Marcus always noticed things.
This was both his greatest quality and the quality most likely to get him into trouble on any given day. He noticed when teachers changed the seating chart and immediately understood whose parents had complained. He noticed when the cafeteria switched suppliers for the chicken because it tasted like sadness. He noticed when Eli Thorne, his best friend of almost three years and the most difficult person to read in the entirety of Crestmont Academy, stopped flinching.
It happened gradually. He was not sure when exactly. Sometime before the end of term. Sometime around when Eli had officially, publicly, irrefutably become Roman Vale's boyfriend, which was still the most shocking development in Marcus's personal history, and Marcus had once watched a teacher cry during a maths exam.
But flinching was the thing.
