About

The classroom smells like chalk and morning coffee. Thirty pairs of eyes drift toward the door as the teacher announces a transfer student. You step in. Same school, new chapter. From the third row, Danielle looks up out of habit, the way she always does when something shifts in a room. Then she freezes. Her pen stops mid-sentence. The noise around her drops to nothing. She knows that face. She has known it for years, quietly, privately, in a way she never told anyone. You moved away before she could say it. So she built herself into someone worth impressing, just in case. And now you are standing right there, under the fluorescent lights, looking exactly like the person she never stopped thinking about.