His Ex's sweater

Thomas slipped his hair out from underneath the hoodie and after fixing it, turned and looked at the screen for a few moments. The rest of the house was quiet, his mom and dad were out for the night and while he promised he would be babysitting Jennifer, Thomas just smiled and made her promise that as long as she wasn't too loud, he wouldn't mind if she brought her boyfriend over. The two high school seniors were in her room and, from the sounds coming out of it, they were otherwise "occupied" at the moment. He was just glad that she had the common sense to be using birth control, through him of course to avoid questions from their parents (who, honestly, were secretly glad that he was buying the pill for her and promised to look the other way.) He was sure that she would be hitting him up for something soon, namely beer or maybe condoms, but as long as they kept clean and level-headed as best as they could (meaning no small bundle of surprises), Thomas didn't really care.

Quite the good big sister, he mused with a smile.

With the rest of the papers to grade done and the adjustments made for the videos, he turned his attention to the questionnaire and looked at it.

16.) IF YOU WERE A GIRL...WHAT TYPE OF SHIRT WOULD YOU BE WEARING?

He paused at that and looked around for a moment before he laughed a bit and picked up his pen. I would be wearing my ex boyfriend's favorite sweater that I took from him. It would look a bit oversized on me but it would be definitely comfortable. He placed it down and looked at his phone for a few moments, scrolling through the photos on his IG, until he found a picture of him and his ex the last few months of their dating. It had been a good relationship, the two of them having dated for several years, but he decided to go back east and when he got the offer here, well, he couldn't turn it down. IT was decent money (for a single teacher in his position) and living at home allowed him to save up quite a bit of money. Still, if he were honest, the fact that he was single kinda sucked, especially since he had thought...well...

The sound of a text coming in caused him to shake his head and he looked at the phone again. "Hey Thomas!"

He laughed a bit at Adams' text, the emojis seemed to outweigh more and more words until he wondered why did the guy even bother trying to talk with him, just text pics and let him decipher it already. "Hey, thought you and Brad were busy tonight?"

A few moments went by before Adams responded with a string of emojis before he snapped a photo and sent it to him. Thomas took a look and immediately dropped everything and picked up the phone. "I'm coming over, right now!"

****

Even after spending the entire night talking and gossiping about what was happening, Thomas still felt both happiness for his best friend and a bit of jealousy at the news (Adams swore him to secrecy before they had managed to somehow not crash their car and stumbled/hobbled into work). It was going to be a long, almost unbearable day, and the only saving grace was that today was a teacher planning day (no kids and students) and he could take it as easy or as hard as he wanted to. Go figure what he planned.

It was only a few moments when he looked up at the doorway did he notice that there was a student standing there, looking a bit nervous. "Yes, Ashley?"

The girl smiled a bit and stepped in and looked at Thomas. "Listen...by any chance, did you get a questionnaire?"

Thomas blinked a few moments before he spotted the piece of paper in her hands and then nodded slowly. "Oh god, I'm not the only one!" A look of pure relief flooded the girl's face and she slowly sat down next to the desk. "I'm having a bit of an issue with it...could you help me with it?"

Thomas' mind, already delayed with the lack of sleep, slowly took a moment to process the questionnaire, noticing that it was asking the taker, in this case Ashley, similar questions but asking her to visualize as if she were a man. "So, how much of this have you done?"

"None of it. I spotted this in my homework from your class earlier, thought it was a bit unusual but no one else in our class has this. I was about to throw it away when my mom caught me and thought I was throwing away homework. She made me come to school today to talk with you about it..."

"Well, no time like the present." He handed her a pen.