Chapter 9: Chapter 9

Renea leaned forward, sipping some fruity drink from a polished cocktail glass. “So what if he’s quiet. Don’t you know how hard it is to find someone who can shut up?”

Denis groaned as he ran his hand through his blond hair. “It’s just awkward, I don’t know, I can't tell if he’s shy, angry, constipated, or plainly doesn't like me.”

“Why would he have agreed to be your lab partner if he didn’t?”

“I don’t know, okay.” Denis had thrown his hands out, his voice rising the slightest in pitch. Augustine and Renea exchanged a glance at Denis’s struggles. But he was too exhausted to try to decipher it.

“Why don’t you ask him?” Augustine suggested. Both Renea and Denis shot him a nasty glare.

“You don’t just ask  somebody, Augustine.” Renea looked at him like he maybe wasn’t Augustine at all, perhaps he was some strange creature who’d flayed Augustine’s skin right off his bones and dressed the part to infiltrate their small friend group.

Augustine held up a hand against their protests. “Hear me out. Ravi is neither rich nor highborn. Ravi is just someone who got into Harvard on a scholarship. You can’t apply high society rules to scholarship students.”

That made Denis pause. Perhaps Augustine was right.

Renea must have come to the same conclusion because she reluctantly nodded. “It just feels so wrong.”

Denis nodded. “If I’d asked father straight out ‘what he was feeling’ when growing up, I’d probably have gotten the beating of my life.”

“Or worse,” Renea smirked. “They might have deemed you a lost case and put you up for adoption to some nice middle-class family.”

Denis didn’t quite share Renea’s fears when it came to that one. He wouldn’t have minded if his mother and father had been a little bit nicer, as she put it. Being adopted into a middle-class family might even have been an improvement in some aspects if Denis were honest with himself.

“Maybe I’ll ask him,” Denis mused as he took another sweep of his beer. It tasted expensive; somehow, Denis had come to enjoy the locally brewed beer that mid-pub offered its customers, but this beer, on the other hand, was sort of trash. “If the worst case happens, I can just drop the course.”

Augustine shot Denis a raised eyebrow. “Yeah, you won’t do that.”

He was right. Denis wouldn’t.

The rest of the night passed familiarly. They stayed at the high-pub until midnight, talking to random students that came up to them, all nervous lads and gals with big smiles and fluttering hands. Most of them wanted to talk to Arnold; nobody really cared to talk to Denis. Denis was tired of this dance of fake smiles and deadbeat pleasantries; he didn’t care to know anyone who only saw him for his family's assets. It frankly made him want to tear at his hair. But alas, he had to suffer the rich, taking them on with a polite smile and distant eyes. Renea and Augustine, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy the attention; their families were also quite famous for their connections to the royal court. The silly dance of pleasantries just made Denis wish he were someplace else, preferably at mid-pub, or better yet, his dorm room.

At midnight, he’d had enough and left. Augustine had offered to follow him home, but Denis felt strangely distant from his friends. Sometimes he forgot that they, too, were part of the high society he had come to secretly despise. Augustine and Renea were funny and caring, but most of all, they understood him. He tended to forget that his suffering wasn’t theirs. While he looked at his family estate and couldn’t care less, they couldn’t wait to inherit their family fortune. Denis knew his lot in life. He knew he’d probably end up marrying some fitting girl or bloke, get a couple of kids, run the family estate, and make his parents proud. But despite knowing that this was his fate, he couldn’t help but think of being braver. Of saying no to the riches to go out into the world to make his own luck. But Denis was a coward, he couldn’t even phantom doing so except in his most secluded fantasy. The sort of fantasy not even incognito mode made it safe to entertain for too long.

If his family knew the temptations swirling in his mind, they would have heart attacks. And so Denis kept his pipedream locked up tight in his heart, and carried on.

The first lab with Ravi was dreadful, but also quite surprising. The giant rugby player arrived with a bruise adorning his cheek, clearly a mark from rugby players rugbying. He sat down next to Denis, who’d already been seated, ready to go ten minutes before the lab started – with a small sigh. Denis had tried to make small talk, but Ravi had just remained quiet and detached, humming at times, never looking at anything but the screen in front of him.

The lab instructor and lab assistant gave out instructions that made little to no sense, as most students in the room looked like big question marks after ten minutes of what might be gibberish rather than actual instructions. But everybody seemed too confused to even know what to ask, so when the instructor told them to go ahead, everyone did so without protest.

Denis turned to Ravi to ask what he thought of the lab. Ravi didn’t say much, but he started writing code with nimble fingers, muttering explanations to Denis as he went along. Denis just sat there staring as Ravi, within five minutes, had completed the entire assignment. And that was how Denis learnt that Ravi was bloody brilliant at computers.

Shit. Suddenly, Denis had a wholly new feeling of being the dumb one, so to speak. The one tagging along excels in a class without having to put in any effort since their project partner did all the hard work. Denis didn’t know if he liked the feeling; to be honest, he felt quite hesitant about this whole ordeal.