The First Sign

Perry Allwood had been staring at the same number for long enough to know that looking at it again wasn’t going to change anything.

89%.

She knew it was a good score. Most people would probably be happy with it and she was, in a way. Still, there was one thing she couldn’t stop thinking about.

One mark.

She had missed ninety by one mark.

“Are you planning to make it ninety by staring at it?” Sivy asked from beside her.

Perry looked up and found her friend watching her with an amused expression.

“I wasn’t staring.”

“You’ve checked it four times.”

“Three.”

“Four.”

Perry sighed and folded the report card before sliding it beneath her notebook. “Fine. Four.”

Sivy laughed, and Perry couldn’t help smiling.

The classroom was unusually noisy that morning. Students had forgotten about almost everything except their marks. Conversations were happening across benches, with everyone comparing percentages, complaining about particular subjects or celebrating scores they hadn’t expected. Every few minutes, someone announced another result as if they were reading out the winners of a competition.

Perry tried to focus on something else.

Their teacher had mentioned a few weeks earlier that students who scored above ninety might have a better chance of getting into the topper section for Class 10. Perry had never seriously expected to be one of them, but now that the results were in front of her, eighty-nine suddenly felt much closer to ninety than it had any right to.

She was still thinking about it when a group of students near the classroom door suddenly became louder.

“Wait, who’s third?”

Perry looked up.

The topper list had been pinned to the notice board outside. Students crowded around it, blocking most of the names.

Sivy nudged her. “Let’s see.”

They waited for a few people to move before stepping closer. Perry scanned the list from the top, barely paying attention until her eyes reached the third position.

Then she stopped.

Kian Martinson.

She blinked and looked at the name again.

“Kian?” she said quietly.

Sivy leaned closer to make sure she was reading it correctly.

“Oh.”

Perry turned toward him.

Kian was standing a short distance away with Victor, Jensen, and Shane. One of them was talking animatedly, but Kian seemed only half-listening. He glanced at the notice board, adjusted his glasses and then looked away as if seeing his name there wasn’t particularly interesting.

Perry found that more surprising than the result itself.

She had always known Kian was good at maths. Everyone did. He could solve difficult questions faster than most of the class, and teachers often relied on him when nobody else wanted to answer. But at school, he never seemed like someone who was trying to prove anything. He joked with his friends, got distracted during lessons and sometimes looked as though studying was the last thing on his mind.

Apparently, there was more to him than she had noticed.

Perry looked at the list one more time.

Third topper.

A small smile appeared on her face before she could stop it.

She didn’t know why.

Maybe because she hadn’t expected it.

Maybe because Kian never looked like the kind of person who cared about being noticed, yet somehow he had ended up being one of the names everyone was talking about.

She turned away from the board before she could think about it any further.

“It is surprising,” Sivy said.

“Very.”

“You thought he wasn’t that good?”

“No. I knew he was good.”

“Then?”

Perry shrugged. “I just didn’t expect this.”

Neither of them mentioned it again.

But the name stayed somewhere in the back of Perry’s mind for the rest of the day.

The next morning, the new class sections were put up outside the classroom.

This time, Perry didn’t wait for the crowd to disappear. She squeezed between two students and immediately began searching for her name.

She found it halfway down the list.

Perry Allwood - Section A.

Relief came first.

She hadn’t realised how much she had been hoping for that.

“Found yours?”

Sivy appeared beside her, already smiling.

“Yeah.”

They started looking through the names of their classmates, pointing out who had made it into the section and who hadn’t.

Perry wasn’t looking for anyone in particular.

At least, she hadn’t meant to.

Her eyes continued down the list anyway.

Then she saw it.

Kian Martinson - Section A.

She paused.

For some reason, she felt relieved again.

It was ridiculous. She barely even talked to him.

Still, knowing that she would be in the same classroom made the new year feel a little less unfamiliar.

“Coming?” Sivy asked.

Perry stepped away from the notice board.

“Yeah.”

She followed her friend inside, leaving the list behind.

Class 10 began without the dramatic change everyone had promised.

The benches were the same, the windows looked the same, and the blackboard still had faint chalk marks left behind from the previous lesson. Yet the atmosphere felt different. Teachers mentioned boards more often, parents had started asking about marks and future plans and even students who usually didn’t care about anything seemed suddenly concerned about what came next.

Perry settled into her usual seat in the third row beside Sivy.

Kian sat closer to the front with Victor and the others.

For the first few days, she hardly paid attention to him.

Then, without really meaning to, she started noticing things.

She noticed that he pushed his glasses higher whenever he concentrated. She noticed that he tapped his pen twice against his notebook before answering a difficult question, almost as if he needed those two seconds to organise the answer in his head. She noticed that he could look completely uninterested during a maths lesson and still somehow know exactly what the teacher was asking.

It was irritatingly impressive.

One afternoon, their teacher finally lost patience with the boys who had been whispering throughout the lesson.

“You four. Move to the back.”

Victor groaned loudly enough to make half the class laugh.

Jensen started dragging his chair across the floor, while Shane complained that he hadn’t even been talking. Kian didn’t argue. He simply picked up his notebook and followed them.

A few minutes later, they were sitting behind Perry’s row.

She tried to ignore them, but their whispers kept reaching her.

At one point, Victor said something that made Jensen laugh. Perry lowered her head, pretending to concentrate on her notes even though she was trying not to smile.

Then she felt it.

That strange feeling of being watched.

She turned slightly.

Kian was looking at her.

Their eyes met for a brief moment.

He looked away first.

Perry immediately turned back toward the board, even though she hadn’t been looking at it a second earlier.

She lowered her eyes to her notebook and continued writing.

She had no idea why he had been looking at her.

And she wasn’t going to ask.

The results were still being discussed days later.

Perry was packing her books after class when she heard Victor mention Kian’s name.

“Third topper and still acting like nothing happened.”

The boys laughed.

Kian shook his head and told them to stop.

Perry looked up for a moment.

She remembered the notice board.

She remembered seeing his name.

And she remembered something else.

She hadn’t congratulated him.

She had wanted to.

That morning, she had even considered walking over and saying something simple. But Victor and the others had been standing around him and Perry knew exactly how quickly they could turn a harmless conversation into a joke.

She didn’t want the attention.

So she had stayed where she was.

It was easier that way.

At least, that’s what she had told herself.

What Perry didn’t know was that Kian had noticed.

Not immediately, but later that day, he remembered seeing her congratulate the first topper. She had smiled, said something and then moved on.

When it came to him, there had been nothing.

At first, he assumed she hadn’t seen him.

Then he wondered if she simply hadn’t cared.

Neither explanation should have mattered.

Yet for some reason, he remembered it.

He didn’t understand why.

So he stopped thinking about it.

Or at least, he tried to.

A few days later, the results were still being discussed in class.

Perry was sitting beside Sivy when Victor brought up the topper list again.

“Third topper,” he said, looking at Kian with a grin. “At least buy us something now.”

“Why?” Kian asked, without looking up from his notebook.

“Because you’re rich in marks.”

Jensen laughed. Shane added something that made the boys burst into another round of laughter.

Perry smiled to herself and lowered her eyes.

She had wanted to congratulate Kian on the day the results were announced. She really had. But he had barely been alone since then. Victor, Jensen and Shane were almost always around him, and Perry knew how quickly they could turn even the smallest thing into a joke.

If she walked up to Kian and said something as simple as Congratulations, there was a good chance the entire group would notice.

And then she would never hear the end of it.

So she hadn’t said anything.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to.

She simply didn’t want everyone making a big deal out of it.

Later that afternoon, their teacher asked the class a question from the previous chapter.

Nobody answered.

Perry looked down at her notebook, trying to remember the answer.

Then she heard Kian give it from the other side of the room.

The teacher nodded. “Correct.”

Victor immediately leaned toward him. “Of course. Third topper.”

A few students laughed.