December 13th. Fourth hour. One day until winter break. It's the only thing keeping me going.

We have a minimum ten minute presentation to prepare for! _Ten minutes_! Absurd! It's supposed to be a Ted Talk. Like, to help us get more comfortable with our peers. Yeah, right. The only good part was that we got to choose our topics. I went from behavioral analysis in psychopaths to nature vs. nurture to, finally, the case of JonBenét Ramsey. I figured: What's better to talk about for ten minutes than an unsolved case from the 90s?

So I have my notecards finished, they are stacked in a neat pile in the corner of my desk. I go through the whole speech I'll recite come my presentation. I mention to my friend how nervous I am and how I hope I'll do good and won't embarrass myself too bad almost constantly.

A boy, coming back from turning something in, overhears and he just grabs my notecards off of my desk and leans against the one adjacent to mine. Now, I've never really paid much attention to him and I didn't even see him as someone that I could ever be interested in.

Anyways, I'm looking up at him from my seat because he's just taken my notecards like they were his. They had very vague bullet points listed, as I had made myself somewhat of an expert on this cold case and prepared myself in every possible way for my presentation. So he just... starts reading them off and so since they aren't actually questions, I just start elaborating on each one.

"The night of her disappearance?"

"December 25, 1996."

"Lou Smit?"

"He was one of the detectives that was on the case."

I couldn't make eye contact with him, and I kept looking towards the clock in between each bullet point he asked me about. I felt hot. Like, my cheeks were hoooot. And my ears. I didn't think I was blushing, the thermostat must've just gone up a bit. The school's thermostats were always finicky. Everytime I looked over I noticed something new I never paid attention to before. Big, brown eyes. Super cute and curly, dark hair. Freckles dotted all over his face. A _really_ cute smile. Long eyelashes.

God, when did it get so hot in here? I felt sweaty and nervous and... Why did I suddenly feel so conscious of myself? My face felt so red. I _cannot_ have a crush on this guy. He was a jock. And I was a loser who was presumed gay because I had a friend who was a lesbian, which is totally cliche but there's a total of, like, 400 kids in this school(over half of which were incredibly homophobic) so people who are slightly different aren't really appreciated. Short story short, it wasn't going to happen. Great.