Tangled Wires
He hurriedly gets dressed as his mind races a Mile (haha) a minute. Pavitr complimented his running, called him amazing, taught him how to kick, PRAISED him vis a vis his kick, stood there TITS OUT, and let him keep some sweet smelling deodorant. He walked through the hallway like he was in a cold sweat. There was only one explanation for such a confusing morning.
Pavitr Prabahakar hated his guts.
He’s walking hard, and fast, like he’s on a mission. There was no plausible explanation, no one is ever that nice to someone who visibly doesn’t want anything to do with them. Granted he did ask him for deodorant but he didn’t have to let him keep it. His nostrils were almost flaring with how hard he was breathing. He obviously wants to see him fail and this whole “friendly” thing was an act to mask how much he dispised Miles. Good. Because he hated his stupid face just as much, if not more. No, Miles hated Pavitr Prabahakar 100x and then some, if that’s the game that’s being played here.
His venomous thoughts were cut short as Hobie falls in line next to him in the hallway.
“What’s up? What’d you do in gym?” He was on his blackberry, listening to some loud, angry band on his chunky headset. Miles didn’t even realized how hard he was gripping the straps of his backpack until Hobie’s voice interrupted his rage.
Miles sighed. “Terrible things that I’d rather not talk about. I have a new enemy, you know,” he looked up at his friend, defeated. Hobie just laughed.
“You’re being anxious, mate. You know what would make you less anxious?” He had a devilish smile on his face like he often did when coming up with a plan that would definitely make Miles even more anxious. “Going to this party at Gayatri’s she’s having with Pav. His student council drones are already telling people about it.” He flashes Miles some messages he’s been exchanging. “Gonna meet up with this peng senior that night. Think I really like her.”
“You don’t mean that,” Miles shakes his head at the name and the insinuation. “That’s my enemy. I just realized he hates me today.” He scowls in resentment, thinking back to his discovery in the hallway post-gym.
Hobie laughed, again, though it was short. This was getting a bit ridiculous, Hobie has to stop laughing at his serious revelations. “You’re right, I dont. But there’s no way he hates you- Pav can’t hate anyone. I think someone pushed on his head as a baby and now he’s physically incapable. I would know cuz it was me.”
Miles ignores the end part as they climb the stairs. “You don’t get it- you had to be there. He hates me, and I hate him.” Miles says sternly. See, this was Pavitr’s trap. He’s getting everyone to like him so the people who don’t seem crazy and awful and now their friends can leave them behind to faun over him.
“Alright, well, give him a chance. You’d get along great.” Hobie looks at him in a way Miles doesn’t understand, he just kinda smiles and snickers to himself, the same look indicating a bad idea flashing across his features.
“Cheer up, you look so mad it’s funny,” he puts his hand on Miles’ head and roughs him up a bit. “Have fun in chemistry. Make a concoction to blow up your archnemisis.” Miles just pushes him away as he rounds the corner to his class, watching with a raised eyebrow as Hobie blows him a kiss and walks away snickering, like he knows some secret. Miles sighs, opening the door and sits at his desk.
His usual work partner isn’t here, so he has the black table to himself today, which is fine because it’s just note transferring. Chemistry is far from his favorite subject, but he can stumble through it with a solid A- if it means more focus on physics. Physics and art were his main passions at a school like Visions, though the art didn’t really come into play until his Uncle Aaron convinced him it was worth exploring a handful of years ago. Even so, he was gonna be a great physicist, find time for art, and show chemistry, biology, AND Pavitr who was really winning. Still, he mindlessly copied numbers and data onto one sheet of paper to the next, his eyelids threatening to fall at the tediousness and only showing mild interest when the teacher walked out the room for a second, coming back with someone behind her.
What. The. Fuck.
His eyelids snap open. Why was he here?! Could he sense when Miles was conspiring against him? He gripped his pencil so tight it nearly snapped in half. If looks could kill, Pavitr Prabahakar and his stupid face would unrecognizedable and obliterated.
“Hey, Miles!” Pavitr greeted him with a wave in his stupid, fake happy tone, his voice cutting across the rest of the chatting classroom. Ugh. Who waves with their whole arm like that? We get it, you have strong forearms.
The teacher walked him over to Miles’ desk, and he grew increasingly resentful of his absent lab partner. “Pavitr’s in my AP class and he missed some notes last year that he needs for the exam, could you let him use yours? It was unit 6.” Miles couldn’t do anything but reluctantly pull out his folder and try to flip through the unorganized papers.
Pavitr sat his stupid sculpted butt next to him, and Miles could feel his stupid brown eyes on him. “Isn’t it funny seeing eachother again?” He could do nothing more but slap the paper Pavitr needed down on the desk. It was a little harsher than necessary, but he was filled with white hot annoyance.
“We go to the same school,” he put his nose back into his work, it now becoming the most interesting thing in the world.
Pavitr just laughs off the abrasion. A couple moments of silence pass, and now he’s quietly humming to himself as he works. Of course he has to hum, and of course it has to sound like honey and gold pouring into Miles’ ears (even if it is Lady Gaga). Miles could never carry a note, hummed or aloud, and it killed him. He loved music, he loved hearing people sing, so hearing this perfect dude use his silky voice for something other than talking about nothing made Miles’ blood run hot and toxic.
And of course he had to smell of coconut and vanilla, just like his deodorant. He bit the inside of his cheek thinking about his shower caddy. Coconut and vanilla shampoo, body wash, lotion, how pretentious. Sure, Miles used a combination of shea butter scents, but at least it didn’t smell delicious 24/7.
And of course his jewelry, his ornate gold bangles grazing the desktop as he wrote, had to catch the light so well and compliment his skin tone. God, did this dude invent gold? It’s like a big middle finger to everyone else. Miles glanced up to confirm an itching suspicion in his bones, and yes, his stupid ear lobes were pierced with gold rings. His grip on his pencil increased dramatically, his mind racing with how much his jewelry personally offended him.
“Hey bro, you did this wrong.”
His pencil snaps.
Pavitr just giggles, again. “Look here,” he puts the paper Miles did a month ago in between them, “if you had 50 mL of this, 15 mL of this would make it bubble over.” He flat out erases Miles’ original work. “Did you mean 5?” He looks up at Miles intently, with his stupid round brown eyes.
Ok, now he’s gonna hold it over his head that he’s an idiot who can’t do simple calculations. How dare he call him out like this. “Probably. I don’t know. I hate chemistry.” Miles takes out another pencil and manages to mutter at him as calmly as possible. Pavitr looks pained by this.
“What! Chemistry is so fun! You can make concoctions to blow up your archenemies. And it’s the backbone of biology!” He gives Miles his full focus now, body now facing the left in his chair, opens on the chair between his thighs.
Miles just glares at Pavitr from the corner of his eye. “I hate both. Physics is so much better.” He didn’t see the point in writing anymore if he wanted his statement to stick.
“Is that why you labeled all of these wrong?”
“Ok, yeah. I hate chemistry and I don’t understand it, ok?” Miles crossed his arms on the desk and rested his chin over top of them in frustration, wanting to yell but holding back.
“No need to be a baby!” He said it in the least patronizing way he could, which still sounded like he was looking down on Miles. It irritated him, that he never once saw him express an emotion that wasn’t inherently positive. “You like physics and art.” He sounded like he was confirming it with him.
Miles glanced up at him, a bit embarrassed under the attention of Pavitr looking down at him with an intrigued eyes and a slight smile. He never noticed this before, but…Pavitr had dimples. And acne scars. Miles’ heart does a scary thing at the sight.
“Physics is the study of how matter interacts, no? And chemistry is the study of what makes up matter. They’re more related than you’d think, thermodynamics, kinetics, etc.” He grins, a far off look in his eyes as he prattles off. He looks so passionate about science as a whole, his big brown eyes catching the light in a way that reminds Miles of amber.
He looks down at him again, snapping Miles out of his observations. “What about art?”
“What?” Miles blinks, confused.
“I don’t know that much about it, I can finish the stuff later,” he pushes the papers he’s working on into a neat pile in the corner of the desk. “Tell me about it.”
“Tell you…about art?” Miles sits up slowly, repeating the question to him with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he leans in slightly. He could’ve said ‘mhm’. He could’ve nodded. He could be confirming Miles’ suspicions and just gathering information to make fun of him with. But in the moment, Miles just blinks. All of his friends knew he drew, and they praised him for it. But they’ve never took an interest like this before. Despite the fact that it had an arts department, being at a stem school, very few cared about the arts outside of like, design and engineering. So to hear, or maybe see, someone so interested despite the fact he just asked him to “tell him about art”, Miles can feel heat rise to his face and a warm, comfortable feeling rise throughout his whole body. He can only laugh at the sensation and the situation.
Pavitr looked worried, like he’d made himself look stupid, an expression Miles has never seen him wear. “What? What’d I say?” Miles could see a tinge of color on his tan, acne scarred cheeks.
“No, you just asked me to ‘tell you about art’ ,” Miles said this in air quotes, smiling despite his hatred’s intuition. “Do you mean, like, a specific medium?”
If he wasn’t blushing before, he was now, though faintly. “Hah! I guess I really am a nerd. Tell me about the art you do, the art you like to do!” The focused look was back on his face once he got over the embarrassment of Miles’ laughter.
“Well,” Miles thinned his lips into a line for a second, the attention still fairly foreign to him, “I like street art. Graffiti, yknow? Spray paint, tagging…” He starts to ramble. It takes a minute, but he slowly becomes more and more comfortable and enthusiastic. He doesn’t notice, but he has Pavitr’s full attention, a smile that puts his dimples on full display spread across his face.
“What about you? Do you draw or..?” Miles finally stops, his smile fading as Pavitr’s own encourages him to talk more, the reality of what he was doing catching up to him. Pavitr just giggles again, rubbing the side of his neck sheepishly.
“It looks fun! I just never got the hang of it. But ooh! My auntie used to draw, and one time I begged her to show me to draw a dog.” He goes through the motions of sketching a fairly detailed and accurate street dog.
“Hey, that’s not bad!” Miles says. Miles’ fingers subconsciously grab his pencil and starts sketching in the margins of his paper as he listens to Pavitr’s stories about his auntie, his bangles, street dogs, hanging onto every word. It’s just Pavitr’s name, over and over, but in different styles and fonts, each associated with one of his features in some way. A soft, bouncy font for his dimples. An elegant one for his hair. A rounded one for his eyes. Looking at his paper, something feels fondly familiar about mindless doodling when you’re thinking about another person.
“Hey! That’s me-“ He laughs, pointing to the page. “This one has my essence, huh?” He puts his hands under his chin. “That’s so amazing.”
Miles just clears his throat as Pavitr tries his best the copy it onto the “name” section of his notes. He looks down at his paper and realized he was the most messy, inconsistent scrawling for handwriting imaginable. So much for perfect. He looks away as if he’s been caught doing something wrong as Pavitr looks back up at him.
“You should join track so we can hang out more!” He tries to convince him. Miles just laughs nervously, knowing he’d hate running everyday.
“Sports aren’t my thing, man.” He shakes his head. He’s been told the “you should join track” thing as much as tall people hear the “you should join basketball” thing. Pavitr pouts.
“Alll righttt,” he slumps in his seat, thinking. “Oh! Gayatri and I are throwing a party at her place on Friday. Would you wanna come?” He asks excitedly, practically bouncing a bit.
Miles was confused. His intuition was telling him that no, Pavitr Prabahakar hates him and wants to see him fail. They’re archenemies. But another part of him wants to go. He wants to have fun with his friends and see Pavitr and be like everyone else in his presence. He swallows his thoughts.
“I’ll have to think about it. My parents are strict.” He says, slightly apologetically as he packs up his stuff once the bell rings. Pavitr just waves it off.
“No worries! Think fast, ok?” He picks up his bag and starts out the class, waving to him with his whole arm again. “Thanks for the wrong notes Da Vinci!”
What a confusing day. What a confusing guy, too, maybe this really was his ultimate plan. Making Miles think about his good smell and his pretty jewelry and his dimples and his soft hair, yeah, Miles is not buying it. At least he can see Gwen at lunch, right? A pallet cleanser.