Engineer Student | Calvin "Cal" Porter

Cal was never good at love. Horrible, even.

He talked too much when he got nervous, and around Chloe, he practically short-circuited.

They were sitting in the lab that afternoon, finishing their introductory circuits projects. Chloe leaned toward her friend, grinning.

“God, I’m not sure if I got this right, but I’m kinda proud of it.”

Cal glanced over. Her breadboard was a mess of jumper wires — colorful, tangled, and barely holding together. The LED on her mini circuit blinked out of rhythm, like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to live or die.

He hesitated. He knew he should stay quiet. But the resistor values were way off, and his mouth moved before his brain caught up.

“Actually,” he said, scooting closer, “you wired your resistor to ground instead of the input pin. That’s why the LED’s flickering. If you swap the ten-k with the one-k, it’ll even out the current draw.”

Before he could finish demonstrating, Chloe stood abruptly and tugged her breadboard out of his hands.

“Yeah, thanks,” she said flatly, exchanging seats with her friend.

Cal froze mid-gesture, his hand still pointing at where the wire had been. The air felt heavier now. The quiet kind that follows humiliation.

He turned back to his station, chewing on the edge of his thumbnail, pretending to check his circuit. “Shit…” he murmured, mostly to himself. He was just trying to help.

---

“There’s no way you blew it that bad,” Karl laughed, slapping his tray down across from Cal. “You actually corrected her? In front of everyone?”

Cal sighed and slumped into his seat, peeling the crust off his sandwich. “Forgive a guy for trying to help a girl,” he muttered.

Melvin smirked, spinning a plastic fork between his fingers. “Help? Dude, you practically told her she was an idiot. You can’t ‘well, actually’ someone mid-sentence.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Cal said. “I was just… explaining.”

“Explaining,” Karl echoed, grinning. “That’s what you’re calling it now?” He leaned back, stretching lazily, his grin widening. “Man, if I’d been sitting next to Chloe, I wouldn’t have been talking about resistor pins, I’ll tell you that much.”

Cal rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you’d probably just make her uncomfortable.”

“Hey, uncomfortable’s just another word for intrigued,” Karl said, wagging his eyebrows.

Melvin snorted. “Yeah, sure, Romeo. Last week you spilled ramen on your shirt trying to talk to Kira from Chem.”

Karl jabbed his fork at him. “That was sabotage! The noodles slipped, okay?”

“Sure, they did.” Melvin leaned toward Cal. “See, that’s your problem, man. You’re too earnest. Girls don’t like earnest; they like confidence.”

Cal raised an eyebrow. “Right. And that’s why both of you are sitting here with me, dissecting my failures instead of having lunch with them.”

Karl froze mid-bite. Melvin laughed so hard he nearly dropped his fork.

“Okay, fair,” Karl said, grinning. “But still — you gotta learn some charm, Cal. Maybe don’t start with a lesson on current flow next time. Compliment her hair or something.”

Cal stared down at his half-eaten sandwich. “I don’t know how to do that.”

“That’s the problem,” Melvin said. “You overthink. You treat people like equations, like if you just find the right formula, everything’ll balance out.”

Cal didn’t answer. He just poked at the sandwich wrapper, his mind drifting back to Chloe’s look, that little twist of her mouth before she walked away.

He sighed. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Guess my math’s off.”

---

Work wasn’t any better. Night shifts at a gas station weren’t glamorous, but they paid better than most of his options. Cal trudged toward the bus stop, rain slicking the campus paths. Normally, he didn’t mind the rain. The quiet, the smell of wet concrete but tonight, every step squished in his soaked shoes.

Something caught his eye. A faint, pulsing glow came from the edge of the woods beside the path. He froze. “Probably just some kids messing with a drone or prank lights,” he told himself.

Still, curiosity got the better of him. He ducked under a low branch, squishing through the mud, eyes fixed on the glow. As he got closer, he realized it wasn’t a prank. Something was… high-tech. Panels and lights arranged in patterns he didn’t recognize, humming softly, almost alive.

A panel slid open with a hiss, and inside, lying unconscious, was a person. Completely still. Cal swallowed hard.

“Uh… hello?” he called, stepping closer. The rain dripped off his hoodie, soaking his notes and sandwich wrapper still in his pocket.

The figure didn’t move. Something about them made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He knew, somewhere deep in his gut, this wasn’t normal. Not by a long shot.

Cal took a cautious step forward. "You’re an engineer," he told himself. You can handle… anything. Maybe.

With a nervous gulp, he reached out.

---

Stupidly, Cal had carried the unconscious person all the way to his dorm. The idea of taking them on the bus had been unthinkable. Someone would see him and call the cops in a heartbeat. And so here they were, sprawled across his unmade bed like some bizarre science project.

Cal perched on the edge of his chair, soaked hoodie sticking to his back, and chewed on the end of his pen so hard he was pretty sure he was leaving teeth marks. His eyes darted between the glowing lights on the stranger’s suit, or whatever it was, and the scribbled notes he had plastered across his notebook.

“C’mon… think, think, think…” he muttered, voice low, almost pleading with himself. His fingers fumbled with his phone as he scrolled through the pictures he’d taken, zooming in, tapping, trying to identify what he’d found. Every panel, every light, every line of hair or skin seemed to defy logic. It shouldn’t look like that… nothing should look like that.

His heart rate picked up. He tried to focus on something normal, anything human, like how the rain had soaked through his hoodie or the faint smell of metal from the small desk fan in the corner. That… helped? Not really.

And then, a shuffling sound. Soft, hesitant, like someone waking from a dream. Cal nearly jumped out of his chair, knocking over a stack of textbooks. “Oh—oh no. Oh no no no.” His hands flew to his mouth before he could say anything louder. Slowly, he crept toward the bed, wobbling like a newborn deer on ice.

The figure stirred, sitting up slowly, rubbing their eyes with hands that looked impossibly unnatural and delicate. Cal froze, blinking. His throat went dry.

“Uh… Hi!” he blurted, voice cracking. He swallowed hard. “Y-your… uh… hair is… pretty?” Why the hell did he even say that? His face felt hot, his words like molten metal in his mouth. Curse Karl and his stupid flirting skills. Cal had never been this bad at human interaction.