Biff accepted a kiss from Sarah as the two parted ways for their first classes. He took a moment to admire what a good job he'd done on her hair before entering his first period class, and then his eyes perked open.
Courtney Phu was in this class.
Normally Biff wouldn't have even noticed the girl, he hadn't even realized she was in this class, but after she'd introduced him to crochet she was basically at the forefront of his mind. He took the empty seat next to her and gave her a friendly smile. It was an unfamiliar feeling for him because it wasn't a flirty smile and he couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled at a girl without flirting just a little bit.
Well, aside from that anomaly of a day when he was a girl.
Courtney gave a wary smile back. She wasn't sure what Biff was up to. But then he gave a small gasp and turned to his backpack, removing something to show her.
Yarn. Biff was holding a bundle of yarn.
"You're good at crochet, right?" he asked. "I'm just starting out. Maybe we can crochet together."
Courtney wasn't sure how Biff knew she liked to crochet, and didn't make the connection at all between this revelation and her previous day's interactions with Karyn at lunch. Why would she? It wasn't like Karyn and Biff had any sort of connection to one another, was it? She warily pulled her own crochet work out of her backpack to display it to Biff.
"Oh," he said as though he didn't already know the answer, "are you making a Bluey doll?"
"It's for my baby cousin," Courtney answered almost on instinct.
And the ice was broken. Courtney returned Biff's friendly smile, and Biff looped some yarn around two fingers in a slipknot so that he could pull through with his crochet hook and start a chain.
"I'm just making a small handcloth," Biff said. "This is my first real project, and I really just want to practice making straight rows."
"That's a great way to start!" Courtney took up her own work. "The key is making sure you keep even tension, and making sure the yarn goes over the same part of the hook every time."
Biff nodded sagely.
"Mrs. Nevis doesn't mind if I crochet during class, as long as I'm paying attention," Courtney continued. "It's a good way to keep my hands busy, without disturbing anyone else."
That was a relief to Biff, as he finished his initial foundation row. But moving on to the second row was somehow trickier. His fingers were bigger than they'd been the previous day. It was harder to manipulate yarn so precisely. The chain slipped from his fingers, the crochet hook wouldn't stay where he wanted it.
But he'd felt so accomplished when he'd been crocheting at lunch. And he wanted to do this right, he wanted to be good at crochet, to be able to eventually make something as cool as the Bluey doll that Courtney was working on. To one day make something as stunning as the mosaic quilt from Nana's shop. And if his fingers weren't even nimble enough for this...
A pulse. A wave of energy that started right behind his eyes and traveled down his neck, across his shoulders, and into his arms, leaving through his hand as though drawn to the yarn they were manipulating. Just one pulse that Biff almost didn't even notice.
But then the yarn started gliding more smoothly. The crochet hook moved exactly how Biff wanted it to. And if Mrs. Nevis hadn't chosen just that precise moment to call the class's attention, Biff may have noticed that his fingers were no longer quite as thick or quite as round as they had been a moment before. They were long, and lithe, and perfect for nimbly manipulating small things with precision.
