Nicola closed his mouth.

One, two, three, four seconds passed.

"Shall we go?" he asked before reaching five. People hated it when silence reached five.

He had completely ignored my comment about Dopey, so I decided it was best to do the same.

We climbed the steps, and I demonstrated my Herculean strength by failing to lift the suitcase. Nicola stayed on the ground, watching me struggle with my spaghetti arms until he took pity on me and asked if I needed help.

He didn't say it cheerfully; I was pretty sure he was just annoyed that I was blocking the door. Fine. He hated me.

"I've got this," I lied and smiled, which was a very difficult and annoying thing to do.

But when I failed again, Nicola stepped forward, lifting himself onto the first step and grabbing the handle of my suitcase from my hands. He pulled it up as if it were empty and placed it on the train floor. Then he went back to get his luggage and did the same.

"Thanks."

Nicola stared at me.

It was horrible when I needed to know what people thought, but I had no idea how to figure it out. Did he hate me? Did he like me?

He had smiled before, but not now. Yet, he wasn't giving me a mean look, at least it didn't seem like it. He had helped me, so maybe he liked me. Or maybe he found it annoying that he had needed to help me.

If only that girl had given me more information... Nicola had to be... something! Was he grumpy or friendly? Affectionate or stubborn? Did he hate me or not?

He couldn't be completely neutral! No one was ever neutral towards me. Either they adored me or despised me, there was no middle ground.

"Gioele?"

I looked up. I had lost myself in my thoughts while staring at my shoes. Nicola was holding the door open, and I would bet he had been holding it open for a while.

"I'm coming."

He made a strange face. I didn't know what it meant.

We took our seats just in time to hear the announcement for any accompanying persons to disembark from the train.

I had seat 5A, and Nicola had the one opposite, both by the window. I was facing forward, and he wasn't.

After wedging the suitcase into the overhead compartment, I placed the bee on the seat next to me and hugged my Bulbasaur against my stomach. The aggressively squishy mass against me made me feel a bit better.

I glanced quickly at my companion. Nicola had also settled. He had a black backpack on his legs that looked like an Eastpak, but the label read "Eestpak." He was looking out the window, even though we weren't moving and there was nothing to see.

As I watched, he took a hand off the backpack and nibbled on his index fingernail. I knew that was a sign of nervousness. Or maybe it was a sign that he liked the taste of his nails. But it was probably nervousness.

He was right to be nervous; he was about to endure a five-hour journey against the direction of travel.

I struggled with that idea until the train started moving. Finally, I reached a compromise that I would agree to switch if he asked me.

"Gioele?"

Already? But we just started! "But... we could do two and a half hours each."

He welcomed my proposal with several seconds of silence. "For what?"

"The seats. Can we switch halfway, so it's fair?"

More seconds of silence followed, but only three. (No one ever reached five.) "Oh, you mean for the direction? No need, I don't mind."

I sighed in relief, maybe a bit too loudly. So, what was making him nervous? I watched him closely, maybe a bit too closely. When I realized I had been staring at him for twenty seconds without blinking my anchovy eyes, I averted my gaze and focused on the moving landscape.

I loved trains. It seemed to beg you to lose yourself in your thoughts, rocking you with the click-clack, click-clack of the wheels.

We hadn't left the station yet, moving very slowly, passing through frost-covered shrubs that had managed to break through the scattered stones on the tracks. I could have spent those five hours imagining a beautiful gray wolf running alongside the train, jumping over obstacles and zigzagging through the vegetation.

But I couldn't.

I would have judged my first meeting with Nicola satisfactory at most. I had to do better.

I visualized my presentation checklist and checked my progress.

My name is Gioele, done.

Nice to meet you, done.

Handshake, done.

What's next? Talk about the weather? People loved talking about the weather.

"Foggy today, huh?"

Nicola startled at my sudden comment. I deduced that I had spoken at the wrong moment. When there's silence for too long, breaking it becomes inappropriate.

He looked outside, as if he needed to observe the fog closely to notice it. "Uh, yeah. Better than the rain, though."

Was it? I definitely preferred rain to fog. At least rain had something to say.

Talk about the weather, done.

Now I had to talk about something we had in common. And how was I supposed to know what we had in common? I didn't know him!

"Do you like Pokémon?"

Okay, the look that passed over his face for a moment seemed... not positive. I wasn't sure what non-positive emotion it was: discomfort, annoyance, anger, offense... they were all more or less the same.

"Uh, I watched them on TV when I was little."

He watched them on TV when he was little. It was still something. I had never met anyone who had played all the video games at least three times and watched all the episodes of the anime and all the movies (there were 19 movies and 27 short films) like I had. When I was in middle school, a girl named Fatima collected the cards, and by the end of the third grade, she had given me her deck. She had been very sweet, especially because she had a very strong Umbreon.

"What's your favorite Pokémon?"

Nicola took some time to think, which I appreciated a lot. "I would say... Charmander."

He pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable, instead of the second, like they did in the Italian dub. But Charmander was a combination of the English words 'to char' and 'salamander,' so the correct pronunciation was Charmànder.

I was dying to tell him, but I knew how annoying it could be for people to be corrected.

"I also love Charmànder." I said it with the right accent, so maybe he would correct himself.

I turned to my bee bag and opened the side pocket. I took out my deck of cards and flipped through my various Charmanders. I chose one where the little orange salamander looked cuter than usual and placed it on the table.

"A pledge of my friendship."

Nicola lifted the card and, after careful observation, that look of a non-positively identified emotion dissolved, and in its place, a smile appeared.

"Thank you." He opened his backpack, pulled out a frayed wallet, and tucked the card into one of the document slots.

It made me infinitely happy that he had stored it so carefully.

"What's your favorite, instead?" Nicola asked.

"Overall? Mewtwo, although I don't have the plush yet. Do you know it?"

He didn't know it, so I embarked on a detailed explanation of the experiments done with Mew's genetic material, the ancestor of all Pokémon species. From there, I realized I had ended up talking about the mystery surrounding Mew's presence in Pokémon Red and Green, and after glancing at my phone, I found out I had been talking about Pokémon continuously for... thirty-five minutes. My mother would have stopped me thirty-three minutes ago.

I realized Nicola hadn't managed to slip in a single word throughout my speech. Why didn't he stop me?

There were two possibilities: either I had sparked a sudden fascination with Pokémon in him, which, given some significant past experiences, I considered unlikely, or he didn't know how to interrupt me, which would make our month of cohabitation extremely difficult. Especially for him.

"Well..." I had to change the subject. What was missing?

Talking about a common topic, done.

Now, ask where you were born, and if you have brothers or sisters. I was a bit reluctant to ask him where he was born. I didn't want my question to be interpreted as, "Your skin is a bit too dark to be from around here; were you born here? Are your parents immigrants? Where are they from? Do you have citizenship?" I just wanted to make casual conversation, not open a political discussion about Ius Soli. I decided to skip the first question altogether.

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

Nicola blinked, perhaps waking up from the Pokémon stupor. "Uh, no. And you?"

"No."

Great. Great conversation.

"You're in Class D, right?" he asked. "Who's your cooking teacher?"

Of course! What an idiot I am! We went to the same school; that's what we had in common!

So, any conversation topic I had with my classmates was suitable for this context. I quickly recalled a typical conversation among the front-row desks group I was part of and pulled out a standard question.

"Do you like anyone at school?"

"What?" Nicola said a bit too forcefully. "NO."

That answer was abrupt and sudden; it seemed slightly defensive. Did I make a mistake? But that was a standard question among classmates! Of course, most people I interacted with in class were girls, so maybe it was more of a female topic.

"Uh, neither do I."

"Why? Have you heard something?" he asked, and it took me a moment to realize that he wasn't asking why I didn't like anyone but why I had asked the question.

"About you? Just that you're normal."

"I'm... normal?" His eyes narrowed. This wasn't an unidentified non-positive emotion; he was clearly angry.

Curse my big mouth. I had said something rude again. This was much worse than the ears thing.

"Uh, I asked your classmates what kind of person you were, and a girl said you were normal. But I don't think she meant it in a negative way."

Nicola stopped squeezing the seat's armrest. His face slowly relaxed. Whichever way I had offended him before, I must have managed to recover.

He shrugged. "I don't think there's anything negative about being normal. Most people are normal."

"Mh, most Germans in 1940 were Nazis."

Nicola scratched his forehead, his eyebrows furrowed, which usually meant either anger, confusion, or pity, depending on the degree and direction of the furrows.

"Do you think being normal is a bad thing?" he asked with a genuine inflection, as if he were genuinely curious about the answer. Or as if he couldn't believe I thought that way.

I focused on my thoughts to reflect on the answer, but the last sentence he had said got stuck in my brain. Sometimes it happened; it was like a stuck record. Do you think being normal is a bad thing, do you think being normal is a bad thing, do you think being normal is a bad thing, do you think being normal is a bad thing...

"Do you think being normal is a bad thing?" It came out slightly louder than intended. Now I felt embarrassed. I wanted to wait at least until we arrived before making a fool of myself.

I crouched down on my stuffed animal and squeezed it tightly. Once I released enough energy into that stranglehold, I felt a bit better. I turned to the seat next to me and unzipped my bee-shaped bag. I dug through the four plushies stuffed in the bag until I reached my notebook and katana-shaped pen.

The notebook had dotted edges for a clean rip. The sound it made when ripped was beautiful. STRRRRR!

I placed the sheet on the table and drew a Cartesian plane, and in the first quadrant, I traced a Gaussian curve.

The Gaussian curve is also called the normal curve because it represents the trend of normality. The curve is very high in the center because most people are average, and it is very low on the sides because few people are at the extremes of positive or negative.

I followed the trace of the Gaussian forward and backward, and then forward and backward, and then forward and backward.

"Is... everything okay?" Nicola asked.

"Everything's okay." I tapped the center of the curve with the tip of the pen. "Most people are here concerning the central elements of life. Average intelligence, average income, having 1.5 children... I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I just find it a bit boring. Since we only have one life, shouldn't we try to make it as special as possible?"

I realized I had gone off-topic. These weren't the kinds of topics discussed among my classmates.

Nicola observed the Gaussian I had drawn. He looked at it for one, two, three, four, five seconds.

"I don't think there's any need to be different from average to make your life special. I think it's a bit detrimental to think that way. Like, if I don't become richer than others, more famous than others, then I've wasted my life."

Ah. "But you've won four cooking contests since the year started. Isn't it because you want to be better than others?"

"No." He answered without the slightest hesitation. "I like pastry, but I don't care about being the best pastry chef or anything like that. I want to open a pastry shop in the countryside or a mountain village. And I want to live there, with my average intelligence and average income and my 1.5 children. So, actually, I think I'm as normal as can be."

I thought that he had endured the silence for five seconds, and I had never met anyone who could do that, so at least a little bit special he ought to be.