The thing about attention was that it followed Alice like bad weather.
He'd made peace with this a long time ago. In high school it had been manageable, mostly because his mother had shown up to school exactly once, for exactly one reason, and the aftermath had been thorough enough that people quietly decided Alice Lancaster wasn't worth the trouble. He'd spent three peaceful years mostly left alone, which was exactly what he wanted, with Bryan and Lucy around when he needed them.
College was going to take a little longer to sort itself out.
He could feel the classroom watching him. Not all at once, not obviously, but in that scattered way where every few seconds someone's eyes landed on him and slid away when he didn't react. Mostly boys, a few girls. He'd learned early that his face did something to people's attention spans and he had never appreciated it.
Bothersome. That was the word for it.
The boy next to him, Ethan, was still talking.
Alice had caught about half of it. Something about the campus map being a public safety hazard. Something about the vending machine on the second floor already being broken. Something about a professor whose name Ethan had decided not to attempt. Alice was listening the way he listened to background noise, present enough to catch anything important, not present enough to invite more.
He wondered, briefly, if Ethan thought he was a girl.
Most people did, given the uniform and everything else. Alice didn't particularly care. It wasn't his job to manage other people's assumptions, and he had no plans to start. If Ethan thought he was a girl, he was wrong, and that was Ethan's problem to figure out in his own time.
What Alice did care about was that Ethan was still talking.
He reached into his bag, pulled out the book he'd packed for exactly this kind of situation, and set it on the desk.
"I'm going to read," he said.
Ethan looked at the book. Then at Alice. "Oh." A beat. "Cool, yeah." Another beat. "Have you read that one before or is this your first time?"
Alice looked at him.
"I read it in high school," Ethan continued, completely unbothered. "The ending kind of annoyed me. Not bad, just. You'll see."
"I'll read it and find out."
"Right, yeah, totally." He nodded. Then: "Do you think they'll do assigned seating all semester or just the first week?"
Alice opened the book.
Ethan, with the energy of someone who had either missed or simply decided not to acknowledge the signal, kept talking in a low, easy voice. Not demanding responses. Just narrating his thoughts in Alice's general direction. It was, Alice had to admit, a specific kind of annoying he hadn't encountered before. Lucy talked a lot, but Lucy at least understood when she was being tuned out. Ethan seemed to treat the book as a conversational pause rather than an ending.
Alice read his page. Ethan talked. The classroom filled up around them.
It was, somehow, not as unbearable as it should have been.
Self-introductions started twenty minutes in.
He'd been expecting this. It was always how first days went. Stand up, say your name, say something about yourself, sit back down while the room tried to look interested. Alice had a very practiced approach.
When his name was called, he stood, looked at the general middle distance, and said:
"Alice Lancaster. First year. I like reading and I hate insects."
He sat down.
The room held a specific kind of quiet for about two seconds. Not awkward. More like the silence of people recalibrating. He felt the attention land on him, heavier than before, and picked up his pen and looked at his notebook.
Bothersome.
The introductions kept going. The person after Alice said something he didn't catch. Then the next. Then Ethan stood up, said his name, Ethan Riley, said something about being bad at mornings, and sat back down. Alice's attention moved on. Back to the notebook, back to the whiteboard, back to the reasonable goal of getting through the morning without anything interesting happening.
He made it to lunch.