I was sitting in French class, yet again almost dying of boredom since Madame Cartier decided to have another review day (this time of the subjunctive, which I had admittedly failed last year, but I preferred to bury bad memories in my subconscious). The only things that were really keeping me up were the weird side glances that Olivia kept shooting me, as if she thought I was an imposter or something. I couldn't really blame her for that—the barefaced (or rather, glasses-less) version of me was quite frightening to behold.

Finally, she sent me such a horrified look that I stopped drawing mindless circles in the margin of my notebook. "What?" I whispered to her. I also took the opportunity to glance down at her notes to see if I had missed anything essential.

By the looks of it, I had apparently missed the most important lesson in the world, since practically everything was highlighted in her special blue highlighter ink. Now, it looked like the unhighlighted sections of text were more significant as they starkly stood out as they swam in an ocean of blue. At this rate, Olivia was going to have to get herself a new highlighter very, very soon.

She shrugged and highlighted another line, this time in green. That meant that line was especially important. I took extra care to scribble that down in my otherwise blank notebook. "I just can't get used to you not having your glasses," she muttered back to me under her breath.

Madame Cartier turned back abruptly. (And I swore I had a heart attack then.) "Mademoiselle, avez-vous quelque chose à dire à la classe?"

Ah, shit; this was bad. I never understood anything since she always spoke so quickly. Olivia was quickly scribbling something down on her notebook—hopefully a translation for me—but she wouldn't be able to do it quickly enough. Steeling myself to my teacher's beady eyes, I surged on.

"Ah, oui," I said quickly, hoping that I had chosen the right response. All right—so I'd need another three seconds to even process anything she'd said...and then the English. My head was already hurting, and I quailed under Madame Cartier's stare, feeling a little like a deer in headlights.

Olivia hid her face in her hands.

"Continuez?" The evil French teacher raised her eyebrows.

All right, that I could understand. I was sure it meant something like "continue". "Madame, j'ai fait une erreur. Je—uh—veux dire rien."

At least my two and a half years of years of French schooling provided me with that much to say—right?

From next to me, I heard a barely stifled groan from an undeniably amused Olivia.

Sending me one last suspicious look, Madame Cartier turned back to the board and stopped occupying herself with me (and therefore took the rest of the class's attention away from me, which was good since it felt like everyone was staring at me like I was being publicly executed).

Without missing a beat, I looked over to Olivia and exchanged an eye roll with her. "What did I say wrong?" I asked her.

"A, she asked you if you had anything to say to the class." Olivia shook her head as she wrote something down from the board and highlighted it three times. Snorting, I copied what she wrote down, just in case.

Piggy-backing off a conscientious student was always the safe thing to do (in the case of test preparation).

"Oh." And I seriously told her that I did have something to share with the entire class, which was still staring me down like I was some sort of a freak.

I decided to copy down the rest of Olivia's very, very blue notes (without coloring my entire page as well) since I was getting so bored that I was sure I was going to do something desperate (such as texting Lila in class—besides, Lila absolutely sucked at the subjunctive) very soon. Olivia and I didn't say anything to each other since both of us (a huge shock when it came to me) was paying attention. Then, I came to a part in Olivia's notes that I couldn't read, so I poked her arm with the back of my pencil.

"Hey, what does that say?"

She didn't bother to respond to that, but she decided to say, instead, "You look very different."

I cleared my throat and pointed at my bare face. "No glasses. Yeah. Now please tell me what that damn word is."

"Dude, I didn't know that you knew how to put on eyeliner," Olivia said, scrutinizing my eyelids. "It's a little shaky, but it still looks pretty good."

Gee, thanks. She sure didn't know that it took me fifteen damn minutes (in addition to the twenty minutes that I took to put in my contacts since they kept sticking to my finger—I'd completely forgotten what my optometrist had said about that) to get the eyeliner to look like a five-year-old didn't put it on me. And not to mention that I took much pride in my appearance—everything had to appear perfect, or else I could not bring myself to leave my bathroom mirror.

Yes, I was a very aesthetically obsessed person.

I wasn't even going to deny it.

"You're mean," I responded flatly. Then, after a couple seconds of intense scrutiny, I figured out what the word she had written down was, and I scribbled that down. Olivia's handwriting resembled that of a medieval European monk—scripted, elaborate, and most of the time, thoroughly illegible.

"I mean, you actually don't look like a nerd right now. It's really impressive. Now all you have to do is to dye your hair blonde, and you'll be all good to go." She looked way too smug as she bit on her pencil to really mean what she said.

I elbowed her. "Yeah, I know you're a blonde and you don't look like a nerd, but you don't have to rub it into my face." I glanced up at the board quickly. Madame Cartier had decided that we were moving on to vocabulary at some point in time when I wasn't paying attention. What a travesty—I sucked at vocabulary.

Olivia only snickered, and the rest of class went on like that.

She was the type of person who took way too much pleasure in another person's misery, and I was completely convinced that was not a positive quality. Why did I stick around her again? I spent at least five minutes contemplating that instead of how to say "parachute" in French.

I only figured out the answer to my own question at the end of class as we all were wrapping up notes in a depressed daze: Olivia took fantastic notes.

↔

Having French class in the morning always sucked because it always acted like the opposite of coffee. It seemed like I was trying to learn through a haze in chemistry, which was, in itself, a miserably complicated and damning subject. Bredbenner, the chem teacher, only proved to reinforce the torture. It seemed like he had this stupid notion in his head that intimidation was the right way to go when it came to educating young adults who usually only had one thing on their minds (sex).

If anything, every time he stared me down in an attempt to somehow force an answer to a question that I couldn't even begin to understand, I felt everything I'd absorbed the night before while doing the reading assignment for homework just flew out of my head.

Just like that.

If I didn't know better, I'd supposed that Bredbenner's eyes were some sort of knowledge vacuum. And I was pretty sure that teachers weren't supposed to have that sort of effect on their students.

Throughout the haziness of chem class, I kept feeling Lila's gaze on my face. I was pretty sure she knew me pretty well (after all, we'd been stuck together for the best of three years). And I was also pretty sure that she wasn't getting premature Alzheimer's or something (which would then excuse her since I'd understand if she wanted to remember my glorious face for as long as she could).

"Hey," I muttered out of the side of my mouth when Bredbenner turned his back on us to attempt to figure out how to turn on the projector. (No one felt like informing him that the on button was literally right in front of his face.) "What's up with you?"

"No, I'm not gay for you," Lila shot back so quickly that I feigned offense and leaned away from her.

"That's horrible!" I shook my head at her. "What's your taste in people anyway?"

Lila snorted and averted her eyes from me for the first time in class. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that Bredbenner finally decided to use his brain instead of his boorish eyes to use the projector, but that didn't count.

I knew Lila's weirdness was all because of the contacts.

They had already caused me enough trouble trying to use them, but now this? What a bother. Lila and I sat in silence for the rest of chem—not that we had any choice in it since Bredbenner occupied us all with a rant about the complex nature of polymers.

But anyway, after third period, which was an uneventful AP Government course, I headed to the cafeteria, where my friends and I usually met up for lunch.

I ran into Lila first just a couple feet away from the cafeteria (there was a serious crowd in front of it today). Apparently, I'd tripped over her feet or something, because she dropped her books with a thump and a dramatic tantrum. "Damn, I still can't get used to not seeing you with glasses," she grumbled to me as she picked them up.

I didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing, so I scrunched my face at her, sticking out my tongue. With a glance behind us at more and more people steadily coming out of their classrooms, I kept us moving along with the crowd so we weren't being roadblocks or anything. "Yeah, thanks. Do I look, like, totally bland? I always thought my glasses gave some definition to my countenance."

"And blandness is what you're worried about," Lila mumbled as she arranged her books in her arms. "What the fuck is wrong with you, A?"

"An individual's sense of morality—or, in other words, ability to tell right from wrong—depends on that individual's perception. And as you know, an individual is very distinctive from others," I returned snarkily. Lila pretended to bow down to me.

That stupid, endearing Lila. I never quite told her how much I loved her, did I?

Then, Olivia's voice burst in from behind us. "Hey!" she called a little too loudly. Both Lila and I jumped, to Olivia's snickers.

"Don't be bothersome," I said loudly back to her. Lila nodded vigorously next to me.

After pushing her way up from the crowd so that she was walking side-by-side with the rest of us, Olivia raised her eyebrows at me. "Someone's using fancy words. I hope you're not picking up after Luc."

I'd explained the entire Bovary situation to her one Saturday afternoon when she sprang on me so suddenly over text that I had no way to make up an excuse for why I was hanging out with her one and only true love (ick). At first, I was steadily getting more and more panicked (like my mom on the days before a huge party she was throwing—she always kept running around the house like a hyper Chihuahua) since Olivia was actually ending her sentences with periods. Like, who dotted their sentences in text-speak? But then, I assumed that she got lazier, because as I kept telling her how Luc totally wasn't into me (for God's sake, he completely lowered my self-esteem about my French reading skills!), she started ending her sentences with emoticons. That was a major improvement. Then we were cool again.

"Oh, no." I shook my head. "I'd never actually use technical terms from English Lit outside the classroom."

Lila snorted behind her hand.

"Oh my gosh, the bildungsroman reference?" Olivia laughed.

I shook my head at her jokingly. I would have almost believed that she was over her puppy crush on the jerk (as she tried insisting several times a couple months before), except she kept looking over my shoulder as we entered the cafeteria and grabbed our trays.

It was Italian food today, so I wasn't faced with the nasty spinach stuff that they usually served on Wednesday. I scooped up some pasta (and some salad to be somewhat healthy) into my bowl happily and followed Olivia to our usual lunch table (that wasn't too far from the rugby jock table where Luc and his posse sat, now that I thought about it). For some reason, Lila had disappeared during our charge through the lunch line. I plopped down heavily, setting down my backpack next to my seat.

After exchanging a couple awkward comments, Olivia and I dug into our food since our lunchtime was somewhat limited. It was silent-ish at our table with the rest of the girls since it was still relatively early. However, after a couple minutes, someone sat down in the seat next to Olivia and across from me. "Hey, L," I said without looking up.

"Well," responded the person, "I guess you're right in a sense."

Luc.

Wrong twin. Why did the Merciers have to give names beginning with the letter L to both of their children? It caused so much confusion, especially when the twins needed to label their belongings with their exact same initials.

"You," I mumbled, looking up from my pasta and somewhat self-consciously biting off some pasta. I met his eyes—which were smoldering gold as they watched me—and quickly looked away, wiping my mouth immediately. Why did he have to catch me at this point in time again? "What do you want?"

"So rude," Luc said serenely. He folded his hands on the lunch table, which was easy for him since he didn't have a lunch tray in front of him. Sometimes, he reminded me so much of either myself or Olivia (when she was in her holier-than-thou-yet-strangely-angelic-about-it mood) that it scared me. "Anyway, I was wondering—"

"Hey, Luc," Olivia said coolly. (She was late on her greeting though.) He really should have said hi to her, especially if he was going to sit down next to her.

He looked at her (and she didn't blush!). "Oh, hi, Olivia. Sorry. I needed to check on something with A."

Who gave him the right to use that nickname? After swallowing down a piece of pasta thickly, I muttered, "And go on. My lunch time is limited."

"So is mine," the smartass pointed out. "Can you please stop rejecting me? It hurts." He rolled his eyes.

I raised my eyebrows. "About tomorrow, right? Yeah, I can't do Friday, so you'll have to come along tomorrow if you wanna squish in a session." I stabbed a piece of lettuce.

Olivia almost choked on her salad. "Session?" she repeated weakly.

I wanted to cover my face with my hands then, but I wasn't going to humiliate myself in front of him.

"Yeah, I really can't do without the zero-dollar-per-hour rate that you give me. It funds everything that I do nowadays." Luc smirked at me. I had no idea what was going on in his head (sarcasm was definitely a strong contender, but it was definitely true that I really had no right to boss him around when I couldn't even give him much).

"So that's a yes. Meet me after school by the entrance. I guess I could give you a ride." I looked at him across the table. He looked vaguely amused, and he exchanged a glance with Olivia. Woah. Since when did she do that with him?

"Why so bitchy with me today?"

I couldn't bring myself to meet his eyes.

Honestly, I didn't know. Maybe my hormones were catching up with me. Maybe I was tired (especially after the French catastrophe in first period). Maybe I was starting to feel funny. Maybe Olivia was being a little more friendly with him that I remembered, and it was really irking me that she didn't bother to tell me anything.

"Go away," I grumbled.

Luc left, not without giving me a weird sort of glance that said something like "you know what's coming for you". Then, right after, Olivia told me out of the blue, "You kind of look like Audrey Hepburn today. I like your bun."

I raised an eyebrow. "Thanks...?"

What. The. Hell.

And right then, Luc's sister took the seat that he'd just vacated and plopped down her lunch tray. "So what's up?" Lila said.

When she met a dead silence, she looked up at Olivia and me. "Come on; I'm not going to turn your faces into stone like Medusa was or something!"