Rain drizzled against the cracked balcony window as he leaned on the railing, phone in hand, silently watching the droplets trace logic patterns across the glass. "Random, chaotic, but still somehow orderly," he muttered. It was a Friday evening. Somewhere inside, the others were yelling about pineapple on pizza.
He didn't join in. Not because he hated fun or because he was too aloof for debates, on the contrary, he had a mental archive of every logical fallacy ever used in food-based arguments, but because he found the laughter more comforting from a distance.
Inside the suite-style college apartment, Room 304, to be exact, sixteen students shared space, sound, secrets, and toothpaste with varying degrees of resentment and love. Some were already pairing off like predictable chemical reactions. Others orbited each other with chaotic magnetic tension.
He, however, remained the still nucleus of a very noisy atom.
His name was yet to be said aloud in this story, but the others called him The Observer. Because he was always... watching. Quiet. Calculated. Distant, but never detached.
He had his own corner in the room, a top bunk with blackout curtains, a desk organized in chaotic vertical stacks, and a charging station wired like a failed AI experiment. His phone buzzed. Discord notification. He tapped it.
[Athena]: You gonna join VC or keep ghosting us?
[Observer]: Already ghosting in person. Might as well stay consistent.
A reaction emoji popped up: "🧍♂️".
He smirked.
Back in high school, things weren't this stable, if you could call shared bathrooms and existential debates about laundry cycles stable. He had always been the observant kid. Friends? Yes. But rarely with depth. His mind would drift in classes, not out of boredom but from stimulation overload. How do atoms hold so tightly together but galaxies drift apart? Why can't time be bent like every theoretical physics thread suggests?
He used to ask questions like that. Loudly. Until teachers told him to stay on-topic. Until he realized that the classroom wasn't built for minds like his.
His grades were inconsistent. Not because he couldn't keep up, but because he didn't care, unless the subject caught his interest. Geography? Nope. Literature? Only when the book involved dystopian breakdowns of human logic. Physics? Oh, absolutely. Computer Science? Nirvana.
His parents were supportive, at first. Then came the pressure.
"Just lock in," they said.
So he did.
Senior year, first term: full isolation mode. Ironically, that's when people started noticing him. Girls included. The juniors found his silence mysterious. Some thought he was deep. Really, he was just processing life like a code he couldn't debug.
His academic rise was unexpected. Third in class. His name on the wall. His name on competition lists. His name in the morning assembly, announced again and again.
Then there was her.
She asked him out first. He didn't know how to say no without hurting her. Besides, part of him was curious. Was he capable of feeling that... thing everyone else seemed obsessed with?
But competitions took over. So did his thinking. His analyzing. His distance.
They broke up.
Mutual.
Still sucked.
He had no idea how to mourn the loss of something he barely understood.
That was the first time he realized he could predict people's emotions without fully grasping them. Like reading the code of a game without knowing how to play.
College became his reset button. New people, new city, new systems. But the patterns remained. He kept people close, digitally. Discord calls. Group chats. TikTok feeds that cycled between mind-blowing science facts and philosophical rabbit holes.
He loved his new friends, but rarely told them. Instead, he showed it by defending them in arguments, fixing their tech issues, or sitting silently beside them when they were down. Once, when Maya cried over a failed test, he just slid her laptop over with a calming screensaver and walked away. She later said it was the nicest thing anyone did for her that week.
The others teased him sometimes.
"You give off psycho vibes, bro."
"Do you even have emotions or just facts?"
To which he always replied, deadpan:
"Actually, by definition, a psychopath shows a lack of empathy and remorse. I have both. Therefore, I'm not one."
Cue laughter. Every time.
He was the chill guy. The mystery. The one who never started a conversation but somehow always ended them with the final word.
Tonight, he walked back inside. The pizza debate was escalating.
"Sweet and savory can exist in harmony!" someone shouted.
"It's an assault on logic and taste buds!" another fired back.
He walked past them, opened the fridge, and grabbed a can of soda without a word.
"Observer," Anya called. "Settle this!"
He turned slowly, eyes half-lidded with mock exhaustion. "If you want me to reduce the entire history of culinary evolution into a binary of taste acceptance... fine. Pineapple is chemically similar to compounds in barbecue sauce. Hence, it has a molecular justification for pairing with cooked protein."
Dead silence.
Then laughter.
"You always do this," Maya said, nudging him.
He shrugged. "I like being right."
He didn't say it, but he also liked being useful. That was his quiet way of belonging.
Later that night, he'd plug in his headphones, no music playing, just silence, and scroll through space documentaries before bed.
He'd text Athena some meme that connected existential dread with subatomic physics.
And he'd lie there, staring at the ceiling, wondering:
If people are made of stardust, why is it so hard for them to understand each other?
A soft knock came at the door. Probably someone needing help with a script or project or feelings.
He rolled out of bed.
The Observer never slept early anyway.
"Good night," came a voice through the door. It was calm, light, and familiar. One of the others. One of them.
He paused for a second. Then smiled.
Maybe he wasn't as distant as he thought.