I nearly screwed the tone I set for this story yesterday. I almost threw it out the window with ahorrible first chapter. Good thing I caught myself before I clicked the "save" button. So, you can thank me later for sparing you that awful crap I wrote. It's been taken care of-as in locked in a deep, dark cellar where it can never see the light of day again.

So today, after class, I was waiting in the music section of the library for my duet practice time to roll around. I did some good old circle of fifths work, trying to clean up my scales (I'm a music major, don't you know?) Of course, I fell asleep-every time I grab one of those private desks in the library, I end up face in my hands, drooling on my iPod.

But when I woke up after 30 minutes, I felt rejuvenated. I finished my circle of fifths work, checked my email, pulled out a sheet of paper, and started writing this:

She Wouldn't Quit Looking At Me

I finished the test with a final sweep of my pencil, dubbing the messily compiled pages complete. With my bag thrown over one shoulder, my inconspicuously black ball cap pulled as low as possible, and my shirt collar uncomfortably high, I walked to the teacher's desk and deposited the test there.

The man didn't look up at me, focusing a little too hard on his task of marking essays. I stood there for a few moments to see if he would actually make eye contact with me. He circled one misspelled word on an essay and continued to loop around it in red ink multiple times until I turned my back and left.

I hurried from the room, leaving a massive lecture hall full of students still creasing their foreheads over the first page. It's no wonder the whole world was going to the pits, these people were incompetent.

Once I had Hanz Zimmer playing his latest work from Inception on my iPod, I headed towards the library, occasionally tilting my head when people walked by. I didn't need the stares anymore than the overweight girl I passed in the food court needed that extra maple and sprinkle-covered donut she was purchasing.

Once at the library, I took the stairs up to the fourth floor where the music section was, telling myself it was for the exercise rather than an excuse to avoid being crammed in an elevator with twelve other people. How these undergraduates did it sometimes, I didn't know…nor did I care to find out.

Students sat scrunched over books in theory and difficult scores as I entered, some of them like I with headphones projecting another world into their brains. I found a table that hadn't been claimed by the multitude and sat at it, silently wishing that I could be doing this Teacher's Assistant work in Professor Nadir's office. At least he didn't gape at me every time I entered the room.

…

First, my leg started to shake. Then, I began a nervous tick of brushing the front of my cap-as close as I could get to my mask without bringing attention to it. If the girl across the room was staring at me, that had to be the reason, right? It's not like she couldn't take her eyes off of me because I was dancing in the nude. Eventually, I just gave up and returned the favor to the girl who had been openly staring at me for the past ten minutes.

When I confronted her visually, she blushed a deep red and leapt into whatever notes she had spread in front of her, bending over so a silk curtain of brown curls covered her cheeks. She peered through her hair a few seconds later but went right back to her work when she saw I was still watching. She sat very still then.

Balking for a few seconds, I noticed that her papers had musical notation on them. A theory student perhaps? Most likely some snotty, half-witted singer who thought herself the next Joan Sutherland. I bet she couldn't hit a high B flat without cracking.

Obviously, people staring at me were often at the receiving end of some antagonistic mental abuse.

I went back to my TA's job of jotting notes on Professor Nadir's next test for architectural design. He had miss-worded this question…

By the time the hair on my neck started standing up, I knew she was at it again. If we hadn't been in the library, I would have tosses a rude remark at her and seriously considered snapping her neck.

Eventually my leg launch its twitching again, so I just got up and walked it out, rounded a few shelves of scores, picked up a random one to occupy myself later, and headed back to my seat.

And there she was.

Sitting at my once-empty table right across from the chair over which my jacket was draped.

She didn't look up at me once as I sat down even though I blatantly stared at her for about five minutes. She was indeed doing music theory work-looked like a Professor Swicket assignment. Yes, she was definitely a Sutherland wannabe.

I thought about moving, but all the other tables were occupied. If only Nadir hadn't been playing that awful reggae CD he had recently bought, I could have done this in his office. Instead, here I was escaping the brain-damaging sounds of Bob Marley only to come face-to-face with something that made it impossible to focus.

But I resolved to ignore the girl and her wide, blue eyes and to get done with this test as soon as I could. But Nadir always made so many mistakes!

Of course, not long into my hard-pressed search for possible revisions, the strange girl started looking at me again. Oh for the love of-

I tapped my fingers impatiently on the table like an insane jazz drum improvisation. There was no way I could get this done before tomorrow's exam at this rate.

I snapped my head up, glaring beneath the ball cap.

"What do you want?" I mouthed furiously.

She watched for a handful of seconds before giving me a questioning look.

"What...do…you…want?" I tried mouthing again.

Same response. I swear she was edging into a smile.

"What do you want?" I hissed, trying not to raise more attention to myself in the crowded library.

The girl shook her head in confusion.

Having had enough, I tore a piece of paper out of Nadir's test and scribbled on the back: What the - do you want?

I'm pretty sure the explicit term I used can be correctly assumed. I tossed the sheet of paper at her and watched her reaction of a barely concealed coy smile. The little-

I'm Christine Daaé, she wrote back. I noticed she had scratched out the curse word I had written. She tried to hand the paper back to me but I wouldn't take it.

"So?", I mouthed.

She shrugged and once again attempted to give the paper back but I refused to take it. With a sigh (what did she have to sigh about? I was the frustrated one here!) she wrote something else. That's a nice piece, the Arnold concerto. The third mvmt is fun

I glanced down at the score I had sitting to the side, the one I had gotten when I went to stretch my twitching leg. It was a clarinet concerto by Malcolm Arnold. But what did she care? She was staring at me long before I even got up and fetched it.

Do you play clarinet, she wrote.

I glared at the paper. What was she trying to do? Play a stupid little get-to-know-the-weird-guy game? Well, I wasn't going to play along. I grabbed my bag, Nadir's test, Arnold's concerto, and left. Any reggae Nadir was blaring would be heavenly voices compared to this nuisance.

If she followed me, I swear…

Trust me, it's much better than what I had written before. That was just awful. But this is okay. Sort of.