“Do you have a picture of him? I mean, you don’t have to show us if you don’t want to, but—”
“What’s his name? Does he go to our school?”
“Is he in our year level?”
“Is he in ourclass?”
They both turn, wide-eyed, to the classroom door, where more students are trickling in, as if one of the guys might suddenly step forward and declare himself my secret boyfriend. Nothing of the sort happens, of course, but peopledoslow down and stare at me like they’ve never really seen me before. Like they’re hoping I might share something about my fake love life with them too.
The only person who goes straight to his desk at the very back is Caz Song. Hands in pockets, one AirPod in, expression of perpetual boredom on his face. Just like yesterday. He glances my way, briefly, impassively, then turns away.
And though it’s really the least of my concerns, my rib cage curves inward. I’m not even sure what I was hoping for, why I imagined he’d acknowledge my existence after that one anomaly of a conversation out in the corridor. Caz Song and I are so different we might as well inhabit separate planets.
“Well?” the girl on my left prompts, drawing my attention back to her and her friend. “Is he?”
I study the two of them, searching for any signs of ill will or mockery. But they both just continue smiling, and I notice the light scatter of freckles across the taller girl’s nose, the yellow butterfly clip in the other girl’s wavy hair. They seem … nice. Genuinely friendly—
“Um, I can’t tell you that,” I say with a small, apologetic smile, hoping they’ll leave the conversation there. “I wish I could, but, you know. We haven’t been togetherthatlong, so we want to keep things private for now.”
“Ah.” They both nod slowly. Beam some more. Neither of them budges. “That’s totally understandable.”
Even though this is all part of the script I’d prepared when submitting my essay, it was only ever meant to be a preventative measure, not something to be shared with people across the world. It’s like those life jackets they store on airplanes; nobodyactuallyexpects to have to use them.
As if on cue, my phone flashes again on my desk.
531 new notifications.
The taller girl sees before I can flip the screen down.
“Wow,” she says as she finally starts unpacking her own stuff for class. A MacBook Air in shiny casing. Highlighters and pens with cute designs all over them. A thick planner that hardly looks used but has bright colored tabs running down the sides and a giant sticker of some K-pop group plastered on the cover. “You must’ve had a pretty wild morning, huh?”
“Wildis definitely one word for it,” I say, relieved I can at least be honest about this.
“I’ve always wondered what it’s like to go viral,” the other girl muses. She has her laptop out, and nothing else. This is actually standard for students here, I’ve learned the hard way. At my old school, we wereonlyallowed paper notes, so I didn’t realize I would even need to bring a laptop until my first class at Westbridge, when everyone was working on a Google Doc and all I had was a notebook and pencil.
Yeah, not exactly the best start.
“Nadia, didn’t that Douyin of yours go viral for a while the other month?” the tall girl is saying.
“The video got, like, twenty thousand views.” Nadia waves a dismissive hand in the air. “That’sverydifferent from having like a bajillion people read your writing. Plus”—she wrinkles her nose—“I kept getting all those weird comments about my feet.”
“True. We don’t love that.”
As the two of them break into giggles, I feel a dull pang in my chest. I’d kill to have that—to be sitting next to Zoe, laughing over some silly inside joke without worrying that I’ll be leaving in a year. To feel so comfortable, at ease, at home.
Something must show on my face, because the tall girl stops and turns to me with concern. “Are you okay, Eliza?”
“Huh?” I feign confusion, then quickly pull my lips into a sheepish smile. “Yeah, of course. Just … thinking about the essay, I guess. And what I’m going to do about it.”
The two of them make longahing sounds and nod again in total sync.
“That’s a good point,” the tall girl says. “You should do something about it for sure. You should— Oh! You should capitalize on the fame.”
“Yes!” Nadia points one finger at me excitedly—and almost pokes my eye out. “Oops—sorry! But Stephanie’s right. Whenever people go viral on Twitter, they always use it to promote themselves or boost their friend’s baking account or something.”
“Do you have one?” Stephanie asks, leaning over the back of her seat.
“What, a baking account?”
