Chapter 12

Yao Wang squeaked the marker across the board, writing the Pythagorean Theorem once again for the students who still didn't grasp the concept of cosines.

Does anyone listen to me? The Asian man let out a sigh.

"Please write on board answer to problem fifty-two..." Yao turned around and dropped his teacher's edition to his side and tapped his foot a little impatiently. He wiggled his finger in the air as he searched for a student to solve the problem.

His dark eyes zeroed in on the sleeping figure in the back of the room.

"Mr. Van Bock, you wake up Mr. Braginski."

"M-m-me?" he stuttered as he pushed his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. Yao crossed his arms and pursed his lips. Eduard swallowed noisily and lightly tapped on the large Russian boy's shoulder.

Ivan lifted his head up and sleepily blinked his eyes. He glanced over to Eduard. The Estonian flinched and looked at Mr. Wang with a pleading look. It was only second period and he didn't want to die before his day even started-let alone his life.

Ivan grinned and looked up at the board, then to Mr. Wang. Yao flushed as he saw the boy's eyes wander up and down his body.

"M-Mr. Braginski, answer problem fifty-two."

Ivan stood up, grabbed his calculator, and sauntered past Mr. Wang's desk and up to the white board. The boy grabbed a red marker and drew a triangle with a theta symbol in the lower right corner.

"You forget this is right triangle?" Yao took an eraser and wiped away the theta symbol. His arm brushed against the Russian's as he drew a box in the corner of the triangle.

Ivan shuffled ever so slightly closer to Yao, and continued to write the problem. Yao's cheeks flushed pink.

Ivan continued to make mistakes, Yao erasing and fixing them as he went along with the rest of the problem. With each correction, the teenager crept a little closer to his math teacher than was necessary, which ultimately flushed Yao's face a darker shade of pink, which curiously progressed to a bright red.

Ivan wrote the answer to the problem on the board.

"Significant figures?" said Yao with a raised eyebrow, trying to mask his embarrassment. The Russian boy sighed and erased two digits from the board.

"Happy now?" whispered the youth, his face too close to his teacher's. Yao stared at the boy's lips and licked his own dry ones before he spoke.

"Kěyǐ-I mean, yes." His eyes flashed towards the class, no one was even paying attention to what was happening at the white board.

They were so close, close enough to k...

Ivan leaned forward and whispered into his teacher's ear.

"My room. After school."

Mr. Wang shivered as his eyes fluttered. When he opened them again, Ivan was already at his desk again-as if the entire encounter had not happened.

Mr. Wang took in a deep breath and let it out as he regained his composure.

"Mr. Hassan, do next problem, ok?" Gupta nodded and walked up to the board quietly.

As the Egyptian boy wrote on the board, Yao couldn't keep his eyes off of the sleeping figure at the back of his classroom. The anticipation was killing him.

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"I swear to God I will hit you with this frying pan," she whispered harshly. Elizaveta's nerves were wearing thin. For some form of ungodly force of nature made Gilbert her partner for Home Economics. Or maybe it was just Mrs. Karpusi.

Speak of the devil, Mrs. Karpusi was instructing the class on how to make 'Fast French Toast'.

"Now take your Mexican vanilla extract and pour a cap-full into your bowl of eggs." The class mimicked their teacher and poured the liquid into their bowls.

"I'm sorry if I've done anything to make you think I'm a terrible person? Is that good enough?" whispered Gilbert as he shook the last drip from the cap into the bowl.

"No," said Elizaveta as she turned on the electric burner and placed the iron frying pan on top of the heat. Why did he insist on trying to make up for pretending to be something he wasn't? He wasn't a boy, her boy. He couldn't be. 'A Boy' was perfect. Despite everything that happened to him, he still held strong-never breaking under the pressure, never being someone he wasn't, never pretending to be perfect-because he was.

Gilbert was everything that was the opposite of that. He wasn't brave-and he was most certainly pretending to be 'A Boy'.

Maybe he was nice...But NO amount of saving baby birds would change her views on him.

Gilbert had saved a baby bird from a gray kitten on Sunday. The little yellow bird was too small to fly, so it had hopped hopelessly along a branch as the kitten had followed it. Gilbert had caught the little bird before it had fallen to the ground. He had thought no one was there, but Elizaveta had seen it all.

"Why the fuck not? I don't know how else to prove to you that I am...myself! This is just so confusing!" Gilbert poured some sugar into the bowl and began to mix vehemently.

"You think you're confused? How do you think I felt when I met an imposter at the dance?"

Elizaveta tried to find the jar of cinnamon that Mrs. Karpusi was holding above her head.

"An imposter? Seriously? Are you fucking stupid? I am me!"

Elizaveta slammed the jar of cinnamon onto the counter.

"Ooooooh, so now I'm stupid?"

Gilbert slapped his hands onto his forehead, pulled them down his face, and then shook them wildly up above his head.

"That's not what I meant, and you know it!" he pointed at her as she searched for a spatula.

"Well then! What did you mean?" she said while looking at him from the corner of her eye. He continued to whisk the mixture slowly.

"You know what I meant." he whispered under his breath.

"Actually, no-I didn't," Elizaveta said as she unwrapped the bread the class had made the day before.

Gilbert stopped mixing and looked at Elizaveta. Just looked at her. He looked down at the mixture and whispered under his breath.

"Sie wirklich nicht, glauben Sie mir, nicht wahr?"

"What did you say?" questioned Elizaveta in an accusatory tone.

"Nothing," said Gilbert as he switched places with her, now grabbing the pieces of the bread to place in the egg mixture.

"Now check if your pan is hot. Remember to grasp the handle with a towel-"

"What did you say?" demanded Elizaveta as she grabbed at the frying pan.

It took a few moments for Elizaveta to realize she had grasped the pan without a towel. She cried out. Elizaveta grasped the wrist of her burnt hand and tears flowed down her cheeks. She collapsed as she hovered over her hand.

"Oh mein Gott!" Gilbert rushed over to Elizaveta, turned the faucet to cold, and shoved her burnt hand under the running water. She couldn't stand; her legs were shaking too much.

"Sind Sie okay?" He stared into her wet green eyes.

Elizaveta whispered under her breath.

"Was?" he brought his ear near her lips.

"Gehe zur fuck weg von mir!" she hissed into his ear as she bunched up his red hoodie with her good fist and shoved him away.

Elizaveta stared with undisguised vehemence through her flooded eyes. She looked away when she saw his face fall.

But it was okay, because she didn't care.

...Did she?

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxX

Toris Lorinaitis was holding hands with his boyfriend when they were stopped by the looming figure, otherwise known as Ivan Braginski. This happened every day after school, and Toris was getting tired of it. He could handle it, but he was more worried about his cross-dressing boyfriend, Feliks Łukasiewicz.

Feliks was...special, and only Toris truly understood him. Toris knew this, so he tried to protect Feliks as much as he could-even if Feliks thought he didn't need protecting.

The Russian boy snickered as he walked towards the couple. Toris tried to back away with Feliks in tow, but bumped into another Russian boy. He looked to his left, then his right. They were surrounded.

"Oh, well hello there. What a nice day it is, da?" said Ivan as he placed his hands behind his back in a relaxed gesture.

Feliks let go of Toris' hand and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

"Like, what do you want?" Feliks said.

"I don't know...just wondering if you wear panties with that skirt of yours?" Ivan said as he lifted the red skirt up. Toris slapped his hand away, because he knew Feliks was just going to play brave and let him get away with it.

"Oh? Were you upset by this? I bet you know if he wears ladies underwear? I bet you fuck him while he wears that skirt every night like the faggot you are." Ivan smiled cruelly as Toris' face flushed with embarrassment and anger. Some of the other boys chuckled.

"Yeah? And, like, so fucking what? I bet you could totally not get a girl to like you without, like, paying for it!" Feliks smiled smugly. One boy let out a snicker-but was soon silenced by a cold look from his leader.

Ivan reached out and pulled at Feliks' blonde hair. Toris tried to stop him, but one of the other boys held him away. Feliks cried out in pain, but tried hard to focus on not letting the tears escape from his eyes.

"What the fuck did you say, queer? What the fuck did you say, you ass-muncher? You don't think I could get a girl on my own, da? I could have my fucking sister if I wanted to! But, you know what? I could even fuck you right now, since you want to be a fucking girl so bad. So? What do you say?" he brought Feliks' face close to him, his hot breath steaming into his eyes-which had given up on holding back their tears.

"Please. Let him go. Please." whispered Toris, he was breaking down, hot tears streaming down his cheeks.

Ivan's eyes narrowed. He turned his head away and threw Feliks on top of Toris, and signaled for the other boy to let him go.

"Come on, lets go-Mne nuzhna khoroshaya yebu."

One of the boys lingered longer than the others and spat at the two boys on the ground.

"Pedik." said the boy, sneering as he left the couple to follow his leader.

XxX

:D Yayyyyyyy! A new chapter! I hope you guys liked it-it was chalked up full of emotions and hypocrisy!

Well, expect another chapter soon, ok?

(I hope to upload at least two chapters this week/weekend)

Bye~!