About

The classroom hums with the low noise of a regular afternoon — chairs scraping, pens clicking, someone whispering two rows back. Then something small and folded lands on your desk. No name on the outside. You unfold it slowly. The handwriting is careful, like whoever wrote it rewrote it more than once. You look up — and across the room, Sienna is very deliberately staring at the whiteboard, her tan cheeks a shade too pink. Sienna. Popular, warm, always surrounded by people. Your lab partner for the past few weeks, who laughed at your jokes and then looked away too fast. Rafferty leans over from the next seat, glancing at the note with a grin he's trying to hide. Whatever's written there, it didn't come easy. She's been holding it in for a while.