For nearly a month, Luke walked the halls of Oakdale High like a ghost. In fact, it seemed to him that he was invisible to the other students. No one other than Maddie talked to him, and almost everyone else just ignored him, not even stopping to give him dirty looks. He still had not been approached by the basketball team, though they had walked by each other quite frequently. Kevin had always been with them, though, so Luke hoped there was still a chance that they would talk to him when Kevin wasn't around.

His classes were no better. He liked the subjects fine, but even the teachers tended to pass him over for answers to their questions. However, though he would never admit it, Luke much preferred the cold shoulder he was receiving from virtually the whole school to Reid Oliver's snarky, rude comments about his ineptitude at Biology, which he was forced to endure for forty-five minutes everyday, plus labs.

One day in the last week of September, when he was in a particularly bad mood because he had been told that morning that his grandmother Lucinda's cancer had returned, Luke was sitting in one of their required afterschool AP Bio lab sessions. He was sitting next to Reid and they were attempting to catalyze enzymes. Luke had no idea what he was supposed to do, but Reid was furiously figuring out formulas and determining which substrate went into which enzyme. Unfortunately, Reid wasn't sharing his knowledge with Luke.

"Will you please tell me what we're supposed to be doing?" Luke asked, frustrated.

"Look in the book. The instructions are laid out in plain English. Only an idiot wouldn't be able to figure it out," Reid barked, still fiddling with numbers and models.

"What is your problem?" Luke retorted angrily.

"I'm working," Reid said, marking down the numbers and substrates he found to be correct.

"I know that!" Luke said loudly.

"Is there a problem, boys?" Mr. Humderson asked from his desk.

"No, sir," Luke said, giving him a reassuring smile. Reid shook his head at the teacher to reaffirm what Luke said.

"Look, just show me what you're doing. It'll go faster that way," Luke said, more quietly.

"Actually, I think it will go a lot faster if I do it myself," Reid said, returning to his work.

"We're supposed to work together. Learn from each other. And since I don't know what I'm doing, without your help, I'm not going to learn how to do this," Luke said reasonably.

"And that's my problem, how?" Reid asked, looking at Luke.

Luke gaped at him. Unfortunately, he could not think of a comeback.

"That's what I thought," Reid said, turning again to the lab.

"That's fine. I'll let you do all the work. Makes my life easier," Luke said, bending over his notebook and starting to doodle.

Reid gave Luke a very dirty look before setting about finishing the lab.

A half hour later, as soon as Mr. Humderson had dismissed them, Luke was out of the door in a heartbeat. When he was halfway down the corridor, Luke noticed that Reid was walking behind him.

Luke turned around and said, "Did you follow me so you could insult me some more?"

Reid stopped dead in his tracks.

"Uh, well…actually," Reid spluttered. He cleared his throat and started again, not looking at Luke and shifting his feet nervously. "Actually, I just wanted to say that I acted badly in lab and if you ever want help, just ask." With that, he turned right around and stalked off down the hall to the other end of the school.

Luke stood in the middle of the hallway, staring after Reid, his mouth agape in shock and surprise.