Between Us, Part 5: Adam by the Window

Between Us, Part 5: Adam by the Window

The Story Begins

The door to Class 8.B opened just as Kaja was explaining to Filip why yesterday’s presentation had definitely not gone wrong. It had simply had an “artistically unexpected ending.”

“Is that what you call it when your computer shuts down?” Filip asked, leaning against a desk.

“That’s called a dramatic pause,” Kaja snapped.

Their homeroom teacher came in with a boy Nela had never seen before. He had dark hair, a black backpack slung over one shoulder, and his hands in his hoodie pockets. He did not look frightened. More like someone who already knew where he belonged and had only wandered in here for a moment.

“This is Adam,” the teacher said. “Starting today, he’ll be in our class. Please help him find his way around.”

A few people muttered hello. Kaja waved so enthusiastically that she dropped her pen. Filip nodded. Adam looked around the classroom as if he had read it in a single glance, then headed without hesitation for the empty desk by the window.

It was the seat where the morning sun fell straight across the notebooks, and where, in the afternoon, you could watch the car park, the gym, and people running late for the bus. No one had sat there for weeks because the student who used to sit there had moved away.

Adam set his backpack beside the chair and sat down.

“Nice spot,” Filip remarked. “When you’ve had enough of school, you can watch nothing happening outside.”

“Great. I’m pretty good at that,” Adam replied.

The class laughed. Not loudly, not too much. Just the way people do when someone says something funny enough for everyone to decide he would probably be okay.

Nela smiled too, but then she noticed that Adam’s smile came a fraction later than the laughter. First his gaze rested on Filip, then Kaja, then moved across the other faces. Only when he saw that no one looked offended or bored did his shoulders relax.

Maybe he was only waiting to see whether his joke had landed, she thought. Everyone does that.

Even so, she remembered it.

During the first lesson, the teacher decided to involve the new student straight away. As they reviewed history, she asked a question most of the class usually dealt with by staring very hard at their notebooks.

“Adam, if you’d like to, you can try answering. Do you know why towns in the Middle Ages were often built near rivers?”

The boy bent over his textbook. “Because rivers are useful. Water, transport, trade… and probably because without them, it would have been harder to build those walls that look so nice in pictures.”

The teacher smiled approvingly. “Yes, exactly.”

“So you studied before you even came here?” Kaja whispered from two desks away.

Adam turned around. “No. I just like rivers. They’re pretty useful.”

“That’s the weirdest answer I’ve heard today,” Kaja said.

“It’s only 9:10,” Filip reminded her. “Give him a chance.”

Laughter rose again. Adam smiled, wider this time. But when Kaja leaned closer to show him something on the worksheet, he changed his tone at once. He spoke more quietly, more carefully. Then Filip made another comment, and the boy by the window straightened up again and replied faster, as if he had to keep up.

Nela opened her notebook beneath the desk. In the blank margin, she wrote: He knows exactly when to laugh.

Right beneath it, she added: But maybe he doesn’t know when he can stop.

At the long break, the corridor filled with noise. Someone was chasing a classmate with a plastic bottle, music played from a phone in the next classroom, and a queue formed at the drinks machine even though nobody was buying anything.

When Things Start to Change

Adam stood by the windowsill with his backpack over one shoulder. Filip was showing him where the staff room, gym, and stairs to the cafeteria were.

“And down there is the bathroom nobody uses,” he said. “I don’t know why. I guess it has a bad reputation.”

“The light is broken in there,” Kaja added. “And once there was a pigeon.”

“One pigeon?” Adam raised an eyebrow. “That sounds manageable.”

“So you’re not afraid of anything?” Matej called from the other side of the corridor. He did not say it unkindly. He sounded curious, with the faint amusement that appears when someone notices a new person in class and tries to work out where they fit.

Adam fell silent for a moment.

“I’m afraid I’ll mix up the classrooms and spend the whole day sitting with the seventh graders,” he said at last.

“You’d survive,” Filip declared.

“Maybe they wouldn’t,” Kaja added.

The group laughed and headed towards the stairs. Nela stayed a little behind to tie her shoelace. Then she noticed that Adam did not leave with the others straight away. First he looked at the classroom door, then at the timetable board, and only then did he follow them.

It was nothing much. Just two extra seconds.

Back in the classroom after the break, Adam returned to the window. He sat down, took out his notebook, and placed his phone beside it, screen down. The bell had not rung yet, so conversations started up again, chairs scraped, and snacks changed hands.

“By the way, does the noise bother you?” Kaja asked him. “It’s like a train station in here sometimes.”

“No,” he answered immediately. “At least you know you’re alive.”

Filip laughed. “You say that now. In two weeks, you’ll be begging for quiet.”

“I can handle a lot,” Adam said.

The sentence sounded casual, almost like an aside. Even so, Nela looked his way. He was leaning back as though he did not care at all. But his fingers gripped his pen so tightly that his knuckles had gone pale.

Just then, someone’s phone buzzed. Then another. The class chat came to life, even though everyone was sitting in the same room.

Nela pulled her phone from beneath her notebook.

Filip: The new guy seems like the type who always knows what to say.

Kaja: At least he won’t be as quiet as half this class.

Matej: We’ll see after the physics test.

Someone sent a nerd-face emoji. Then a laughing reaction appeared.

It was not nasty. Nobody insulted him or made fun of him. Even so, Nela felt that the messages were like little balls tossed in his direction. They were waiting to see if he would catch them. If he would laugh. If he could reply in a way that made everyone else feel comfortable.

She typed: It’s his first day here.

Her finger stopped above the send button.

What if it sounded as though she were defending him? What if Kaja asked why she was making such a big deal of it? And what if Adam looked her way and felt uncomfortable?

Nela deleted the message.

A moment later, she looked up. Adam had his phone in his hand. He was reading the chat without expression, but his gaze hardened for a moment. Then he put it back beside his notebook, screen down.

When the bell rang, he was the first to raise his hand in physics.

An Important Moment

“Of course,” Filip whispered. “He really is going all in.”

Adam answered with a smile. But Nela already knew his smiles were not always an answer. Sometimes they were only doors he shut quickly so that nobody could see inside.

Later, the teacher announced a group project. They had to prepare a short poster about what a city of the future might look like. The class divided up before she had even finished the instructions. Chairs scraped, someone was already shouting that they wanted to do transport, and Kaja claimed the markers before anyone else could get them.

“There’ll be four of us,” Filip said, moving his desk towards Nela. “You, me, Kaja, and…”

He stopped. Adam was still sitting by the window. Two groups were already full. At one desk, five people were even squeezed together, although there were supposed to be no more than four.

“You can join us if you want,” Matej called to him. “But we’re doing an underground city, because none of us can draw trees.”

Adam smiled slightly. “Are there at least rivers underground?”

“Maybe pipes,” Matej replied.

Someone laughed again. The boy by the window looked at their group, then another, and finally at his notebook. It took him only a moment to decide. Nela saw it in the way he straightened his back.

He was about to say that he did not mind. That he could work with anyone. That he would manage.

And suddenly Nela knew that if she said nothing, those would be the exact words Adam would tell himself. Not because they were true, but because people expected them from him.

She pushed her chair back a little. The movement was quiet, but Adam looked at her.

“We still don’t have any roofs,” she said. “And Kaja wants to draw a park every two metres. Will you join us?”

Kaja raised a marker. “Not every two metres. That would be impractical.”

“Every three,” Filip corrected her solemnly.

Adam stood between the desks for a moment. Then he picked up his notebook and moved over to them.

“Can I do the river?” he asked.

“Of course,” Nela said.

“But a normal one,” Kaja warned him. “No medieval walls.”

“I can’t promise anything.”

This time, Adam laughed before the others did. It was not a big difference. Maybe nobody else would have noticed. Nela did.

As they worked, it turned out that he could draw better than he admitted. Not perfectly, but precisely. His river had little bridges, benches, and a path along the bank. Filip suggested a landing pad for drones, Kaja added colourful trees, and Nela wrote above the poster: A City Where You Can Breathe.

“That sounds pretty serious,” Filip said.

“It’s a poster, not a meme,” Nela replied.

Adam looked at the words. “I like it.”

Nela nodded, although that simple sentence made her face grow warmer than she wanted.

After school, the classroom slowly emptied. The chairs stood crooked, a forgotten notebook lay on the windowsill, and outside it was getting dark earlier than felt pleasant. Kaja and Filip were arguing about who would carry the poster to the staff room. Nela was packing her notebook when Adam stopped by the door.

“Hey,” he said quietly.

She looked at him.

For a moment, he shifted his backpack strap on his shoulder. He no longer seemed like the boy who had walked into the classroom that morning, sat by the window, and immediately known what to say.

“Thanks for letting me join your group,” he said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“We needed a river.”

What Comes Next

He smiled, but this time he did not hurry to check whether she was smiling too.

“Still,” he added. Then he looked into the corridor. “I’ve been new somewhere before. For a long time, I pretended I didn’t care about anything. It’s… tiring.”

Nela waited to see whether he would say more. But when he stayed quiet, she did not start asking questions. She only slung her bag over her shoulder.

“We have maths first thing tomorrow,” she said. “That’s almost worse than seventh graders or a pigeon in the bathroom.”

Adam gave a short laugh. “Then I hope I survive.”

At the door, they nodded to each other and set off in opposite directions.

That evening, Nela sat at the table at home. Her room was quiet; only the sound of someone closing a cupboard in the kitchen came from behind the door. She opened her notebook to a blank page and held her pen over the paper for a long time.

At last, she wrote:

“Sometimes it’s enough to move a chair. That’s also a way of saying: you can be here.”