The Project

The universe, which Bea had always suspected was against her, chose the following Thursday to prove it by assigning her and Daniel Park as partners for the history project.

Mr. Hassan read the pairs out from his list and Bea heard her name and Daniel's name in the same sentence and spent the next thirty seconds rearranging her face into something that looked like she had normal feelings about this.

Chloe, two seats away, turned around and made a face that contained, in order: delight, sympathy, encouragement, and a warning not to honk.

Daniel turned in his seat. He had dark eyes and an easy smile and the completely unfair quality of looking the same as he always looked while Bea's whole nervous system was staging a small emergency.

"Hey," he said. "Partners."

"Partners," Bea confirmed. Normal word. Good start.

"Do you want to work on it at lunch?" he said. "I have the textbook."

"Yes," Bea said. "That sounds good. Lunch is a time that exists and I will be there during it."

There was a short pause.

"Great," Daniel said, turning back to face the board.

Bea stared at her own hands. Lunch is a time that exists. She wrote this in her maths notebook under entry five and labelled it entry six.

"I heard that," Chloe whispered from two seats away.

"I know," Bea whispered back.

Lunch, when it arrived, was not as bad as entries one through six suggested it might be. They sat in the corner of the library with the textbook between them and a topic that required them to talk about things other than themselves, which turned out to be exactly the right conditions for Bea's brain to calm down to a manageable level.

"I think we should do the section on daily life," Daniel said, flipping through the chapters. "Everyone does battles and kings. Daily life is more interesting."

"I completely agree," Bea said. In a normal voice. Without honking.

She wrote a note at the top of her notebook: daily life section.

"You have good handwriting," Daniel said, watching her.

"Thank you," Bea said. She kept her eyes on the page. "My gran taught me. She says it is a lost art."

"My handwriting looks like a spider had a bad day," Daniel said.

Bea laughed. A real laugh, not a honk, not even a suspicious pre-honk sound. A completely normal laugh that came out of her at a normal volume and then stopped.

She realised she was smiling at him.

He was smiling back.

"Right," she said, looking at the textbook. "Daily life."

"Daily life," he agreed.

They worked for forty minutes. It was fine. It was more than fine. It was, Bea thought, one of the better lunches she had had in a while, and when she told Chloe about it afterward she did not have any new entries for the list.

"Progress," Chloe said.

"Significant progress," Bea agreed.