After School
April was acting even weirder than usual, not that this was a bad thing. She was super funny and much more interesting than most humans I knew. Maybe it had to do with her talk with Draxum earlier in the cafeteria? She seemed more confident and at the same time all over the place. It surely never gets boring; this is why I loved the upper world.
We spend the afternoon on some class projects, talking, eating snacks, and hanging out in one of the abandoned classrooms that we had claimed for our own.
I had focused in my drawing for some time, while April had some physics books scattered all around her and she occasionally hammered some numbers into her calculator.
“Oh man, this just doesn’t make sense, what am I missing?” she cried out and threw her arms in the air.
“What’s up?” I asked. April’s frowny face was difficult to take her seriously, but it was very cute.
“My formula seems right but the calculation is still off, I tried it for the third time now!” she looked at her phone, “I try to avoid doing that for my regular homework but maybe I should call Donnie for help…” she mused.
I liked the boys, but somehow my first instinct was to tell her not to do it.
“Can I look at it?” I offered quickly.
April considered for a second, then brightened up a bit.
“Sure,” she said and gestured that I should come over to her desk.
I took a stool and placed it right beside hers. I leaned forward to have a better look at her nodes.
To be clear, I am not a math wizard, but human physics was one of my strong suits.
“Mmmh,” I run through her calculations, “there seems nothing wrong with this part.”
“You think? That’s…reassuring.” April said beside me. Hunched over I didn’t see her face, but her voice seemed a bit more high-pitched, not really like her usual relaxed tone.
I focused on her nodes again. Some quiet moments passed by. April was sitting so close I could slightly feel her body heat. Humans were naturally warm-blooded beings, very different from most yokai. Surely, very different from me.
Then it struck me, I pointed to a number.
“Here, I think you meant 5 but it looks like a 3?”
“What?!” April picked up her calculator and began punching in numbers in a frenzy.
“You were right!” She cried out when the new result appeared on the screen.
“I knew my own bad handwriting would be my downfall one day,” she said dramatically, then she directly looked at me. I again noticed that our stools were right beside each other. I could see all the small cracks in her glasses and, beyond those, her eyes who glimmered with excitement.
“You are the best,” she said wholeheartedly and placed her hand on top of my own. The warmth I had just now only felt just a bit, almost like a halo, now enveloped my hand. It spread from there to my whole body and my heart pumped at least twice its normal speed.
I looked from our hands to her and back to our hands with eyes wide open.
April’s almost dreamy expression quickly changed to amusement.
“You look super shocked, are you so surprised you found my mistake?” she asked mockingly, but still didn’t pull her hand back. Her words did break a magic spell, the moment who had seemed like an eternity passed by.
I remembered how to blink. Then I took a deep breath.
“I…yes, I guess? You may now call the genius who surpassed Donnie,” I returned with a smug smile.
“Oh, great words! But for that title you need to prove yourself, how about supervising my other homework tasks as well?”
By now the warmth had reached the depths of my heart and surrounded it as if it has been wrapped in a fluffy blanket.
“I guess I have some time on my hands where I will proof my brilliance,” I said and picked up a pencil with my free hand and pointed it towards the physics books as if I was challenging them to a duel.
We didn’t let go of each other’s hands until we had solved every problem we could find and think off.
When we said our goodbyes for today and walked home and it had become quite late and cold, but I didn’t feel the shivering breeze. A warm-blooded yokai, I mused, something like could only happen in the upper world; I really loved living here.