Author: MT_Reade
Word Count: 1114
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The teacher's hand slides across the board at a constant and unfaltering speed. Her wrist flicks and the black dry-erase pen churns out lengthy words like they're effortless. The projector at the front of the room shows a detailed slide of the discussion points, including sample diagrams and references. The afternoon is mundane and quiet, the sky is visibly grey through the closed windows, and the day is ordinary. There is a calm in the classroom, with the teacher's droning voice as white noise, and the sound of gently rustling papers, and pencils scritch-scratching across the pages in various notebooks and binders. The classroom is organized, with neat rows of desks, five across, and seven deep. Almost every desk is filled today, with no student having better places to be on an uneventful Tuesday such as this. The room is tranquil and orderly.

But Virgil feels like he's sitting amongst chaos.

His pen scrambles across the next to empty page in front of him. His writing is rushed and unkept, the scrawl almost unreadable in his hurry. He's doing his best to keep up, really he is. But, the teacher is writing much too fast, and Virgil's eyes are quickly losing focus on her quickly accumulating writing as he becomes frantic. She's talking about the last point on the slide now, and Virgil hasn't even managed to jot down the first two. He's halfway through the third when his stomach twists itself into a knot, and the teacher flips to the next slide, beginning to erase her previous writing on the board, in order to make room for more.

Virgil watches on impotently, biting his lower lip harshly. He decides to give up on the half-completed notes from the preceding slide, instead trying to just jump to these next few. Hopefully he can get a hold on these ones, and manage not to let go.

However, Virgil's grip is weak, and he soon falls behind once more. The teacher is moving on before he's even copied down a quarter of the notes on the board.

Virgil's too nervous to ask her to slow down, especially considering that, based on what he can see, everyone else seems to be keeping up just fine. The boy who sits to Virgil's left, Logan, actually has to stop his note-taking every once in a while to wait for the teacher to catch back up to him. Logan often claims to not have emotions, he says he's abandoned them in favour of a more practical and efficient lifestyle. Logan would never get this overwhelmed and worked up over something as stupid as taking notes in class. It's pathetic, really, how much Virgil's chest is constricting right now, and how his hand shakes as it hovers helplessly over the page of point-form writing that he's desperately trying to complete.

So, Virgil doesn't ask the teacher to slow down. He could never bring himself to do that. Besides, he doesn't want to inconvenience anyone.

The class comes and goes, and by the end of it, Virgil feels drained. He feels defeated and exhausted, and he leaves with a sag in his shoulders, a sinking feeling in his stomach, and a stack of half-finished notes in his hands. The pages are filled with fractured fragments; bits and pieces of writing that are either entirely unreadable, or won't make sense even if examined by an expert decipherer.

The classroom is still quiet when he leaves it, but to Virgil, the world is a storm. A storm that has never felt so loud before.

--

The nice things about storms, though, is that they pass.

Virgil has calmed down quite a bit by the time the end of the day rolls around. One nauseatingly boring math class later, and Virgil's heart has finally settled into a consistent rhythm. He's much less panicked now, but he feels the dread at the idea of having to tackle his assigned homework without a clue of what the lesson itself had actually been about.

He has to try four times to get his locker to open, because the padlocks that hang from the metal clasps in this hallway are old and really need to be replaced by ones that are from this century, preferably. When it finally does click open, Virgil opens the metallic doors to see that the interior of his locker is an absolute mess. There's papers strewn about haphazardly all throughout his things. However, Virgil hates when his locker is a mess. It makes him feel crowded. He'd never leave his locker in such a state.

He picks up one of the papers curiously, and sees immediately that it isn't his own. It has ridges along the edges, as if torn expertly from a coil notebook. It's written on with meticulously neat, evenly spaced words, that are written in blue liquid ink. Virgil doesn't own a pen like that. Virgil frowns, and picks up another. This one is covered in detailed diagrams, with straight lines, and labelled in the same blue, careful penmanship as before. Virgil notices how this one has a label in the bottom right-hand corner:

"IV"

He checks the other sheet that he's holding, and sees a "VII".

Virgil gathers up all of the pieces of paper, stacking them in chronological order in reference to the roman numerals in the corner of each. As he does this, Virgil can't help but notice the way that the papers have scattered about his locker, like they'd been shoved in through the slots in the door. He stoops down, reaching for the final piece of paper. This one has a "I" written neatly in the corner. This page has only a few lines of text on it:

"I noticed that you were struggling with the notes in class today. You're welcome to keep these ones, if you'd like. - Logan"

Virgil feels a small smile tease at the corners of his mouth. He folds the notes up carefully into quarters, and he hopes that Logan knows how grateful he is.

Even though the tone and wording of the note on the first page is methodical and algorithmic, Virgil can't help but think that that's not entirely reflective of the situation. The way he can see the indents of the pen being pushed into each page, tells him that Logan must have copied these out by hand. Logan also not only noticed that Virgil had been struggling, but had then taken the time to find Virgil's locker and deliver hand-written annotations of today's lesson. Virgil can't help but think to himself that, for someone who claims to be unfeeling, that sure took compassion.