“Get in your pairs now!” The teacher yells. Luna gets up and moves to Josh. Victoria also stands up and turns toward him, then she sees Chen.

“Hey Victoria.” He smiles.

“Hi Chen.” She gives him a small smile. He stands up and goes over to Krystal. She sits down next to him.

“The project will be in a PowerPoint, by the way.” The teacher adds.

“So, what should the topic be about?” She asks forcing her tone to be light.

“I don’t know.” He says. A pause.

“What about we find out which genres are more popular and why?” She asks.

“Okay.” He nods once, a quick motion and then he sees Victoria scribble something in a red notebook. “So we should probably right down which genre we think is the most popular now so that at the end, it will say who was right or wrong.” He adds and she nods and writes something else down. He does the same: Mystery? Action? “So how are we going to research?” He asks focusing on his writing, if he looked at her, the situation would probably become even more awkward.

Victoria watches him, is he avoiding her because she asked him out? Logically it should be her who is avoiding him since he did say no in an unnecessary way but she couldn’t really bring herself to avoid someone who just said no to a date. In her opinion, that’s a quite childish thing to do. Except for the fact that she took rejection badly.

Usually she could read a person but she couldn’t read Tao at all, she has absolutely no idea if he’s mad or distracted, but this made him a challenge. Maybe trying to figure him out could distract her, just focus on this project for now, her brain orders.

Tao sees her staring ahead of her, the gears turning in her head. She’s muttering things under her breath in Mandarin, wow, he didn’t know she spoke that. She’s saying the genres and books that are in that genre, some he had never even read. He makes a note to read one of the books she mentioned: Game of Thrones, he’d heard of it but didn’t really think too much of it.

He writes a few books down in the categories he had made earlier, and adds a new genre: Love. Love stories are very popular, like that Twilight series. Another genre: Fantasy. What about the Fault in Our Stars, he’d seen the movie only because everyone had been talking about it, it was really sad. So did people like tragic love stories? More writing.

He digs in his bag for one of the books he’s reading at the moment to look which genre it is because for some reason he forgot the plot. He gets it out but it slides out of his fingers and drops to the floor, he reaches forward to get it at the same time another hand reaches forward. Their hands brush and the touch sends a jolt of electricity through his hand, the other hand grabs the book. He straightens to see his book being placed on his desk by Victoria, it lands with a soft thump and then she starts writing in her notebook. Is she avoiding him because he said no? Does she hate him? Stop being off track and make some progress!

“I think we should compare notes now, maybe say which is more popular than the other and stuff.” He says.

“Alright.” She passes her notebook to him. She has nice handwriting and every thing is neatly organised, you’re not here to admire her handwriting, read what she has, his brain tells him. She’s written lots of books and genres down, most are in the love one but some are connected to other genres by lines like fantasy or action.

Wow he’s got good handwriting, Victoria says, well, for a guy, she adds focusing on what he’s written. The book titles are organized into a list under the different genres, lots are mystery and action with a few love as well.

“At the moment, I’m thinking that action and love are the leading ones.” She says.

“Add fantasy to that as well.” He replies still looking over her notes.

“So a slide for each of those three main ones, maybe we can break those down into sub ones. For example; love and fantasy would be quite popular with Twilight. Action and love could be the Hunger Games. Oh wait! What about science fiction?” She points to one of the things he wrote.

“Yeah, that works.” He nods slightly.

“So we could add that new book Divergent to it, the Hunger Games could also go there…” She trails off.

“In the fantasy section is Harry Potter, Twilight, lots of popular series are there including this Game of Thrones, right?” Tao asks her.

“Yes.” She says. The bell rings and she’s up putting her stuff in her bag and then slinging it across her shoulder, she waits in front of her desk for Luna and they head to class together.

“How was it being partnered up with Victoria?” Chen asks him.

Tao tries to find the right words, “Alright, at least I didn’t get a dumb partner.” He shrugs, except a dumb partner would actually look at me, or smile. He adds in his head.

“How was the first day working with Robot Panda?” Luna asks using their nickname for Tao.

“Could have been worse.” She says. Worse than a guy who was given the nickname Robot Panda, yeah, that’s easy to find. She almost rolls her eyes, at least he’s smart, she tells herself. She hates it when a boy is dumb because then she has to do almost all the work herself and do about a fourth of his work.

There was something else too, when she had picked Tao’s book up and their hands had touched. She had felt something odd, like an electric pulse travelling up her arm and her heart had sped up, could she be falling for him? Impossible, you’ve just lost it, she shakes her head.