I stare as he finishes up the last few sentences of his assignment. He sits right across from me, and it’s too hard for me to pull my eyes away from him. He grips his pencil tightly, and as he writes, I can see the muscles in his arms moving. He has a look of concentration on his face, and he’s biting his lip, thinking. His soft brown hair hangs down in front of his beautiful green eyes. I remind myself to take deep breaths, but I still can’t look away.

He looks up suddenly, feeling eyes on him, and his emerald eyes stare into mine for a split second before I quickly shift my eyes from him. But it’s too late, my breathing lost its control again, and he caught me staring. Yet still, I can’t help but turn my eyes to him once again. I take all of him in again, and notice how good he looks in blue. It’s jersey day for spirit week in our school, and he wore a blue football jersey; he said he got it as a gift from his aunt. The rich blue color brought out his eyes and looked nicely with his hair. I keep that observation locked away in my mind for later so I can compliment him on it.

“Finished,” he declared as he finished dotting the period after the final sentence.

“Finally,” I say, joking around, “You’re like the last one in the class finished,” I laugh.

“Yeah, yeah, shut up,” he smiles as he gets up to turn in his work. I watch his slightly clumsy walk as he walks to the teacher and back to his chair. When he sits back down he smiles and I notice that he has a small dimple on his left cheek. I see that he’s changed his braces colors yet again. They’re red and green now, because it’s close to Christmas. He always gets colors to fit the holiday. They used to be orange and black for Halloween. I smile as I think about what he’ll do after Christmas, when there isn’t a big holiday until July 4th. I know he’ll choose blue to match his shoes, and his binder, and today, his jersey. He seems to match all the time, and every time I mention it, he always claims for it to be an accident. But oh well, I think it’s cute.

Now, as we’re waiting for further directions from our teacher, he makes faces at me like he always does, to make me laugh. And of course, it works. I’d laugh at anything he does. He makes a face, I laugh, he smiles his crooked smile that’s just so cute I could cry, and then he goes on to make more faces. It might sound childish, but I don’t care, because it’s with him. I love anything I do when I spend time with him, because I’m with him.

The teacher doesn’t have time to tell us to do anything else, because the bell rings, signaling that it’s time for lunch. We all rush out of the classroom and to our lockers. His locker is right next to mine, and he’s always faster at putting in his things and getting out his lunch. But he waits for me, the slow poke. I finally grab my lunch, shut my locker, and turn to face him. I smile as I see him grinning down at me. We turn, and walk to the cafeteria, him on the right, me on the left.

He has to look down at me as he talks because I’m only 5’1” and he’s 5’7”. As he tells his story, he waves his hands around excitedly and attempts to walk backwards so he can face me as he’s talking. But he doesn’t see how close he is to the wall and he runs right smack into it. We burst out laughing, bending over and holding our stomachs. We even have to stop walking so that we can get control over ourselves. When we finally stop laughing, we continue to walk, wiping the tears from our eyes because we were laughing so hard.

Now, we join our friends at the lunch table, talking over each other to tell them the story of how he ran into a wall. We laugh again as we retell the incident.

I drink in my joy, as a let the whole day wash over me, smiling as I think about the remaining of our classes that we have together after lunch. I want to remember this day for as long as I can. Because I know, that tomorrow it will be different, because she won’t be absent again for a while.