Glass Cutter

No one could ever really say they knew Oliver Sykes—not even Delilah Weston. My best friend had spent the winter of our junior year in high school dating him, but the days they’d passed together—hugging, kissing, and ignoring the world’s existence almost altogether—proved to be seemingly useless. They’d dated for the better part of November, all of December and January, and a small fraction of February; and despite more than two months of being locked at his side, she’d come back empty-handed. She still couldn’t tell him apart from every other high school boy she’d slept with.

Delilah wasn’t even the only one that had gotten that close to him, either. His hips seemed to attract the girls of our town like honey did bees. They’d swarm around him, beg him for attention, and all he’d have to say was, Open your legs, and they’d ask, How wide? It wasn’t that he’d had notches on his belt, though. He’d make each and every one of his companies feel exclusive, but he’d also make it a potent scent in the room that exclusivity would never actually be theirs. Delilah hadn’t truly expected to be any different—or, at least, she couldn’t have with the way she’d claimed to know him—but it was certainly something different that he’d latched onto her for so much longer than his usual.

I’d spent time with him once, but I’d still never really spoken to him. I’d barely even heard his voice, in all honesty. One December evening over the time they’d dated, Delilah had gone to a party with him and they’d both downed too many drinks. The cure to their avoidance of a DWI was to call me—the only person she called her best friend—at three o’clock in the morning. He’d stumbled into the backseat of my car with her, made a few sounds as they canoodled, and then proceeded to blunder out of my car and onto his front lawn ten minutes later. It was the closest I’d ever gotten to communicating with him, but even a number of months passed sleeping with my best friend had never brought me any closer to a real discussion with him.

Even despite his breakup with the girl I called my best friend, I’d had nothing against him. Quite contrarily, I’d found him interesting because I’d never known anyone in our town able to have a secret. Delilah had grown bitter towards him after the fact, talked about how size really meant nothing because he still wasn’t an impressive candidate, said things like he’d never find anyone like her, and every once in a while, she’d break down and cry. Her emotions towards him, however, had been lost once she’d begun dating Derek Austin, the quarterback of our school’s varsity football team, and civility between the two had been able to be salvaged. They’d wave to each other in the halls, and I’d give him a smile if I was present for the encounter.

Despite the indifference she’d eventually grown towards him, I’d never lost the fascination and awe I felt towards his illusive nature. I questioned his ways, wondered how he’d get away with all he’d pull, but my curiosity was never voiced. Delilah had been my best friend since childhood, and even though there were aspects of her that I hated, it was in my nature that I could never betray her by offering a word to the boy that had broken her heart.

However, there had been nothing in my nature that disapproved a response to him if he’d approached me first.


The sun poured onto the Washington town of Menlo effortlessly, warming the late summer morning temperature into the high sixties. It was a day for driving with the windows down and the radio to play Katy Perry just a little louder than usual. I was in a good mood, even excited to see Delilah for the first time in two weeks; and I was even okay with the knowledge that I would have to hear all about her trip to Italy, the cute boys, and the amazing fashion.

I was about twenty minutes early for classes when I arrived into the student parking lot, but the asphalt was still full and busy. It was no surprise, seeing as it was the first day of school. Everyone was always early for the first week; and while I appreciated their excitement for the return, I disliked not being able to find a parking spot close to the main entrance.

I immediately spotted Delilah’s cherry red convertible and her magnificent platinum blonde hair. She looked even more glamorous than usual against the black tint of her windshield as she sat atop the hood. Two weeks away from her had proven to unusually surprise me.

She was with two of our friends—really her friends—Laura Heely and Desiree O’Brien. Laura’s Manic Panic Vampire Red hair surprisingly stood out against Delilah’s Mercedes. Desiree, with her mousy brown hair and cream-colored sundress, was the last to be spotted, but she was always the quieter of the three. In fact, the only person noticed less than her was me.

I parked my white ’97 Corolla across from Delilah’s luxury and stepped out of my car to greet the three of them. Delilah and her friends were truly glamorous—her sequined miniskirt, Desiree’s dress, and Laura’s black-and-white striped thigh-highs. I felt out of place with my destroyed denim shorts, white V-neck tee, and years old Converse high-tops. It was the way it always was with Delilah and her friends, though—so I ignored it with a big grin on my face and a cheery, “Hello.”

Delilah squealed with delight and jumped off her car. “Amanda!” she shrieked, embracing me tightly. “I missed you so much while I was in Italy! I have so much to tell you—oh my gosh.”

She pulled herself back onto the hood of her car and immediately began rambling; “I met a boy that was on vacation there, too, and he lives in Seattle—that’s only a hundred miles away! He’s so cute!” She pulled her white iPhone out from her black bra—which was completely see-through underneath her white cami—and continued talking as she searched for something on the touch screen.

“His name is Alex, and he’s a sophomore at the University Of Washington,” she went on. “He’s studying to be a business major—he wants to have his own marketing company one day.” Her face suddenly lit up, interrupting her monologue, as she found what she must’ve been looking for.

She turned the phone screen towards me to show a picture of herself next to a boy that had his arms wrapped around her waist. The candidate, who must’ve been Alex, looked young to be a sophomore in college, but I took her word for it anyway. It surprised me that he was her type—long, black hair covering most of his eyes, tight gray pants, and a morbid tee-shirt design that said Chelsea Grin on the bottom—because she hadn’t dated anyone that looked like that since the previous year, when she’d gone out with Oliver Sykes. I guessed it was at least a good sign that she seemed to have truly moved on from the infamous heartbreaker.

“He’s cute,” I replied, smiling back at her. Regardless of my skepticism towards her new friend’s honesty, I was happy that she was smiling and moving on from Derek Austin, not even so much Oliver Sykes. Derek was close to my least favorite person in the world—ridicule all throughout middle school had left me with a sour taste in my mouth—and so when she’d ended it with him sometime over that summer, I hadn’t exactly been brokenhearted that she was moving on from her past entirely.

“Yes!” she giggled. “Desiree and Laura don’t think so.” She shot them playful glares. “Laura says he looks like he’s twelve.”

“Well he does!” Laura exclaimed defensively. “I mean, he’s not bad looking, but he just doesn’t look like a sophomore in college—that’s all I’m saying.”

Desiree chuckled quietly. “You should tell her how he is in bed,” she chimed, crossing her arms over her chest.

I peered at Delilah with my best effort to not look disapproving. “D, you were in Italy for two weeks. When did you even meet him?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, really—it was a habit for her to give herself up so easily—but my cares regarding diseases and heartbreak were difficult to ignore, no matter who it was that was practicing the stupidity.

She rolled her darkly decorated eyes and sighed. “I met him the first night I was there—he was staying in the same hotel. We got drunk together like three nights later, and it just happened. What can I say? He was cute.” She giggled like an excited child. “But he’s so good, so it didn’t even matter. He’s huge—it’d even be worth getting herpes.”

“Good to know,” a deeper voice chimed. In just a second later, Oliver Sykes was passing through our group of four, laughing to himself; and his response—and distraction—left me without even a moment to form my own.

“Hi, Oliver,” Delilah said cheerily, giving him what I knew was a false grin.

He smiled back and turned to face us as he continued walking away. “I’m sure I’ll see you in one of my classes—you can tell me all about this big guy and having herpes then.” He waved to us and turned again to face the direction he was going in.

“I still think it’s weird you guys are friends,” Desiree suddenly declared, pulling all of our attentions back.

“Please,” Delilah scoffed. “It’s been like a year since we dated, and who really cares anyway? I’ve certainly moved on. There’s no need to be a bitch to him—even though it is fun.” They all exchanged giggles, and I merely smiled.

“Yeah, especially when you’re going to bed with him,” Laura added. “He whines so much.” Laura had never kept it a secret to anyone that she, too, had slept with the infamous Oliver Sykes just weeks before Delilah’s fling with him had begun.

I shifted my weight on my feet uncomfortably, being the only virgin in the group, and tried to keep my best fake expression up to par. The sex talk was coming, and I knew it was only a matter of sentences before Delilah would bring up the notorious question. Have you finally gotten laid yet, Amanda? and the fact that she and everyone else already knew the answer probably irritated me more than the question itself.

Though I knew it was only a matter of time before it became the topic of our morning chat, the question came sooner than I’d expected; “Have you finally lost your V-card, Amanda?” Delilah suddenly asked, sounding almost absentminded—or maybe bored because of how many times she’d asked.

I cleared my throat. “No,” I answered honestly. I had half a mind to start lying to her. “I’m still looking for the right candidate,” I added. I really wanted to backtrack and say, I mean no as in not when I was sober—it’s happened drunk, though; but I could never be a girl like that, and she and I both knew that.

She sighed, tossing her long, blonde hair over her shoulders. “Amanda,” she whined, “we’re almost eighteen. At this point, you should just fuck Oliver Sykes.”

The three of them laughed, and Laura added, “I’m sure he’d be happy to. Did D ever tell you what he said about you on the last day of school?”

I shook my head, and Desiree went on to inform me; “They were hooking up,” she exclaimed, laughing hysterically, “and he was drunk off his ass, and—”

“He told me I should dye my hair a light auburn color to look like you,” Delilah interrupted. “Needless to say, I did not finish him off. I mean, if anything, you should dye your hair blonde so you could look like me;” and a sudden wave of defense came over her demeanor.

“I think you’d look good with blonde hair,” Desiree commented to me, feeding Delilah’s ego with the idea that she was the original blonde—as if Marilyn Monroe hadn’t been born more than half a century earlier.

I scratched the back of my neck, feeling the most discomfort I’d ever experienced around my own best friend, and cleared my throat once more. “I don’t know why he would say that,” I replied awkwardly. “...You’re clearly prettier.”

It was my way of staying on Delilah’s good side—complimenting her whenever a comparison or competition had been made—and it was probably the only reason why she’d remained friends with someone like me over the years. If it hadn’t been for her, it was more than safe to say that I would’ve been a stereotypical high school outcast—a beaten up car that was considerably gross in comparison to the majority’s means of transportation, plain clothing because the town consignment shop had a reputation of never possessing anything more than decent-by-a-long-shot, and no social life in existence due to the fact that two jobs and the strive for straight A’s were at the top of the priorities list. The truth was: Delilah Weston kept Amanda Tate from being a complete fool.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re not ugly, Amanda—you just don’t do anything to yourself. You wear some eye shadow and eyeliner, and that’s it. I mean, you could be gorgeous if you wanted to; and you’re lucky because not many people can say that. Just look at Betty Yu—she’s fucking disgusting.”

Betty Yu, a small Asian girl with pin-straight black hair that hung down to her hips, was the stereotypical high school outcast. She was the student in all advanced placement classes, the teenager that never went out on Friday nights, the girl that still believed people couldn’t see panty lines, and the person that I would’ve been had Delilah Weston never asked me for help in our second grade math class.

I swallowed a wad of dry saliva and shrugged. “You have enough beauty for the both of us.” My cheeks warmed at the lie, but I knew the falsity would never be detected in her fabulously clouded mind. I wasn’t good at lying, but I didn’t have to be if I was complimenting her. I did believe she had enough physical beauty for the both of us, but that wasn’t the kind of beauty I’d been thinking of when I spoke.

She grinned widely. “Aw, Amanda,” she chirped, “you’re so sweet.” She playfully kicked Desiree’s shin. “You guys never compliment me like that,” she grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest.

“You don’t need any more compliments than you already get,” Laura defended.

I peered over my shoulder, trying to find anything to look at that wasn’t the trio before me in the effort to ignore the erroneous focus of their conversation. My eyes found Oliver Sykes standing on the front steps of the school’s main entrance, leaning against the silver railing with a cigarette between his lips. His eyes watched the students as they passed him—I was sure theirs did the same to him—and I longed to stand beside him in the silence, just people-watching with contentedness. Delilah and her friends’ interests had never been my own, and I could only pretend they were for so long.


The first day of school was always a half-day, and all the students in every one of my classes fidgeted in their seats impatiently with this knowledge. Periods were half as long, twenty precise minutes, and teachers knew they had the room’s attention for about five. I was anxious to be back in room 128, my homeroom, and I was also intrigued by the seat change. Oliver Sykes had somehow ended up sitting one lab table in front of mine on the left side, whereas he’d always been two tables directly in front of me on the right side with Howard Symon between us.

Homeroom was the first assembly of the day coming back from summer, and it was followed by four long class periods, one lunch, and three more spans of unwelcomed education. Lunch was as usual, despite the two and a half month break from the cafeteria. Delilah, Laura, and Desiree sat at the same table as every other year—with one other girl, Hope Williams, and three boys, Tommy Dennings, Matt Hale, and George Stone—and I’d been given my usual seat next to Delilah at the very end of the bench. Just as every other year, I was offered to be present with the company, but I never truly found a mold shaped like my own to take solace in.

For our senior year, it was comforting to have lunch once more with people I was familiar with, but I wasn’t so ecstatic to discover a shared chemistry class with Delilah and Tommy. The entire table had been comparing schedules over the twenty-minute period, and when the rare occasion that someone invited me into the discussion had actually occurred, we found that she and I would be sharing the next period together, as well as with Tommy. Despite the comfort I found in routine, I’d been looking forward to the three-period break after what felt like much too long of a time with Delilah and her friends.

A young teacher, Miss Grey, that had just started at the school the year before, was our scheduled chemistry teacher; and as I trudged through the hallway after lunch behind Delilah and Tommy, I wondered how much patience I would need to get through the rest of the day.

Miss Grey was a notoriously difficult teacher, and everyone, including myself, dreaded falling under her jurisdiction—everyone except Delilah, that was. Delilah adored Miss Grey for the worst of all reasons: her glamor. While Miss Grey was one of the most feared teachers throughout the high school faculty, she was also the most beautiful. She was almost as much of a diva as Delilah—platinum blonde highlights, French manicured nails, and a salon-perfected tan—and it was probably the only reason Delilah wasn’t afraid of failing for the year and having her graduation be put in jeopardy. She and I both knew—though neither of us would admit it—that all she had to do to pass for the year was find some good deals and stories to share concerning haute couture...and I could hardly wait for sharing time.

“So what about you?” Tommy suddenly asked, looking halfway—and halfheartedly—over his shoulder at me. “How’s your first day going so far?”

I shrugged and peered down at my sneakers. I never did well when he’d randomly invite me into their conversations because I was usually so into my own thoughts above everything else. “Good,” I answered briefly. “I mean, it’s school, you know?”

Delilah scoffed. “Oh, please!” she exclaimed. “Amanda, you love school. It’s like your sanctuary or something. What she really means, Tommy, is she loves it and can’t wait for everyone to get settled in.” She grinned back at me, rubbing my arm affectionately. It was her way of telling me not to take her cruelty personally.

The two stopped in front of the doorway to room 267, our classroom, and Tommy continued on with the conversation; “I’m excited for this class,” he declared. “This is my first class all day that I have with friends—and thank God it’s gonna be a small one.”

“Why would it be a small class?” Delilah asked dumbly.

“Well not many people take chemistry,” he explained, “’cause of how the school started that whole thing two years ago of whether you could choose chem or physics in your senior year—so now it’s like a two to three ratio for the courses, I think.” His statistics were wrong, but I’d never had enough of a backbone to even try and inform Delilah or her friends of the fact that they were all about as smart as a pile of bricks.

“I don’t know why people would pick physics over chemistry,” she scoffed. “It’s so much more difficult if you ask me.”

“It’s less memorization and more math,” a familiar voice offered; and once again, the sight of Oliver Sykes came into view, passing us as he entered into our classroom doorway.

“Math is memorization,” she argued, rolling her eyes.

He shook his head and smirked as he looked down at the name card on the right side of the second row of lab tables. “It’s more common sense,” he replied. “If you pay attention, a lot of it actually goes together.” He sort of smiled to her—only his lips curled upward—before walking away to the end of the first row in the back of the classroom.

She rolled her eyes and folded her arms over her chest. “Well good luck to us for having this class with him,” she said. “One of you is gonna end up exceptionally close to him, Amanda.” She looked at me with pursed lips. “His sex appeal is pretty distracting, I will warn you;” and with her subtle blessing, she walked away from Tommy and I and took her seat in the second to last lab table of the second row, about twenty feet diagonally away from Oliver.

I did my best to give Tommy an encouraging smile in return to his friendly gaze at me.

“Heads, I keep my last name and my seat away from him—tails, you take it.” He sniggered and walked away without even waiting for a response.

I walked through the doorway and closed the short distance to the first lab table, trying to figure out exactly where my seat had been placed. I glanced down at the name card in front of me, the one that Oliver had looked at before, and read, Elizabeth Towers. Of course, Oliver Sykes was sitting on the left side of the last table, leaving just one spot open for the card that would say, Amanda Tate.

I walked hesitantly to the back of the room and looked down at my shoes to avoid any knowing stares. Everyone in our town knew Oliver Sykes, and anyone that ever had some sort of contact with him was always considered just as much as the source—the source being him. I could only imagine the future comments—Delilah sneak-attacking me at the end of the period outside the classroom door, shrieking, How was it? and Laura sitting atop Delilah’s car after school, looking at her nails in her best effort to seem without a care towards him while saying nonchalantly, I really don’t understand why everyone cares about him so much; and Tommy walking side-by-side with Delilah the next day to our classroom, looking half-assedly over his shoulder at me again and declaring, My condolences that T comes directly after S in the alphabet.

The bell suddenly blared in my ears, signifying the start of the period, and I merely looked up from the linoleum floors, rather than rushing to my seat. The stage of an anxious nerve-takeover always made me lose most of my ability to feel for anything other than the cause of my tension. It was why what would’ve been a normal reaction for me—hurrying to my seat in order to avoid being the last one standing after the bell—was not the reaction I had then.

I locked eyes with Oliver just as I heard Miss Grey’s heels click against the floor; and rather than returning the stare he was giving, I cleared my throat and looked away as quickly as possible. I took my seat beside him, trying to be as graceful as I could manage, but the sound of the stool’s metal legs scraping unpleasantly against the linoleum floor reminded me that grace was not something I usually possessed.

I put my olive green messenger bag atop our shared lab table and looked down at the bronze zipper, doing my best to ignore any and all stares. At that moment, I wished I’d had some sort of MP3 player to use to drown out the sound of Miss Grey’s distant, prissy voice. Merely thinking of Katy Perry’s crazy Friday nights could only do so much; but even more so, I wanted the music to drown out the rest of my surroundings—Delilah’s thoughts practically seething into the atmosphere, Tommy’s turned body that allowed him to see me through the corner of his eye, Betty Yu’s allergic sniffling, and most of all, Oliver’s gaze down at my fidgeting hands and the small smirk on his thick, rosy pink lips.

Suddenly, without warning, Chase Peters, who sat in front of me, was waving a sheet of paper in my face. “Earth to Amanda,” he called, shaking the paper some more.

I took the sheet from his impatient hands and swallowed hard to try and wash away the embarrassment of my daydream. I looked down at the Times New Roman font printed darkly on the paper and skimmed over the three sections’ directions. Section I: Define the following terms to the best of your knowledge; Section II: Match the following theories with the correct scientist to have developed them; and Section III: Read and assess the following equations. Solve using dimensional analysis, and do not forget to include a unit in your answer.

“What are we supposed to do with these sheets?” I asked Oliver quietly, my voice cracking with nerves.

“She wants us to fill out as much as we can so she can see where we are in terms of our knowledge,” he answered comically. He jokingly waggled his eyebrows at the word knowledge, mocking its importance, and followed it with a snicker.

I felt myself chuckle at his expression without any thought, and the anxiety suddenly felt alleviated. I’d never known Oliver Sykes to be a lighthearted person—and I’d especially never known him to be anything other than serious or detached from the rest of the world—but in just that moment, I realized that he had a way of contorting his face into a comical scenery, and it was a nice side to see. It was ultimately a pleasant way of easing the tension I felt, and I welcomed the comfort he radiated.

“I’ve never even heard of half these words,” I grumbled in response, reading over the first section’s terms.

He smiled at me. “You have a pencil I could use?”

I nodded and reached into my bag to pull out a purple mechanical pencil for him. I handed it to him and watched as he neatly scribbled down a bunch of letters and numbers onto his sheet. Within no more than a minute, he’d had the first section completed and was moving onto the second part without even a moment of hesitation; and within just a couple of minutes later, he’d completed the sheet and was sliding it over to my side of the table.

“There,” he declared, “now you’ll be her favorite overachiever.” He grinned triumphantly, giving me a genuine expression I’d never seen before; and after allowing myself to stare for just a second longer than what was necessary for mere acknowledgement, I decided he actually had a really beautiful smile—and a guilty part of me wished I could see it a lot more often.

I forced myself to finally peer down at the sheet and was dumbfounded. Was he telling me to take his paper for the answers and take the credit?

“How do you know all this stuff?” I asked stupidly, not quite knowing how I should’ve responded. In that moment, I felt like Delilah for asking something that sounded so idiotic.

He shrugged and pushed the lead of my pencil back into the tip. “I read a lot of trivia, and I’m good at math. It’s pretty much connecting all the shit I know;” and had he been anyone else, I might’ve thought his nonchalance was a pretense to make himself seem better than he truly was; but something about his demeanor made me feel like he truly viewed his knowledge as being insignificant—or at least unimpressive.

I read over the terms and the definitions he’d written down—mole, Avogrado’s number, stoichiometry, ¹²C, Proust’s Law, Karlsruhe Congress. He’d linked his definitions together with arrows, and numbers, and numerous sentences that made very little sense to me, and I wondered who in the world even knew that any such facts existed.

According to Oliver Sykes, Avogrado’s number was related to a unit of measurement called the mole, equivalent to 6.02214 × 10²³ molecules of carbon-12, and it was a number defined by a scientist named Amedeo Avogrado in 1811. The mole was an SI base unit to numerate the amount of a substance in terms of number of molecules, and it was directly proportionate to the weight of a substance. The name mole was simply the English translation of Wilhelm Ostwald’s 1894 coined term moleküle.

He’d written down a triangular process called stoichiometry to connect all the concepts listed, and carbon-12—which he’d explained was written as ¹²C—was the standard of all elements’ atomic weights, the substance in which each stoichiometric ratio used. Additionally, Proust’s Law, defined in 1794 by Joseph-Louis Proust, was technically called the law of definite proportions, and it defined the consistency in all elements, regardless of their amount. It stated that all characteristics of an element remained the same, no matter how much of the element was present, thus allowing the mathematics of stoichiometry to exist.

Lastly, he’d told all about an international conference held in September 1860, almost one hundred years after the adoption of Proust’s Law. Between September 3rd and 5th, when the meeting had been held, delegates from over ten countries—the United States surprisingly not being one of them—convened and determined the standards the current world would eventually use, such as Avogrado’s number and carbon-12 for stoichiometric conversions. The conference had been held to discuss chemistry worldwide and its problems, and only later it was dubbed the Karlsruhe Congress. This meeting discussed such issues in chemistry as chemical nomenclature, notation, and atomic weights. It was sponsored by German chemists August Kekule Von Stradonitz and Karl Weltzien and the French’s Adolphe Wurtz. At this conference, Von Stradonitz had showed the delegates nineteen different formulas that were being used just to determine acetic acid, and it became a notorious example of the problems the chemistry world had faced and dealt with at Karlsruhe.

After finishing my overview of the sheet’s answers, I peered at Oliver with raised eyebrows. “You seriously know all this stuff off the top of your head?...Did you take chemistry before or something?” It was all I could really bring myself to say, as stupid as I must’ve sounded. It was incredible and unbelievable to me that someone knew such complex information and had it just sitting in their brain to collect dust and wait to be presented. I had trouble wrapping my own brain around such an idea.

He laughed and shrugged. “I just really enjoy trivia.”

“You should go on Jeopardy,” I murmured, amazed. “You could win so much money.”

He chuckled again and began drumming his fingers rhythmically against the porcelain counter top of our lab table. “I don’t wanna make money off it. I learn it all for fun.”

I bit down on my lip. I’d never known Oliver Sykes to be intelligent or any sorts of concerned with knowledge and intellect. It was something Delilah had never mentioned, and it was something he had never shared. He was a notorious “bad” student—never did homework, mouthed off to teachers, came in late to class without a single care about chastisement—but if he was so intelligent, why did he refuse to share it with the outside world?

“If you know all this, then why don’t you just do your school work?” I asked, peering at him once more. “I mean, you could probably get a scholarship with this kind of knowledge.” I wanted to continue on with a speech about why he should’ve chosen to do more productive things with his obvious intelligence, but I stopped myself once I saw him shrug again.

“What’s the point?” he answered. “I’m gonna get a scholarship and go to college for what—a nine-to-five job that I don’t even like and yet taxes the shit out of my salary, just like everyone else in this town?” He simpered, sort of laughing to himself. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

I pursed my lips. “Well with that kind of commentary, you make it sound like there’s no point in doing anything in this town.” I frowned, feeling some truth in that belief even against my own desires. “It makes life in general sound kind of pointless,” I added sadly.

“Isn’t it?” He smiled at me this time, as if this revelation and existential idea was a good thing.

“No,” I answered stubbornly, the corners of my lips turning down further. “There’s a point to living. Whether people see or find that point is a different story, but it’s still there. Life is all about finding yourself—that’s the point. Some people succeed and some people don’t, but just because some people never discover who they’re really meant to be, it doesn’t mean they were never meant to be anything.”

He grinned again, softly chuckling to himself. “Well then I guess life has a point after all;” and without the chance of saying another word, Miss Grey turned the lights off and began presenting a PowerPoint slide of her rules. The classroom fell silent, and I didn’t say another word to him.