The thing about attention was that it followed Alice like bad weather.
He had come to terms with this a long time ago. In high school it had been manageable, mainly because his mother had shown up to school exactly once, for exactly one reason, and the aftermath had been so thorough that most people had quietly decided Alice Lancaster was not worth the trouble Alice had spent three very peaceful years mostly left alone, which was exactly what he wanted, with Bryan and Lucy orbiting nearby like they always did.
He could feel the classroom watching him. Not all at once, not obviously, but in that scattered way where every few seconds someone's eyes landed on him and then quickly looked somewhere else when he didn't react. Boys, mostly, though a few girls too. He had learned early that his face tended to do something to people's attention spans and he had never particularly appreciated it.
Bothersome. That was the word. Just bothersome.
The boy next to him, Ethan, was still talking.
Alice had caught roughly half of it. Something about the campus map being a public safety hazard, something about the vending machine on the second floor already being broken, something about a professor whose name Ethan couldn't pronounce and had decided to just not attempt. Alice listened the way he listened to background noise, present enough to catch the important parts, not present enough to encourage more of it.
He wondered, briefly, if Ethan thought he was a girl.
It wasn't an uncommon assumption rather but a common one because of his uniform and everything else. Alice didn't particularly care either way. It wasn't his job to sort out other people's assumptions and he had no plans to start. If Ethan thought he was a girl, he was wrong, and that was Ethan's problem to figure out in his own time.
What Alice did care about was that Ethan was still talking.
He reached into his bag, pulled out the book he'd packed for exactly this kind of situation, and set it on the desk.
"I'm going to read," he said.
Ethan looked at the book. Looked at Alice. "Oh." A beat. "Cool, yeah." Another beat. "Have you read that one before or is this the first time?"
Alice looked at him.
"Because I read it in high school," Ethan continued, unbothered. "The ending kind of annoyed me. Not bad, just, you know. You'll see."
"I'll read it and find out."
"Right, yeah, totally." Ethan nodded. Then: "Do you think they'll do assigned seating all semester or just the first week?"
Alice opened the book.
Ethan, with the energy of someone who had completely missed or simply ignored his signal, kept talking in a low, easy voice, not demanding a response, just sort of narrating his thoughts in Alice's general direction. It was, Alice had to admit, a specific kind of annoying that he hadn't encountered before. Lucy is a yapper but this one lacked knowing about social cues. Most people got the message when the book came out. Ethan seemed to treat it as a conversational pause rather than a conclusion.
Alice read his page. Ethan talked. The classroom filled up around them.
It was, somehow, not as unbearable as it should have been.
* * *
Self-introductions started twenty minutes into the first class.
Alice had been expecting this. It was always how first days went. The professor asked everyone to stand up, say their name, say something about themselves, and then sit back down while the class tried to look interested. Alice had a very practiced approach to this. He stood when his name was called, looked at the general middle distance, and said:
"Alice Lancaster. First year. I like reading and I hate insects." He sat down.
The classroom held a particular kind of silence for about a few seconds after that. Not an awkward silence. More like the silence of a room that's surprised. He felt the attention shift and settle on him in a way that was heavier than before. He picked up his pen and looked at his notebook.
Bothersome.
The introductions kept going. The person after Alice stood up, said something Alice didn't catch, sat down. Then the next one. Then Ethan stood up beside him, and Alice caught the name, Ethan Riley, and then the class kept moving and Alice's attention moved with it, back to the notebook, back to the whiteboard, back to the very reasonable goal of getting through the morning without anything interesting happening.
He made it to lunch.