The classroom never started out loud.
Suzu always liked that part. The quiet before everyone arrived, when the desks were still slightly crooked. It felt like the room belonged to itself rather than a container for noise, expectations, and other people's energy.
Then the day actually began. Footsteps multiplied outside the door. The air changed before anyone even spoke, like the room was bracing itself. Bags hit desks. Chairs scraped. Someone laughed too loudly at something that wasn't actually funny, and just like that, silence stopped being the default and became something Suzu had to actively protect.
She took her seat in the middle row, not close enough to be noticed for trying too hard, not far enough to be accused of hiding. A carefully unremarkable position. If she had to describe it, she'd probably call it a "statistically safe location," though she would never say that out loud because it sounded worse when spoken.
Her notebook was already open.
She didn't like the official ones. The lines were too obedient, like they expected her thoughts to behave properly just because they were on paper. Suzu's thoughts didn't behave. They didn't even agree with each other most of the time.
Inside her notebook, the margins were doing most of the work. The center was half-finished notes from class—things she was technically supposed to be learning—but the sides were where everything interesting happened. Underlines that didn't always connect to anything. Little comments to herself. A sentence she liked from something she absolutely shouldn't have been reading in school, circled twice as if repetition made it safer.
She turned the page too quickly and immediately regretted it, like she'd disturbed something fragile.
Someone in front of her laughed at their phone. It didn't matter. Nothing in particular ever mattered in isolation, but everything still managed to affect the shape of her attention anyway. Suzu pressed her pen to the page without writing, then lifted it again.
She should write something normal.
A heading. A date. Proof she was participating in reality like everyone else.
Instead, she wrote: today is probably going fine in a way I cannot verify yet.
She stared at it for a second, then underlined it once, then again. Suzu tapped her pen once against the desk.
And felt, very suddenly, like the room had already been looking at her for longer than she had been allowed to notice. She looked away first.
Not because she had seen anything, but because continuing to look would have required commitment, and commitment was dangerous when you weren't even sure what you were committing to.
The teacher arrived a minute later, carrying a stack of papers and an exhausted expression. The familiar routine unfolded without asking whether anyone was interested. Attendance. Announcements. The slow migration toward whatever today's lesson was supposed to be.
Suzu tried paying attention. She genuinely did. For almost four minutes. Then her attention wandered toward the novel hidden beneath her desk. It wasn't a particularly respectable book.
Not that Suzu thought books needed to earn respectability in the first place. Stories were stories. Some were mysteries. Some were romances. Some involved girls making poor decisions around other girls.
In the interest of academic honesty, those tended to be her favorites.
She carefully nudged the book open with one hand while keeping her notebook positioned at an angle that looked educational from a distance. Years of practice had refined the maneuver into something approaching an art form.
The page opened to a scene she had already read twice. Which, unfortunately, did not stop her from reading it a third time. A character was in the middle of confessing her feelings with all the grace of a train derailment. Every sentence somehow made the situation worse. Suzu felt herself smiling despite herself.
"You cannot say that," she thought, horrified.
The character said it anyway.
"No. No, stop talking."
The character continued talking. Suzu bit back a laugh. A few words caught her attention. She grabbed her pen and quickly scribbled a note into the margin.
This is ridiculous. Nobody would actually say this.
After a second's consideration, she added:
...unless they were desperate.
Then she underlined desperate.
Twice.
The teacher's voice drifted across the room, discussing something that was probably important to somebody. Suzu turned the page. A moment later, a shadow crossed her desk. Not for long. Just a second. Maybe less.
She glanced up automatically. Nobody was standing there. The lesson continued. The students around her continued. Everything appeared completely normal.
Yet somehow, that feeling returned. The same feeling from before.
Awareness. Like a page being read over her shoulder. Suzu slowly lowered her pen. Then, after a brief internal debate, she tilted her notebook slightly to cover more of the novel.A ridiculous reaction. If nobody was looking, she was hiding from nothing.
And if somebody was looking—
Well. That was worse.
She stared at the page for a few seconds before realizing she had read the same sentence six times without processing a single word.
"...This is becoming inconvenient," she muttered under her breath.
The girl beside her glanced over. Suzu immediately pointed at her notebook.
"Math."
The girl nodded sympathetically. Which was somehow more embarrassing. Suzu sank lower in her seat. It didn't help.
If anything, it made her more aware of the fact that she was sinking, which was not the intended outcome of sinking at all. She adjusted her posture again, slowly, carefully, as if she could reset her physical presence into something less noticeable by sheer intent alone. It did not work.
The classroom kept moving without her permission. The teacher's voice continued its steady, indifferent explanation of something Suzu was not retaining in any meaningful capacity. The sound of pages turning rose and fell in uneven waves.
Suzu tried to reattach herself to it. She looked at the board. She did not understand what she was looking at. She looked at her notebook instead.
Because the notebook was honest in a way the classroom was not. The notebook reflected exactly what she had been doing, which was not paying attention and instead oscillating between reading scandalous romance literature and thinking about whether or not she was being observed in a meaningful, narratively significant way.
She pressed her pen lightly against the page without writing. Then again. Then stopped. A habit was forming there, and she did not like habits that she had not consciously approved. She exhaled slowly through her nose. This was becoming difficult in a way she could not technically justify.
If she was being watched, she couldn't tell by whom. If she wasn't being watched, she was behaving suspiciously for no reason. Both outcomes were inconvenient.
She shifted her book slightly under the desk again, just enough to see the next line without fully committing to the act of reading it. The gesture was practiced, efficient. Almost boring in its repetition.
The characters on the page were still arguing about feelings in a way that felt both exaggerated and uncomfortably familiar. Suzu found herself thinking, not for the first time, that fictional people had a very loose relationship with self-preservation. It was part of their charm.
She turned the page. Then paused. She turned her head. Just slightly. Just enough. And there it was again. That same sensation from before. She simply registered it, quietly, as if acknowledging it too directly would make it become more real than she was prepared to handle.
Then she looked away again. Slowly. She couldn't bring herself to fully look. She closed her eyes shut and stopped breathing for a moment, before deciding to close her book and focus on the teacher. Someone had to have been watching her read that book, she had little doubt. It was embarrassing to think about.
"I should really stop reading yuri in class," she thought.