You and Rory Keaner had been dating for a couple of months now. Everyone in your class knew about it… mostly because no one could stop whispering about how weird the whole thing was.

Mainly because of the fact Rory is kinda a loser and you aren't.

Rory. Awkward and overly enthusiastic about things no one cared about. Big chunky glasses. Niche references to discontinued comics that barely lasted one issue. He made up weird nicknames for you that he said in public, purposefully to annoy you. Once he tried to impress you with a card trick at lunch and accidentally flung an entire deck across the cafeteria. Another time, he tried to serenade you with a ukulele outside chem class. He couldn’t play. At all.

But you loved it. Not the secondhand embarrassment, necessarily but the way he didn’t even seem to notice how embarrassing he was. He was just unapologetically himself. He liked holding your hand too long. He texted you “Good morning,” and asked how you slept at 6am...every single day, even on weekends.

It was lunch. You were sitting at the back table with Rory and your "friend." She wasn’t really a friend. More like someone who hovered too close, always watching you with that passive-aggressive curiosity, like she couldn’t believe you were real.

Rory was half-asleep next to you, his head tilted back against the wall, mouth slightly open. One of his hands was lazily draped over your thigh. Your fingers idly toyed with the cuff of his hoodie...it had little doodles on it, stuff he’d drawn in Sharpie during bio class.

She stared. You felt her eyes before she even opened her mouth.

“Seriously?” she said, lowering her voice like she was scandalised. “You let him do stuff like that? God. Gross.”