#frerardie

Being ten minutes late, Frank made his way to the desk at the end of the class under the teacher’s disapproving gaze and nasty grins of the classmates. He opened the paragraph and zealously began to absorb everything that the teacher said quickly pulling out a textbook with a notebook on his desk. He has been an excellent pupil all his life. Ever since Frank was a child, his parents kept telling him about the importance of the good education, and they have chosen him a university in New York when he was only in the fifth grade; “there is a high level of teaching, every teacher is a Doctor of Philosophy, the best medics study there” – that’s what father was never tired of saying. And Frank honestly has been working all these years in order to pass all the exams, get the highest scores, enter that uni in New York and become the most qualified dentist of all the most qualified dentists that ever existed.

Four classes have passed at such pace. Frank was listening carefully, writing everything down and quietly rubbing his empty stomach, which nevertheless was growling so loud that it created an echo in the silence of the class. On the fourth break Frank met his new acquaintance from yesterday, Alexa, and for some reason Frank felt something unpleasant, so he wanted to leave. But he didn’t do that.

“So, how’s the test?” she asked, sounding amused in some way, with her voice of a young smoker. “Nailed it, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah, nailed it,” answered Frank, as if he was talking to the wall and not to the girl.

“I didn’t. I don’t know a damn,” she let out some kind of a chuckle. “Straight A’s, huh?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re a nerd?” she sneered.

“No, I just get A’s,” Frank hissed between gritted teeth.

“Chill, man,” Alexa snorted.

Frank felt uncomfortable. He didn’t like her; he didn’t like her at all, and that’s why he didn’t want to argue with her, it was an unpleasant feeling, even a creepy one. After all, he was a newbie, he didn’t have to be rude to anyone.

“Okay,” he tried to soften his voice, “it’s science now, isn’t it?”

“Yup. A combined class.”

“It’s not a school, it’s a whole mansion. Where’s that classroom?”

“Ugh, you do need the map,” she smiled at him. “It’s on the fifth floor. Let’s go, I’ll show you.”

Alexa lifted her bag from the floor, and pulled Frank’s sleeve. She headed to the stairs, making her way through the crowd of hasty students.

“And what is a combined class?” Frank asked, panting and trying not to get lost in the crowd.

“Don’t you know? Didn’t you have that in your previous school?” asked Alexa, turning her head back for a second.

“Nah, I didn’t.”

She quickly ran up the stairs to the fifth floor, and only when they were standing in front of the needed classroom, she threw her bag on the windowsill and answered him.

“A combined class is when a classroom is getting stuffed with two groups of students of the same year. We always have combined science, P.E. and history.”

“Ah,” murmured Frank. “Is that convenient or what?”

“It’s fun.”

“Fun?”

“Yup. The more the merrier, right? Besides, Pierrot is always pulling something. Psycho. God, I wanna smoke.”

“Pierrot?”

“Yeah, oh, look, the class is open, let’s go.”

Alexa, all frisky, jumped off the windowsill and waltzed in with the rest of the kids, leaving Frank all alone. But he was okay with that.

The bell has rung. The last student has come into the classroom, and Frank had to leave the window and follow him. When Frank came in, he was amazed by the size of the auditorium. He has never had such a huge classroom back in his previous school. Two groups of students could easily fit in that one.

Having hard experience, he wasn’t even trying to sit with anyone and just headed straight to the empty desk at the back of the class. And while it was fine in the usual classroom, now it was terribly inconvenient. How’s he supposed to hear anything? But he had nothing to do with that.

Sort of getting settled, Frank looked around the room. That girl with long black hair, wearing it in two pigtails, was nice. With her short plaid skirt and a bright red lipstick, she looked cute and sassy at the same time.

Staring at her, Frank didn’t even notice someone who walked in the auditorium, and everyone became silent. The Beautiful Girl was sitting quiet too; she turned her head to the door, and Frank also turned around to look at whatever caught everyone’s attention.

Right by the door there was a boy. He was squeezing the strap of his bag, while everyone looked at him with some kind of an evil judgment. Clumsily shaking his long black hair off his face, he took a tiny, very shy step forwards, and someone from the back row started chanting:

The scrawny lover With a long neck Will be His last mistress!

And Frank didn’t understand why, but every single person started laughing, even his Beautiful Girl was glinting with loud laughter, what made her no longer beautiful in Frank’s eyes. He knew for sure they all were laughing at that guy, but he couldn’t understand why.

The boy angrily looked around the laughing crowd and headed towards the desks to take a seat, but kids were putting bags and legs on the nearby seats, or even pushing the chairs down. Nobody wanted to sit near him.

He went around every seat, and finally got to Frank’s place, looking as if he was asking a permission to sit there. Now, when he was standing so close, Frank could see him better, and his first thought was “this bag must be so heavy it’s gonna break his shoulder”. He was so weird, so… slender, fragile, with a glossy fever burning in hazel eyes, with black, terribly messy hair and amazingly thin fingers.

He was odd, and Frank was staring at him until he questioningly raised an eyebrow and coughed a little, as if he was trying to draw Frank’s attention.

Frank blinked a few times, as if he was trying to wake up, and desperately looked around. Everyone was looking at them and waiting for something.

The boy wasn’t welcome there. So Frank gave in to some kind of an impulse and shook his head and put a bag on a nearby seat, banishing the boy. He noticed the satisfied smiles of the tall strong guys that were sitting somewhere in the front row. They even winked at him, and Frank unwillingly felt happy about doing everything ‘right’ and not making contact with an outsider.

“Poor, poor Pierrot, nobody wants you,” some blondie drawled, and everyone burst laughing.

“You know what,” the boy said with a quiet but clear voice; it was nice and even soothing, in Frank’s opinion. “Fuck you,” he proudly raised a hand, getting up his middle finger, demonstrating it to every person in the auditorium.

With those words, he just sat on the floor; he sat on the floor just like that, taking the textbooks out of his bag and really preparing for the lecture, sitting on the real goddamn floor. Frank was taken aback by it.

A few seconds later, a teacher has come into the classroom, and she definitely has noticed Pierrot among all of the students, but, surprisingly, she didn’t say anything to him. The lecture has started.

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