As Marinette sat in class, she started to let her mind wander. What if Cat Noir really was at her school? Did she know him? Has she even met him outside of the mask? Marinette always assumed she had met him in passing, like maybe as a customer at the bakery or walking past him in a store, but she never even thought of the possibility that she knows him. Like, knows him on a first name basis or something. She had no idea what grade he was in or anything, probably close to hers? Maybe a year or two older? He was kind of tall, but then again so was half of the male population. She vaguely remembered him mentioning Chloe forcing him to do her physics homework while he was guarding her from the Evillistrator, but she never thought much of it. Actually, she figured he would just fill in the answers with the first word he thought of. Still, any little bit of a clue was still a clue.
Part of her felt guilty for thinking about it, since she never really let Cat mention too much about their personal lives, but at the same time she never stopped him from thinking about her. And if he was somehow able to actually work with the minimal amount of clues that she gave, and somehow figured out who she was? Well, then he simply deserved to know, after all that detective work. She really wasn't that against eventually finding out. In fact, she started to accept that they would eventually figure it out, but she just didn't think about when. Being a superhero seemed like a pretty lifetime job. They had plenty of time to learn about each other.
She started to think about the options of who he could be, if he actually went to the same school. Obviously not Nino, Max, Nathaniel, or Kim, since they had all been akumatized. In fact, she could eliminate almost all of the class, since she had seen Cat Noir with them. Unless he has a secret ability to multiply and be two places at once, that is an elimination factor. So that means he can't be Ivan, either. That basically eliminates her entire class, aside from Adrien. Well, not quite.
Marinette thought back to when the Horrificator had a bunch of people in those 'goo balls'. She remembered seeing Adrien's shoes with the goo, and hearing him call out when she was in the room with all the goo balls. But Marinette had made a little promise in herself to not eliminate any options unless she directly saw them together, because that was only fair. After all, Ladybug answered for Marinette, so voices and actual people were two different things. So she only counted seeing them together as elimination, so Adrien is like… half-eliminated? Whatever.
Marinette had already given her 'why Adrien can't be Cat Noir' rant before to Alya, and laughed inside at herself for considering repeating the rant for a moment. But as time went on- even though that was only a few months ago- she thought she at least matured a little, and was treating everyone as a culprit.
Innocent until proven Cat.
But still, Marinette didn't think Adrien would make a very believable Cat Noir. She did think they would be good friends, though, since they kind of balanced each other out. Adrien was the responsible one, and Cat was the wild fun one. They'd be like an old married couple.
Marinette couldn't help herself but to giggle a little outloud at the mental picture of Adrien and Cat Noir as an old married couple, but caught herself before making a scene.
After calming herself for a moment, she went through the rest of the kids she knew from her school. She mostly hung out with people from her grade, so she didn't have a very detailed list of her other schoolmates, but she still ran through them anyway.
None of them seemed to really fit the bill, for either personality, physical, or just plain common sense reasons.
She shrugged to herself, focusing back to the schoolwork. Being your own personal detective was getting boring, and she'll just have to wait until the next akuma fight to maybe find something new about him.