The crowd of relatively cheery eighth graders all took their seats in plastic chairs at plastic desks and waited for the plastic lesson to begin.   One eighth grader was a mess.  Unable to make friends, unable to play sports, and unable to cultivate the academic rigor necessary to succeed in any prestigious middle-school, he committed the three unpardonable sins.  Sitting there in the middle row, his arms crossed on the desk and his head on top of them, his only wish in 4th hour math class was to leave.  To go back to his loving home and parents, sit on his ass and do nothing of substance until he had to go to school again.
	The classroom was the standard public education classroom, full of ignored positivity posters of cats and puppies and babies.  The inhabitants were the usual bored teacher and her usual bored pupils.   The next generation of athletes, pop stars, and gas station attendants, sitting with hopeful abandon despite where they were, except of course for our boy.
	He, who shall remain nameless, stares at a particular part of the classroom every day for however long he can.  In it sits a raven haired, solitary beauty, herself separated from the throng of the masses.  She sits, graceful, elegant, unattainable.  Her hand firm in her work as she writes out the Pythagorean theorem and receives the square root of x.  He sees her and sees himself, sees himself caressing and holding her far from the dim electric lighting they are currently bathed in. In a beach or in his room, in a wooden glade or sitting side by side with their hand
together and feet dangling below into a small stream.  He imagines the nightlike aspect of her shrouding him,
protecting him from harsh reality.  He admires her ability, her focus, her distance from himself as she sits in front of his view.  He had made numerous fantasies for the numerous times he had stared at her from the middle of the classroom, all of them the fantasies of an eighth-grade boy.
	What the odd, poor, kid had not noticed was that his subject was aware of his actions.  The raven-headed girl, who shall also remain nameless, had seen him stare at her frequently.  Why did she not confront him sooner?  Why had she not let him escape from her confrontation until that fateful day?  The answers are found only in her locked, shapely obsidian head and we must resist the urge to delve further and respect her privacy.
	The boy did as usual on that bright winter day, allowing his mind to wander from the rote memorization of algebraic equations and decimals to romantic achievement and companionship.  It could have been the freezing 20 below temperature, or the backlog of work before midterm break, but today the Raven Haired girl was having none of it.  At the end of class, she rose from her seat, looked directly at the boy and curtly said
	“Please stop staring at me”
	It was as if cannon had been fired.  Every child still remaining in the classroom (most of them along with the teacher had long since left) turned to look at the action in the center of the room.  The boy, for his part, was stunned into complete and utter silence, his mouth gaping open slightly as his eyes widened.  His refuge in the idea of another, in the arms of imagination with the face of a dream, had been shattered in mere moments by the harsh reality in which he
continually found himself.  And so he could only stare and wait for his mind to return to him, broken as it was. The girl, not gaining a response, said again
	“Please stop staring at me.”
	This seem to shock the boy out of his revelry.  She was attacking him! Her, the one who should understand, who should return his glance with a wry smile like in the movies.  Who was this independent and resentful creature, who from her face was irritated and her words resentful?  What had he done to deserve this?  His face, mind, and soul mortified beyond belief (only because SHE was mad, not them, he could care less about THEM), the boy grasped for some believable excuse.
	“I-uh-was um, looking at the board beyond you” he muttered out in a low voice cracked by puberty and strained by underuse.
	“It’s annoying and creepy” she responded, while packing up her things, not seeming to hear the words he was speaking.  Within thirty seconds flat, she was out the door and into the hallway, her long dark hair swishing behind her in rhythm to her gait.
	The classroom around them snickered and pointed at the odd boy, disliked as he was for his haughtiness.   The boy could only stare at the ground, lip trembling, eyes watering.  He waited until everyone else had left before picking up his books and hurrying to his next class.  He continued to go to classes as usual, took the bus home, said hello to his caring mother and strapping father, went to his room, locked the door, and sobbed quietly for at least thirty minutes.
	Years later, the same boy, still self-alienating, still a mess, will think of this day and shudder.  He shudders not because it is the day he publicly embarrassed himself, or made a young woman uncomfortable or even because it reminded him of middle-school.  He shudders because he is ashamed at his imagination, at the base romantic thoughts of a child that he now considers himself far removed from.  Who needs a woman?  He thinks to himself to this day, nose turned up at the caressing and preening of what he considers to be a lesser species than him. But beneath the bitter bluster he remains the same eighth-grade boy and he remains in the same dreamy state he now outwardly scowls at.