RINGGGGG
The bell rang eventually, though for Parveen it felt like it had taken a geological age to do so. Ms. Poonam gathered her books at the front of the room, unhurried as ever, and paused at the door just long enough to look back at him.
"..." Parveen, who was trying to make his way back to his seat to relax, froze under her gaze.
"Consider this a warning," she said. "Next time, I won't go this easy on you."
She left. Parveen stood there for a second, staring at the empty doorway, making sure she wouldn't return before moving.
Easy? he thought. This is what she calls easy? I can't feel my arm. I can't feel my leg. If this is her being easy, I don't want to see what hard looks like — I'll probably end up in a hospital, or a museum, displayed as a cautionary exhibit.
"Ha~" Parveen sighed in relief.
He shuffled back to his seat and lowered himself into it slowly, the way old men lower themselves into chairs, wincing at parts of his body he hadn't previously known were capable of hurting.
He had exactly four seconds of peace before Hero nudged him from the seat beside him.
"Oi! What was that?" Hero asked.
"What was what," Parveen mumbled, not opening his eyes.
"That!" Hero gestured wildly at the blackboard, at Parveen's arm, at the general concept of the last several minutes. "Daydreaming! In Ms. Poonam's class! On day one! Do you have a death wish?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Parveen said, rubbing his shoulder.
"You are either the most stupid person or the most courageous person," Hero said, with the reverence usually reserved for war heroes and cricket players who'd hit a six off the last ball. "You looked her dead in the eye, ignored her, and lived. People don't come back from that."
"You're making it sound like I returned unharmed. Didn't you see me getting slapped?" Parveen said angrily.
"Once! Only once! I think she was in a good mood today, honestly," Guru said, nodding to himself as if this were a perfectly reasonable scientific conclusion. "You should've seen her last year, my cousin told me—"
"Shut up," Parveen said, rubbing his arm. "Both of you. I need five minutes of silence, is that too much to ask?"
It was, apparently, too much to ask.
"What were you even thinking about?" Guru asked, swivelling forward in his seat directly behind Parveen, all traces of the king-of-idiots feud forgotten in the face of a juicier mystery. "You don't just zone out for no reason. Not on day one, at least. Did you find money or something at lunch?"
"Neither! Leave me alone," Parveen said angrily, recalling the events of lunch break.
"Looks like something happened at lunch to make him angry," said Kavi, leaning forward from the bench behind Hero. "It can be one of two things — either he got a common card he already had, or he finally found a rare one and, in his excitement, got it confiscated."
Kavi had reached this conclusion because he was the one who'd sold Parveen the card pack, and he'd noticed Parveen was upset right after lunch. He'd simply put two and two together.
"I told you to be quiet," Parveen said, without admitting that Kavi's guess was spot-on — except his cards weren't with any teacher, but with a blackmailer.
"Amazing, as expected from Kavi. I think it's the latter one — he would've shown us the cards even if he'd gotten common ones," Hero said instantly, eyes lighting up like he'd just solved a murder.
"Don't worry, teachers normally return that stuff at the end of school," Guru said.
"He's right — they'll return it, unless someone else claims it first and they hand it over instead," Hero said, smirking.
"..." Parveen ignored Hero, knowing he couldn't claim the cards from the teachers, since they never had them in the first place.
Soon Parveen got his silence as the science teacher, Mr. D.K. Tyagi, entered the classroom and began the lesson — a tall, mild-mannered man who wrote things on the blackboard as though he had all the time in the world, which, compared to Ms. Poonam, made him feel less like a teacher and more like a vacation.
Parveen had just about managed to relax his shoulders for the first time since lunch when something small and hard bounced off the side of his head.
THOK.
He turned around, already composing a glare aimed squarely at Guru — and found the classroom's newest resident looking anywhere but at him, wearing a glare that said pick it up.
Tanya.
A crumpled ball of paper sat on the floor by his foot. Parveen glanced at the teacher, still absorbed in the blackboard, then bent down and unfolded it under his desk, careful to keep it below eye level.
Stay in the classroom after school.
That was it. No signature. It didn't need one.
He looked left, at Hero, who was busy trying to balance a pen on his nose for reasons known only to himself. He looked behind, at Guru and Kavi, both apparently engrossed in the lesson for once in their lives. Satisfied that nobody had noticed, Parveen folded the note back up, small enough to disappear into his pocket, and spent the rest of the period trying very hard to look like a boy who wasn't currently being blackmailed by a girl.
......
RINGGGGG
The final bell rang, and the classroom emptied out in its usual chaotic rush — bags zipped, chairs scraping, someone's water bottle rolling across the floor and getting kicked twice before anyone bothered to pick it up. Parveen made a show of tying his shoelace slowly, then re-tying it, then discovering a sudden, urgent need to check the washroom, waving off Hero's suggestion that they cycle home together with a vague mumble about "stuff."
"So you're telling me you can't come with me because the teacher who confiscated your cards is shy, and asked you to wait till everyone left and refill the water tank with him as punishment — and for that, you have to check the water pressure from the washroom, and only then will he return them?" Hero asked.
"Yes, that's exactly it. See you tomorrow," Parveen said, already running to the washroom.
"Must be an upset stomach. Well, whatever — where are Kavi and Guru?" Hero muttered to himself, heading toward the exit.
Parveen waited there for what felt like an appropriately suspicious amount of time — long enough, he hoped, for the corridor outside to empty — before making his way back.
.......
Ten minutes later, he pushed open the classroom door to find it empty except for one person sitting calmly on the last bench, exactly where she'd been that morning, like she'd simply never left.
"Finally," Tanya said. "I was starting to think you'd run home."
"Just give me my cards," Parveen said, skipping straight past any pretense of a greeting. "I already told you, I can't find some boy in this entire school with nothing to go on. There are hundreds of us. I don't even know his name."
"You dare deny my request? It looks to me like you don't need your cards, then — I should just keep them for myself," Tanya said, walking toward the exit.
"Wait! I'll try — but you have to tell me something about him. Age, height, class, anything," Parveen said, practically begging.
Tanya thought for a moment, trying to recall the boy's features — though, to Parveen's misfortune, she'd only ever met him online and knew nothing beyond the fact that he went to this school.
"Name — unknown," she said, counting off on her fingers. "Age — unknown. Height — unknown."
"That's basically nothing," Parveen said. "Were you blindfolded when you 'met' him?"
"I met him online," she continued, ignoring him completely. "We used to talk. A lot, actually. Then he just... stopped. No warning, no goodbye, nothing. Just gone."
"So you don't know his name, his age, his height, or even his face, and you want me to find him in a school of hundreds of students," Parveen said slowly, as if saying it out loud might reveal some hidden logic he was missing.
"I know he goes to this school," Tanya said. "And I know he's the most honest person I've ever talked to."
Parveen stared at her.
She stared back, entirely serious, as though what she'd just described was a perfectly reasonable set of clues and not the plot of a ghost story with no ghost.
I was wrong, Parveen thought, with the calm, sinking clarity of a man who has just stepped into a hole he didn't know was there.
She's not a blackmailer. She's a crazy, dumb blackmailer.