Straight As since our report cards were A through F instead of being fives to ones, except when he didn’t hand something in. It was too important not to give his teachers any ammunition to hand to his parents. An intentionally messed up project couldn’t be explained away. A missing project could be blamed on the teacher’s failure.

He wasn’t a genius. His reading of people, his grades, he knew he wasn’t special. It was that everyone else was dumb, or they… they hadn’t had a reason to try. They coasted. It was a Tuesday, and he’d overheard some people talking about next Saturday’s morning cartoons.

He’d had to work for a long time now, at every interaction. Every project.

“This isn’t bad,” he lied, finishing up, passing her project back to her. He took his own back.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You never get out of your chair when it’s a group project or class activity.”

“There are twenty-nine students in class,” she said. “No matter what size the group is, someone has to be left out.”

“Thirty students in class now. I’m here,” he told her. “Unless you tell me not to, I’ll group with you until the end of the year, ’kay?”

She nodded, smiling. “Alright. Um, and it’s Manny.”

“Manny?”

“You wrote Amanda here. I wanted to get it out of the way. Manny, not Amanda. They always use our full name for roll call.”

He had to adjust his glasses.

“Got it,” he said, even though he didn’t. Manny was a dumb name for a girl.

The teacher was watching the exchange, he guessed. He couldn’t look. Perception mattered, and the last thing he wanted was to be seen as calculating.

A part of him was pleased Amanda had been so easy to work with. If he was putting in the extra effort, maybe there was some way to get some payoff later on. She probably wasn’t romantically interested in him, but he’d observed that any male and female friend who spent enough time together would form some kind of attraction. If he wanted to, he just had to stick near her.

He wasn’t that interested in that. But could he make her do something, like hurting someone else, or stealing something? Could he remain the angel at home and at school while getting others to do what he wanted?

It was so easy, when so many others were unaware, barely thinking from moment to moment, and yet it was so hard to justify. So much work for so little gain. He wasn’t that kind of guy, who had a herd of others following him.

A card to keep up his sleeve.

“We might have a third person for our groups,” Amanda said.