"Nagihiko?"

"Hm?"

"Why did I take this course?"

The tap tap of keyboard keys abruptly stopped as Nagihiko paused. He stared at the laptop screen for a few seconds, silent, before letting out a long, heavy sigh and giving Rima an exhausted glance.

"Rima, please," he said. "Your MyCreation is due in three days, you barely understand how to do it, and this is the sixth time you've asked me that question in the past hour of me trying to explain to you what you need to do."

"Oh," Rima replied flatly. He sighed once more.

"Okay," he said. Hints of a weary sigh still lingered in his tone. "So as I was saying, to draw a polygon, you need to have two integer arrays—one for the x-coordinates and one for the y-coordinates of the vertices." He pointed at a line of code on the screen.

Rima blinked, her gaze slowly following his finger.

"Does that make sense?" Nagihiko said. "It's kind of similar to how you need to state the x- and y-coordinates of the corner when you make a square. Right?"

"Oh."

Nagihiko blinked, before he sighed and looked back at the laptop screen. Then he turned back to Rima and opened his mouth again, probably about to further explain polygons or whatever. But he just gazed at her, silent.

"Okay, I'm sorry. We need to focus," he finally said, covering his face with his hands, elbows propped up on the desk. "But it's just that for the entirety of me attempting to explain concepts to you, all you've done is either respond with a very uninterested 'oh' or some completely unrelated, crisis-inducing question."

"My questions are not crisis-inducing," Rima said, offended.

"That's literally the most passion and effort you put into saying anything for the past hour," Nagihiko replied.

"Well, sorry I'm not a crossdresser who's good at everything like you are," Rima muttered.

"I don't see why my family tradition has to be involved in this."

"Ha ha ha."

"That was the most dead inside laugh I've ever heard."

"This is the saddest conversation I've ever heard."

"I agree. So let's stop." Nagihiko pushed the laptop over to Rima. "But now that you hopefully know what to do now, you can work on it while I'll watch you to make sure you're doing it right. Okay?"

"Why did I take this course?" Rima replied.

"Rima."

"Meh." Rima began typing, eyes boredly following the lines of code she wrote. Every few minutes, she would shoot a quick glance at Nagihiko to make sure he wasn't judging her too much. But his gaze remained fixed on her screen and he didn't react at all when Rima looked at him.

Does he care about my project this much? was Rima's initial thought, but then she realized that his eyes were glazed over and he was slightly nodding off.

Oops. Maybe her behavior for the past hour took a bit too much out of him.

I guess I'll give him some time to recover while I work.

Contrary to what Rima's "oh"s and apparently crisis-inducing questions during Nagihiko's explanations might've implied, she actually had (somewhat) been listening. She managed to get through thirty minutes of independent coding without needing to bother him.

"Oh, are you done?" Nagihiko said after she stopped typing and turned to him.

"Yup," she said. "Only the first scene of the animation, though."

"Let's see it."

Rima ran the code and they watched as a new window popped up. It had a simple background depicting a castle from the outside. Characters moved around the screen, and although literally all they did was just slide left and right, she had to admit she was kind of proud of what she made.

"Wow, that was actually better than I expected," Nagihiko said after the animation finished. "It's nice to know that an hour of my suffering actually paid off."

"You're welcome." Rima gave him a smug smile.

"Don't give me that," Nagihiko muttered. "You're the reason why I was suffering in the first place."

"Hey Nagihiko, why did I take—"

"Okay moving on," he said quickly. "If you were able to make this, then the second scene shouldn't be too much of a problem if it's not too different from this one." He glanced at the animation. "Does your horse appear in the second scene, too?"

"It's a dragon," Rima hissed.

Nagihiko blinked at the screen. "That's a dragon?"

"Obviously. It's even attacking the castle." Rima fervently pointed at the castle, shooting Nagihiko a glare. "Why would a giant horse be attacking a castle?"

"I thought your animation was about the Trojan War," he said, his mouth forming into an amused smirk. "It made sense! There was a castle, and there were soldiers coming out of the horse."

"They were attacking it," Rima snapped.

"Nope, they were totally coming out of it," Nagihiko said, returning to the code. "Well, anyways, we need to get rid of the background for a little bit."

"Why?" Rima said. "That sounds suspicious."

"We need to make sure your erasers are properly made."

Rima narrowed her eyes dubiously. "I didn't make erasers in my animation."

"No, I mean the things that draw the background over the character when it moves," he said. "You obviously won't be able to see your erasers if the actual background is there, right?"

"Hmm."

"Rima, do you want to pass computer science or not?"

"Fine."

"Thank you for clearing me of suspicions and granting me your permission to perform this dangerous task," he muttered, adding two slashes in front of the line of code that drew the background. "I'm just commenting out your background commands, so you can un-comment them later on, okay?"

"I want to comment out my life," Rima said.

Nagihiko just stared at her in utter exhaustion, but before he could respond, a loud alert notification sound rang from the laptop. Everyone in the library turned heads to collectively glare at the two disrespectful teenagers who would dare cause such a horrendous disturbance in a public area, and the librarian shrieked "QUIET IN THE LIBRARY, YOU DISGUSTING INGRATES!" from the third floor.

After Rima and Nagihiko apologized to the two dozen disgruntled adults in the library, they returned to their desks. Rima checked the time on her phone while Nagihiko returned to the laptop.

Nagihiko tapped Rima's shoulder. "Uh, Rima."

"What?"

He slid the laptop across the desk to show her the window that had appeared over her code.

Ready To Program has experienced an unexpected internal error, it read. This error is caused by a bug in the environment. The most recently saved version of your code will be available in an .sav file.

Rima stared at the message.

"Rima, you can still recover your most recently saved version," Nagihiko said hastily. "And you did save at some point, right?

"Nope."

Nagihiko blinked, unable to make his expression anything but dumbfounded. He and Rima simply stared at each other for a few seconds.

Then a smile flickered across Rima's face. It grew to a grin as she covered her mouth, slightly shaking, before she burst out laughing. Nagihiko just looked at her as she buried her head into her arms, entire body shaking from giggles. Then he looked back to her code, which had become corrupted from the crash.

He let out a very, very long sigh. "On second thought, commenting out my life might not be a bad idea right now."

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*"Commenting out" something is when you turn a section of your code into a comment (with two slashes, in Java's case), so that section of code no longer runs and is ignored by the program

Author's note

So this is something I wrote with no plan whatsoever and completely inspired by my experiences with a computer science course I took in school. I'm not sure if a lot people will understand it but if you still found this somewhat enjoyable, I'd be really happy! Thanks for reading!