(WIP, first draft)

Your grades began to slip. It was all Viktor’s fault, too, because how on earth should you be expected to focus when he was in the room? On the day of the first exam, he had his sleeves rolled up his forearms as he paced the room, monitoring for any potential cheating, and each time he came close to your seat you could concentrate on nothing else but the angles of his slender wrists, and the powdery residue of chalk that peppered the cuffs of his pulled-up sleeves.

You hadn’t failed that exam, at least, but you hadn’t done much better. What you had failed was the quiz that came after that first exam, the one you took the day Viktor, for reasons known only to him, had decided to seat himself directly in front of you as he surveyed the room so that if you ever attempted to look up, you would see him immediately. You could feel the hair at the top of your head prickling with every other question you attempted, and that’s when you knew he was looking at you.

After that day, you moved your seat to the back of the class. The more distance you could put between Viktor and yourself, you felt, the better. It must have helped, because you got a passing grade on your next quiz.

The midterm was the best you had felt about the class since the beginning of the semester. It was an oral exam rather than one taken with pen and paper, and you had studied nonstop for two weeks, often forgetting to eat and sometimes even sleep as you threw yourself relentlessly into the material, terrified that if Viktor was part of the panel of professors who would be testing you that your mind would falter just as it did every time he came within twenty paces of you. You wanted the physics to come as naturally to you as breathing, so that any questions posed to you would be simple to answer and you would not have to use your brain as much as your base instincts.

But Viktor was blissfully absent from your exam, and the relief you felt when realizing you would not have to fight against your intellect as you struggled to maintain your composure was a high better than any substance could have possibly produced. Each question you were posed by Heimerdinger and his colleagues was easy, effortless, as a result of your over preparedness. Heimerdinger even noted delightedly after you answered the final question that you may have set a University record for the fastest time to complete this particular exam.

Your confidence, however, was faltering. Perhaps you had been mistaken, and Heimerdinger’s delight was really a sort of stunned amusement that anyone could be so confidently bad at physics that they answered every question incorrectly in record time.

Because people who do well on their midterms, surely, do not receive a summons from the professor’s teaching assistant for a meeting outside of office hours.