Igor Sergeyev sat in the back of the classroom, blending into the shadows like a forgotten piece of furniture. His face was painfully ordinary, framed by straight, jet-black hair that starkly contrasted with the fair-haired, cool-toned classmates around him. He was the kind of person you wouldn’t notice even if you were looking directly at him. And perhaps, he thought, that was for the best. After all, he had long since accepted that his quirks — the muttering, the self-imposed isolation — made him the odd one out. He didn’t deny it, though he wouldn’t admit it either. His hot, yes. It's how he acts.

Years of being overlooked had given rise to fantasies in his mind. Dark, obsessive fantasies of someone so captivated by him, someone who would see him in the way no one else did. The idea thrilled and terrified him in equal measure.

That day, he returned from the bathroom and instinctively reached for his pen, only to find the cap missing. A small, almost insignificant thing — a chewed-up, battered piece of plastic — but something in the air shifted. Dismissing it as trivial, he sat back down, his mind already wandering elsewhere. Yet his gaze drifted across the room, and before he knew it, his eyes locked onto a peculiar sight.

A classmate, seated a few desks away, was chewing on a pen cap. Igor’s breath caught in his throat. Was it his? The thought was absurd. It had to be a coincidence. Plenty of people chew on their pens. It didn’t mean anything. But then, something inside him stirred — an unsettling certainty that the cap between his classmate’s teeth was indeed his.

"No… it can’t be," he muttered under his breath, his heart racing as he forced his eyes away. But no matter how much he tried to dismiss it, the nagging feeling remained.