Jeremie Belpois didn't really have friends. Everyone assumed he was too busy or considered himself above the 'average people' with his genius intellect and tendency to stay in his room and program things. He didn't mind, though. Really, he didn't need friends.
Even less so than friends, however... romance was pushed to the side. There were jokes that he was in a committed relationship with his computer and he just shrugged them off. Romance was a silly idea and it was only junior high. There would be plenty of time after he had his life in order.
But when that new girl transferred in ("Class, this is Aelita White, Milly's cousin from America." ), he thought, for the first time, that maybe it wasn't such a silly idea.
Still, girls weren't his area of expertise and it wasn't likely that she was going to speak to him anytime soon. She was always hanging around with Milly, Tamiya, Emilie, and Matthias (nobody knew how the two older students suddenly became best friends with the seventh-graders) and rarely spoke to others. The five were an odd group, always cutting class and running off to some strange place (always saving the world, but he never gets the chance to remember). They stuck to each other like some sort of pack.
It wasn't his place to question (it never stopped anyone from doing so), which is why he never bothered to ask. He wasn't going to initiate conversation. They wouldn't want him.
Not until the day he runs into Aelita, quite literally, in the hallway, falling to the ground and dropping his box of robot parts everywhere, stammering out an apology. She smiles and helps him pick it up, then asks what he's using the parts for. He starts explaining in a very thorough and scientific manner, before stopping himself because nobody understood.
Her smile grows and she starts asking questions in the same way ('geek speak, language of the geeks' is what Della Robbia from down the hall calls it). She ends up helping him work on them, praising what he's done and he's blushing because nobody understands what he does this way and the light from the window catches her pink hair and green eyes, causing them to glow.
They're interrupted by a phone call from Emilie. He doesn't know what's said, but she grows wide-eyed before apologizing to him and getting up to run off somewhere and as he watches her retreating back, he thinks that maybe, for the first time in his life, he has a crush.