Yuna's POV
The days did what days do when you're too tired to pay close attention to them — they blurred together into one long stretch of mild disasters and reluctant adjustment.
Week one, I got lost going to the bathroom and ended up in the stairwell. Week two, I walked into the wrong classroom again — not 2-B this time, mercifully, but a third-year room where everyone looked at me like I had crawled out of the floor. Week three, I wrote an entire pre-chorus in my notebook during Science and only realized it when the teacher called on me to answer something about cell division and I looked down at my notes and found the words "you left and I'm still standing in the same place" staring back at me.
Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. That was the only actual science I had written down. I had offered it up to the teacher with complete sincerity. She had not been impressed.
Slowly, painfully, I was getting used to San Esteban High.
I had stopped panicking every time the Wi-Fi refused to load. I had memorized which hallway to turn at to find my classroom — most of the time. I had learned that the vending machine near the gym ate coins without apology and that the one by the library was slightly more trustworthy if you pressed the button twice. Small things. Survival-level things.
The mornings were still too early. The uniform was still slightly itchy around the collar. And my classmates had settled into a collective understanding of me that I could only describe as politely confused — they knew I existed, they had witnessed the roll call incident of Day One, and they had collectively decided I was That Transferee and left it at that.
Which suited me fine.
My seatmate, Marco, had decided much earlier than everyone else that he had opinions about my existence and was going to share all of them.
He had introduced himself on my second day by leaning over and whispering, with complete seriousness, that our history teacher was definitely a time traveler. He cited the way she always knew what questions were on the test, her uncanny ability to appear in the hallway the exact moment someone was doing something wrong, and the fact that she never seemed to age in any of the faculty photos going back years.
I had stared at him for a long moment.
"Or," I said, "she's just been teaching here for a long time."
He shook his head slowly, like I was the one being unreasonable.
From that point on, Marco had made it his personal mission to narrate my school life to me whether I wanted him to or not. He whispered commentary during class. He provided unsolicited observations about my lunch choices. He once leaned over in the middle of an exam to inform me, in an urgent whisper, that the fluorescent light above us had been flickering in what he believed was Morse code.
I had told him to go away.
He had taken that as an invitation to explain the Morse code theory in more detail.
He was exhausting. He was also, in the way that extremely annoying people sometimes are, occasionally useful — he always had a pen, always knew which teacher was in a bad mood before first period, and once talked a prefect out of writing me up for being in the hallway past the bell by launching into a story so long and so confusing that the prefect eventually just walked away.
I tolerated him. Mostly.
It was somewhere in the middle of week three that Erika Santos decided I was her problem.
I hadn't paid much attention to her before that. She sat three seats away from me, closer to the windows on the other side of the room, and she was the kind of person who was always doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing — notes open, pen moving, paying the kind of attention in class that made the rest of us look bad by comparison. Glasses, serious expression, color-coded everything.
I had categorized her as Someone Who Had Their Life Together and moved on.
Then one afternoon at lunch, she appeared.
I was sitting at the end of a table, picking at my food with the enthusiasm of someone who had lost track of whether they were actually hungry, my notebook open beside my tray because I had been trying to work out a bridge section in my head and needed somewhere to put the words before they disappeared. I wasn't bothering anyone. I wasn't doing anything dramatic.
She sat down across from me, set her own tray down with a small decisive click, and reached over and pulled my notebook toward her before I could process what was happening.
I looked up. "Hey—"
She was already flipping through it. Her expression moved through several things — mild alarm, resignation, something that might have been professional disappointment — before she set it back down and looked at me over the top of her glasses.
"Your handwriting is terrible."
I blinked at her. "Thank you?"
"These are your class notes?"
"Technically."
She turned to a page that had three actual bullet points about photosynthesis and then, below them, half a verse about leaving and not looking back. She tapped it once with one finger.
"This isn't Biology."
"It's a work in progress."
She closed the notebook, pushed it back toward me, and opened her own. It was, as I had suspected from a distance, aggressively organized color-coded by subject, each section tabbed, the handwriting so neat it looked like it had been printed. She placed it flat on the table between us and looked at me with the expression of someone who had made a decision.
"Starting today, you can copy mine."
I stared at her. "I'm sorry?"
"Your notes are unusable. If you keep going like this, you're going to fail your exams, and I refuse to sit here every day and watch that happen."
"You don't even know me."
"I know your notes." She glanced at my notebook again. "That's enough."
I didn't know what to say to that. People didn't usually just do things like this — walk up and insert themselves into someone else's failing situation without being asked, without wanting anything back, without making it weird. It made me suspicious in the way that unexpected kindness sometimes does.
"Why?" I asked.
She picked up her pen. "Because I have eyes."
And that was it. That was her whole explanation.
I copied her notes. They were extremely good. I didn't say that out loud.
From that day on, Erika was just there. Not in an overwhelming way — she didn't follow me around or demand conversation or ask me a hundred questions about my life the way some people might have. She was just quietly, consistently present in a way that was hard to argue with.
When I showed up without a pen — which happened more than I would like to admit — she handed me one without looking up from whatever she was doing. When I looked too hollowed-out in the mornings, which was most mornings, she slid an extra snack across the desk in my direction without comment. When I stood in the middle of the hallway for too long staring at the row of classroom doors like I was trying to solve a puzzle, she appeared beside me, took my sleeve, and physically pointed me in the right direction.
She noticed things. She just didn't make a production out of noticing them.
"You eat like a bird," she said one afternoon, frowning at my tray.
I looked down. I had eaten maybe a third of what was on it. "I eat fine."
"You pick at things and then stop."
"That's called having a small appetite."
"That's called not eating." She pushed her own finished tray to the side. "Do you actually get full, or do you just forget to finish?"
I opened my mouth and then closed it, because the honest answer was closer to the second one than I wanted to admit.
"I eat more at night," I said instead.
"That's not healthy."
"Neither is color-coding your entire notebook by subject."
"That's an organizational system."
"It's a cry for help."
She ignored me, which she had gotten very good at very quickly. "You should eat actual meals. At actual mealtimes. Like a person."
I shoved a large bite into my mouth just to have something to do. She watched me with the expression of someone filing a report.
That was also the week she saved me from the tricycle.
I hadn't been being careless on purpose. I was in the middle of a thought — a specific thought about whether the chorus I'd been working on needed a key change or just a different melody — and I had been walking on autopilot, the way I did when something in my head was louder than everything happening around me. The street outside the school gate wasn't usually that busy at that hour.
Usually.
I heard it before I felt anything — a loud, sharp honk, very close, and then Erika's hand closing around my wrist with a grip that was genuinely startling for someone her size, yanking me back onto the sidewalk hard enough that I stumbled.
The tricycle shot past, close enough that the rush of air from it moved my hair.
I stood on the sidewalk, blinking.
"ARE YOU TRYING TO DIE?" Erika's voice was about two levels higher than I had ever heard it. She was still holding my wrist, staring at me like she couldn't decide whether to shake me or just scream into the open air.
The tricycle driver had already turned the corner, but his opinion of me had been made clear by the volume of the honk.
"I was thinking," I said.
"You were about to get hit by a tricycle."
"I was thinking about something important."
"YUNA."
"I have the reflexes of a cat," I said. "Probably."
She let go of my wrist, pressed both hands against the sides of her head, and stood there for a moment, very still, in the way people stand when they are deciding whether or not to say everything they are currently thinking.
Then she exhaled. "You," she said, "are going to give me a heart attack."
"I'm fine."
"You almost weren't."
I didn't have a good response to that, so I didn't say anything. She straightened her glasses, looked at me for another second with an expression I couldn't quite read, and then started walking again like the last thirty seconds hadn't happened.
I fell into step beside her.
Neither of us mentioned it again.
I still didn't fully understand why she kept showing up. She didn't ask about my life before San Esteban. She didn't push on the things I clearly wasn't saying. She just kept appearing every day, sighing at whatever fresh disaster I had managed to produce, and quietly making sure I didn't fall apart too badly.
It was a little suffocating, in the way that being genuinely looked after sometimes is when you're not used to it.
But I was, I was slowly realizing, kind of glad she did.
The announcement about the student gathering came on a Thursday morning, delivered over the intercom in between announcements about lost property and a reminder about overdue library books. The whole class perked up slightly in the way classes do when something is mentioned that isn't a quiz.
"They do this every year," Erika said, already consulting her notebook like she had a section on this specifically. She probably did. "All the clubs set up booths in the courtyard and recruit new members. You have to go — it's mandatory."
I put my chin in my hand. "Is it actually mandatory, or is it mandatory in the way that things get called mandatory when they just really want you to show up?"
"Mandatory as in they take attendance."
"Argh."
"There are clubs for almost everything," she continued, ignoring my suffering with practiced ease. "Science Club, Student Council, Dance Team, Chess Club, Journalism—"
"Pass, pass, hard pass, pass, no."
"You don't even know what you're passing on."
"I know enough." I slid down slightly in my seat. "Is there a club for sitting quietly and avoiding commitment? Because that's really more my speed."
She gave me a look that communicated, with great efficiency, that she was not going to dignify that with a response.
Marco, from my other side, leaned in without being invited. "There's a cooking club. Last year they made caldereta and let people try it."
"That," I said, pointing at him, "is the most useful thing you have ever said to me."
Erika closed her notebook. "You're both impossible."
By the time the actual event arrived, the school courtyard had been transformed into the kind of controlled chaos that only happens when every extracurricular in a school decides to exist in the same space at the same time. Colorful banners hung between posts. Tables were pushed together and covered with displays. Club officers stood behind their booths with the particular energy of people who had been told to recruit and were taking that instruction personally.
The Student Council had claimed the prime real estate near the center of the courtyard — a large, well-organized booth with matching signage, actual printed materials, and enough members to run a small government. The Dance Team had a speaker going. The Science Club had something that looked like a small demonstration involving a liquid that was a color I wasn't certain occurred in nature.
It was a lot.
I drifted through it beside Erika, who was making careful observations, and Marco, who had already located the Home Economics booth and was working on his second sample of something.
And then I saw it.
Wedged in the far corner of the courtyard, tucked between the Dance Club's loud setup and the Chess Club's quiet one, was a booth that looked like it had given up somewhere around the planning stage and just decided to show up anyway.
A folding table. Two faded posters that had been laminated at some point in the past and had since developed the slightly cloudy look of things that had been through too many seasons. A small Bluetooth speaker sitting in the middle of the table, playing what sounded like a cover of a pop song that had been slowed down just enough to make every note slightly uncertain. Two people sat behind the table — a girl with her chin in her hand, staring into the middle distance, and a guy with messy hair who was watching the crowd with the hopefulness of someone who knew it wasn't going well but hadn't quite made peace with that yet.
A banner above them read: MUSIC CLUB.
The guy perked up as a student walked past the table.
"Hey, do you want to—"
"No thanks," the student said, not even fully stopping.
The guy's expression did something complicated. He picked it back up, reset, and watched the next student approach.
A guitar was leaning against the side of the table. He reached for it, probably thinking a small demonstration might help. The moment his fingers touched the strings, one of them snapped with a sound that was somehow both quiet and catastrophic.
He stared at it.
The girl beside him didn't even look up.
"Tragic," I said, quietly.
"Their membership has been falling for two years," Erika said, appearing at my shoulder in the way she sometimes did, like she had been there the whole time and I just hadn't noticed. "Half their active members graduated last year. The ones who are left don't have enough people for performances, which means no funding, which means no new equipment." She paused. "That guitar has been broken for a while, apparently."
I looked at the booth. At the faded posters and the sad little speaker and the guy who was now looking at the snapped string with an expression that I recognized in a way I didn't want to examine too closely.
"That's rough," I said.
"It is."
I looked for another moment longer than I had planned to.
The guy set the guitar down carefully, like it still deserved that. He straightened up, looked out at the courtyard full of students rushing past his table, and didn't move. Just stood there, steady in that quiet way people are when they haven't given up but they're getting close and they know it.
I turned away.
It had nothing to do with me. I wasn't a joiner. I wasn't looking for a club, and I certainly wasn't looking for one that was already halfway to dissolving. That was a problem that belonged to someone else, some other person with more time and fewer secrets and an actual reason to care.
I crossed my arms and looked at the Student Council booth instead, with its matching signage and its crowd of interested students.
Erika had moved on to the next booth. Marco was still at the food table. The courtyard was full and loud and moving all around me.
I told myself to walk.
I stayed where I was.
To be continued.