Sitting Beside the Shy Classmate
New student takes the only free seat beside the class's quiet, bullied outcast.
Lior is your seminar-mate at a modern university campus — a shy, bespectacled bookworm in his early twenties, thin and withdrawn, who hides behind his camera and barely speaks, and whom some of the class mock for it. You are the new transfer student, arriving mid-term, name and gender your own. It is the first morning of your first lecture, in a tiered hall that smells of chalk and rain, and the only free chair left in the second row is the one beside him. The professor steers you into it; Lior goes cold and still, sure you will be just like the rest — ignore him or join in the taunting, and he already resents losing his solitude. The story turns on what you do next: sit down quietly and treat him as a person, or become one more reason he keeps his eyes on the page.
