival.

"We don't know much, but all we really know is that he isn't from round here," Ethan replied, glancing over at the boy in question.

"Yeah he like moved here or sumin'." Brandon added, making no valid contribution to the conversation as usual.

"Do you know if he like, knows anyone from this area, like anyone in the school?" I add, mildly interested by this slight change of events for once.

"We dunno yet, he's been pretty quiet so far. Knowing our luck, he will be in our class, seeing as we always get the rejects or the migrants..." Ethan trailed off. 

"As long as he's not like that Miracs kid from last year, he was a pain and he did our class no good," I add, recalling the events of the previous year's 'new kid'.

"He is probably in some mental hospital by now, after all he went through here," Ethan joked, as we all stood around laughing about the past year.

And then we fell silent. Not an odd occurrence in a group of nerds, yet still unexpected.

We instead switched our attention to watching the new kid, who had now concluded his thorough bag check and he slowly, with careful precision zipped up both sides, taking care to not scuff any of the bag's contents, as though it contained some sort of valuable or somewhat rare item.

He then turned and made direct eye contact with me.

I blushed and quickly looked away, slightly stunned by what had happened, breaking the eye contact with him. It was fairly awkward but I tried my best to brush it off.

But, the eye contact had been made, and I had reacted. 

However,  I hadn't blushed in surprise, nor because he was astonishingly ugly in fact almost the opposite:

He was, to phrase it best, hella cute.

It was definitely not going to be just a normal day.