Chapter 1

Prelude

It was during last-period grade twelve remedial maths that it all began. I was elbows deep into our latest assignment, working away diligently, and very relieved that the first week or two of the course hadn’t posed any real problem for me. Some people, I’m sure, would say I didn’t ‘belong’ in the remedial math class. As a dash one stream student, I was utilizing a clever trick one of my favourite teachers had told me the year before: take remedial classes to boost your overall average. Anyway, I was knee-deep into multiplying logarithms, when one of the boys who sat in front of me began asking his desk partner if he had any clue how to solve one of the problems. Neither of them had a clue, and were about to call on our very busy teacher when I spoke up.

‘You’ve got to turn them into exponents,’ I said. They both turned to look at me.

‘What do you mean?’ one said.

‘How?’ asked the other.

Businesslike, I scribbled down the method using the question they were struggling with on a piece of scrap paper and turned it towards them. They moved forward in their seats toward it, still swivelled around. Using my pencil as a guide, I went through what I’d written down.

‘So when it’s a logarithm of base ten, you just carry over the other number across the equal to make an exponent?’ The first boy—his name was Jesse—repeated, drawing an arrow to better indicate what he meant.

‘That’s right,’ I confirmed, smiling. His companion, Myles, snatched up his worksheet and put it on my table.

‘Will you help me work through this next one?’ he asked. ‘I think I get it. I just want to make sure.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

I had always enjoyed helping people understand difficult concepts, and even though it set me back a little in my own work at times, I always liked helping them with their questions. The both of them figured out pretty quickly that I was willing to help and good at explaining things, and thereafter needed no prompting to ask me questions. Where before they had paid me no mind, as the diligent and reserved student and an outlier of the clique-y social crowds, now they were interested in me.

I’d had classes with Jesse before during high school—sure, only a few, since both boys were destined for either the trades or professional sports, and didn’t need to be in the dash one stream to achieve their goals—but it hadn’t been until I’d earnt their respect and they’d gotten to know what I was capable of that he’d noticed me in the least bit. It was the first class I’d ever had with Myles, though, and I found him to be a decent and pleasant person. Now that he knew me, he would often greet me in the halls or at the beginning of class, as did Jesse. They were the sort of boys many people, including myself, would stereotype: the kind who wore baseball caps incessantly, drank energy drinks, vaped on the sly (and sometimes during class), had only the necessary amount of brain cells, and were party animals.

Of course, the old adage is completely true, and neither of those books were what their covers quite suggested. After they got to know me, they were very nice. I think they were about as surprised about how I actually was like as I was surprised about them. I knew I naturally exuded a goody-two-shoes exterior, which seemed obvious from my hard work and attentive, concentrated focus during class lectures, as well as how knowledgeable I was. From these evidences, they had drawn the conclusion I was boring a bookworm without a sense of humour. But while I was helping them with their schoolwork, they learnt to know how I actually was. We didn’t just do schoolwork; in fact, when there was a lull, we often chatted about this and that and joked around.

‘You’re probably the nicest person I’ve ever met,’ Jesse told me, after I’d helped him with one of the questions he hadn’t understood. I felt myself flushing, embarrassed but pleased at the compliment.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

They were just people, like everyone else, just some boys I was friends with, as I often was, getting on better with boys than girls my own age, the majority of whom I found vapid, shallow, self-centred, and above all, fake. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand about a person, it was when someone pretends to be something they’re not.

They seemed to me nothing out of the ordinary, nothing but friends to joke with, until—

Something subtle but drastic seems to change everything when you become fully aware of another person as a sexual being. The air seems to vibrate with a kind of hidden energy flowing with an undercurrent of excitement—or, at least, that’s how it felt to me.

It was just a normal class, no different from any other. Jesse and Myles were sitting at their table in front of me, as always, working on things they understood, turned away from me, and, as they so often were, they were talking. The two of them could come up with the most absurd hypothetical questions at the drop of a hat, and especially did so with each other. Sometimes, it was superpowers. Once I had been asked quite casually by Jesse that if I could have a superpower out of flying, invisibility, and time travel, what I would choose. Their questions were never boring when they weren’t about school work, and neither of them seemed to have much compunction about who heard them speak, either.

I still don’t know if they meant for me to overhear them.