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as someone covers my eyes.
    “What the hell?” I ask, half
irritated, half surprised.
    “Guess,” I hear a deep, husky voice
whisper in my ear, so close that his breath tickles my neck and
sends shivers across my skin. I inhale the woodsy, earthy smell of
his cologne and I have to admit that, for a brief moment, my
irritation fades and I relax. This feels good – his closeness, my
head cradled in his chest, his touch. Then I snap out of
it.
    “Are you stalking me?” I
accuse.
    Craig laughs as he releases my
eyes.
    “No, seriously. You’re stalking
me!”
    “This happens to be my next
class.”
    I pause for a moment, letting that
sink in.
    “Yepp.” He watches the realization hit
me, “You have the pleasure of seeing me twice a week for the next
few months, princess.” He gives me a sideways smirk that I’m
all-too-familiar with.
    I roll my eyes and get back to my
phone, opening Hailey’s response text.
    “I’m up. Julie gets ready
with music blasting. I couldn’t sleep in if I tried. Thanx for the
text though. See u later.”
    “Your new boyfriend?”
    I roll my eyes. “None of your
business.”
    When I look up, I notice he’s sitting
right beside me. Too close.
    “Are you staying there?” I ask,
“Because if so, I’m moving my seat.”
    “Why do you hate me so much?” His
voice is tight, but his features soft.
    “You annoy me. And don’t even try to
act all innocent. You know you do it on purpose.”
    “Because I call you
princess?”
    “Among other things.”
    “Okay, Valerie . I’ll try not to call you
princess anymore. Is that a start? Truce?”
    I hesitate, trying to decipher what
he’s really trying to do here.
    He takes my hesitation as a no. “See,”
he says seriously, “It’s not that. I think you’re just determined
to hate me no matter what.” And before I can respond, he grabs his
books and walks up to the next row. He sits down without even
looking back.
    I can’t help it; it stings a little.
So I gather my stuff and move up a row too. I sit right next to
him. “Stop calling me princess. Stop irritating me on purpose. Stop
flirting. And maybe we can be friends, for Drew and Hailey’s sake,
if nothing else,” I offer.
    “Well irritating you seems to come
natural to me. I don’t even have to try, so I’m not really sure how
I can stop.”
    “C’mon, Craig. You know what I
mean.”
    “Fine,” he agrees. But I
can still feel the tension rolling off of him. He’s still mad at
me. What the hell did I ever do to him for him to be mad at me ?
    The professor walks in before I can
address the issue with Craig. I hadn’t even noticed the classroom
filling up. The professor is a small, middle-aged lady, with dark
hair and glasses. The first thing she does is instruct us to move
the tables and chairs into a u-shape, rather than lined up in rows
like they are now. We all get to work adjusting the classroom. She
tells us we’ll have to do this every day at the start of class,
because she wants a more intimate feel, where all of her students
can see their classmates. Then she hands me a stack of papers and
tells me to take one and pass the rest along. I take the first one
in the stack and hand the rest to Craig, who is still sitting
beside me. She explains that the class is mostly lectures, broken
up by speaking days. On the speaking days, we’ll be responsible for
standing in front of the class and reciting an assignment. The
first speaking day, we’ll be allowed to read our assignment off of
a piece of paper. The second speaking day, we’ll be able to use
note cards, only looking down when we get stuck. And the third
speaking day will be completely from memory. Our final exam won’t
be an assignment at all, but rather just speaking in front of the
class about anything of our choosing: talking about our favorite
book or movie, debating an argument, soliciting people to join a
team or activity, reciting a poem, anything. The class wouldn’t
seem that hard at all, if it