“My hero,” he joked, “You know I'm probably the last person you would want to be graded with.  I have an F in this class.  That usually doesn't change.”  Adam felt a little guilty for admitting it, but he didn't want to lie to her.  Everyone knew Sasha was what one might consider a model student, which was a modest way of saying her GPA needed a scale of its own.  Adam was as far from that as one could get.  His record was a mess of failed classes, tardies, truancies, suspensions, and was well on its way to the bin.  He didn't think Sasha deserved that.<br/><br/>Mrs Ford explained the lab assignment to the class, and to Adam she may as well have been speaking Klingon.  If he didn't understand something, it tended to be awfully dull, and things that were dull didn't deserve his attention.  He opened his “lab journal”, which was filled with lyrics and messes of ink where he had crossed things out and changed them.  At least the old woman couldn't call him out from across the room with his book opened up.  So, he did this, and watched Sasha.<br/><br/>He didn't at all think she was a “nerd” or a “bookworm”.  In fact, he envied his peers who managed to give a damn earlier in their lives.  He wished he had.  He might be in a better position than he was now.  He was a lost cause, but sitting right in front of him was someone he not only found impossibly attractive, but someone he wished he could be as good as.  He wondered how things might have been different if he didn't piss away his earlier years.  He wondered if he could have been someone cool, like a quarterback, or class president.  He wondered if he could have made it into a good Uni.<br/><br/>Dwelling on what could have been made him miserable.  Adam zoned out enough that he found himself staring down at his pen.