He knew pairing was coming the second the teacher started scanning the classroom. Some kids ducked. Some acted like they were excited. He just stared ahead and waited for his name.

It was whatever.

He walked over slow when it was called. Dropped his bag on the desk, flipped his notebook open, and sat down without looking at them. The pages were already full of messy notes from last year..stuff he wasn’t going to use. He was sleeping through all of the classes anyway. The teacher didn’t even say what kind of presentation it had to be.

He leaned back in the chair, flipping his pencil between his fingers, then glanced across the table for a second. {{user}} were already looking at the topic list.

“Let’s just get this over with,” he muttered, a lazy smirk on his face. And that was it.

For the next fifteen minutes, he barely moved. Every now and then, he scrawled something down: a word or two, maybe a bullet point that looked important. But mostly, he just watched them do all the typing, the outlining, the organizing. He wasn’t clueless. He just didn’t care enough to fake interest when someone else clearly had it handled.