Noah had been at our school for three months by then, but the rumours about him had never stopped.
Some said he was the son of a well-known scientist — that his family had the kind of money that could purchase an entire school building. Some said he'd been studying abroad and transferred back for reasons no one could pin down. Others said his personality was the way it was because of something that had happened to him when he was young — though no one could agree on what that something was.
Ashly had tried to get information out of him once. But Noah was like a wall: whatever you threw at it came back exactly as it left.
"He never joins anything," Ashly said. "The second the bell goes, he's gone. Nobody knows where."
"Maybe he just prefers being alone," I said.
"Normal people have at least one or two friends," she said, frowning. "He seems like he doesn't need anyone at all. Don't you think that's strange?"
I thought about it and didn't answer.
Strange, yes. But what was strange was that I wasn't genuinely curious. Noah had existed for me as a background detail — present, but not requiring attention. Until that moment outside the auditorium, when he asked his question.
"Is there somewhere you'd particularly want to go back to?"
That sentence stayed in my mind for days. I didn't know why he'd asked it — whether he asked everyone something like that, or whether it was only me. But I was certain of one thing: when he said it, his expression carried something. Not curiosity. Not a test. Something deeper — like someone searching for a specific thing, or confirming the presence of something they already suspected.
I started noticing him.
Not deliberately — my eyes simply kept returning in his direction. I noticed that he was always reading, but turned pages slowly, as if he were actually elsewhere. I noticed he never carried a phone — in a room full of people looking at screens, that was almost conspicuous. I noticed that he occasionally looked out the window with an expression that held nothing, as if looking at something that wasn't there.
One afternoon I stayed late after everyone else had gone. The classroom was nearly empty — just me, and Noah, still in the back row.
I gathered my things and stood, walked toward the door. When I passed his desk, I stopped.
"Not leaving?" I said.
He looked up. That expression — composed, almost cold — but this time I caught something else in it. A fraction of a second, so brief I could almost convince myself I hadn't seen it. Something moved, and then it was gone.
"In a while," he said.
"In a while for what?"
He didn't answer. He looked back at his book.
I stood there for a few seconds, then left.
But I kept thinking about that expression. The one that had come and gone so quickly. The one that looked, for just a moment, like something had touched him.
Maybe he wasn't actually cold. Maybe cold was what he used to hold himself together — the same way I used "I'm fine" to hold myself together.
We were the same kind of person. Both hiding. Both carrying something. Both waiting, without quite knowing it, for someone to reach through.