Sam McRoyan, a taller-than-average seventeen-year-old boy with heartbreaker good looks tried unsuccessfully to fight the furious flush spreading across his cheeks. He clutched the strap of his knapsack tightly, and he made his way to the seat his new teacher had pointed to, trying to be as quick and as inconspicuous as possible.
The girl sitting next to him stared at him with a bored curiosity. He smiled slightly and nodded by way of greeting, at this point quite positive that he was going to die of an aneurysm induced by excessive blushing.
Sam hated being the new kid. Everyone was waiting for him to both do something stupid and be the loser for the rest of the year, or do something commendable so the cool kids would accept him. Usually, Sam had an effortless charm that he could easily win people over with, and he'd been one of the rare liked-by-everyone popular people at his old school. But that had been in Portland, and this was Castle Rock. And the thing was, he didn't have enough energy to care.
His thoughts were interrupted by his new Algebra class' groans of resentment as Mr. Levin said there were just a few notes he wanted them to take down. Silently, he flipped to the first page of his brand spanking new coil notebook, and then searched through a pocket in his bag for a pen. Crap, he thought. He'd remembered everything from the banana in his lunch to clean gym socks but he'd forgotten to bring a writing utensil to school. He gently tapped the skinny boy's shoulder sitting in front of him. "Sorry, do you have a pen I could borrow?"
The guy looked at him for a moment, not sizing him up appraisingly, just studying him. "Nope," he said at last. "I just have one. It's in use. Just a second." He turned around in his creaky desk. "Chris, got a spare pen?"
Sam watched as the second boy, Chris, nodded wordlessly and then sailed a blue pen onto his friend's desk. He turned sideways in his seat with a smile. "Don't try anything funny with my pen, Gordie."
"It's not for me, you pervert," Gordie shot back. "It's for him."
"Oh." Chris nodded to Sam impersonally, however not impolitely. "Well, good luck with that pen, you might need to shake it a bit to get it to work. Sam, right?"
"Yeah." He tried to make eye contact, but he had been suddenly afflicted with a case of the shys. "Thanks."
When Gordie turned back around to jot down the notes Mr. Levin was busy scrawling down on the chalkboard, Sam felt lonely, and he wished he had a friend.