Nate felt like the little mouse that got tossed into a snake pit. He knew where he stood in the predatory scale. He had been to high school, thank you very much. This here? This was an all boys school on steroids. An all boys from the really wrong side of the tracks school, and Nate was the pretty little thing of the group, which automatically made him most likely to get his ass kicked on a daily basis. Oh sure, the Mexican guy was probably maybe a teensy bit shorter than him, but he looked like he'd been in a few good scrapes in his life, and he had at least 15 pounds of muscle on Nate to boot.
So he did what he always did, he tried his best to be invisible. Nate moved quietly, as close to walls as he could manage while they were inside, and always close to the shade of trees outside. He kept his head down, literally, because that made his hair fall like a curtain over his features, only peeking out timidly from time to time, to make sure where he was going. He watched the others too, through a curtain of hair, trying to peg them in terms of least likely to do him bodily harm.
He was rather fascinated by the Native American guy among them, a total strong silent type that he was naturally drawn to. He always gravitated toward the aloof and unavailable. At one point he thought he caught Forge looking at him with those scary beautiful black eyes and his breath caught, his pulse thrumming fast as a hummingbird. He immediately looked away and pretended not to have noticed. He kept sneaking glances at the copper skinned man, his fascination growing as he noticed the limp and the way one arm seemed never to move.