The festival photo had legs.
That was the only way to describe it. Every time I thought it had run its course — had been seen by everyone who was going to see it and commented on by everyone who had an opinion — it resurfaced somewhere new. A different account reposting it. A different comment section with a different theory. A different person in a different hallway holding their phone up like I was supposed to react.
Monday morning and it was already on its third wind.
Sky and I had made it exactly halfway down the main corridor before the first sighting. A girl from the year below us, phone extended, asking if I'd seen it. Sky had answered before I could — something about no comment at this time, delivered with the gravity of a man under subpoena — and we'd kept walking.
The second sighting was at the water fountain. A group of three boys who'd clearly been discussing it before we arrived and hadn't quite stopped when we approached. I caught fragments. Eight hundred likes. Has to be staged. No way she just lets someone carry her.
The third sighting was a comment read aloud by someone who didn't realise I was within earshot.
She's not carrying him physically. He's carrying her emotionally. That says something about the dynamic.
Sky made a sound beside me like a man swallowing a laugh whole.
"Don't," I said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're vibrating."
"I'm walking."
"You're vibrating while walking."
He pressed his lips together. His shoulders were doing something that suggested the laugh had simply relocated rather than disappeared.
We turned into the east corridor and I very deliberately did not look at my phone.
Ferb was back.
He appeared at his usual desk in Osei's class like he'd never been gone — notebook open, glasses clean, pen already moving across a fresh page with the focused energy of someone who had spent his absence doing something productive and was not going to discuss what.
He caught me looking.
Nodded once.
I nodded back.
Sky leaned toward me the moment Osei turned to the board. "He looks smug."
"He always looks smug."
"This is a different smug. This is the smug of a man who knows something."
"Ferb always looks like he knows something."
"This is the smug of a man who knows something new."
I glanced at Ferb. He was writing notes. His expression was, objectively, entirely neutral. But Sky wasn't entirely wrong about the quality of it — there was something slightly different in how he held himself. A kind of settled certainty that hadn't been there before Friday.
I turned back to the board.
Whatever Ferb knew or didn't know was Ferb's business. I had enough of my own.
Osei's class gave way to Chemistry, which gave way to a free period that Sky used to study and I used to stare at the ceiling of the library and think about Thursday's mission brief, which I still hadn't fully read, which was either strategic compartmentalisation or avoidance, and I was choosing not to examine which.
Lunch arrived with the familiar noise and smell of two hundred students all deciding simultaneously that they were hungry.
Sky and I found a table near the windows. I put my tray down. I picked up my fork.
From two tables behind us, clearly enough to hear:
"— definitely them, look at the coat —"
"— but she never looks like that, like she's actually relaxed —"
"— I think it's sweet —"
"— I think it's staged —"
"— why would someone stage being carried through a crowd —"
"— for attention obviously —"
Sky took a very deliberate bite of his food and looked at me with the expression of a man exercising heroic self-control.
"Don't," I said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to say several things."
"One thing."
"What thing."
He pointed his fork. "She's carrying him emotionally."
"Sky."
He dissolved.
Not loudly — he had the presence of mind to muffle it against his sleeve — but completely. His shoulders shook. His fork clattered against his tray. He pressed his hand over his mouth and made a sound like a kettle that had been asked to be quiet about the fact that it was boiling.
I stared at my food and waited for it to pass.
It took a while.
"I'm done," he managed finally, straightening up and wiping the corner of his eye. "I'm completely done. That's out of my system."
"Good."
"The comment section really said—"
"Sky."
"Gone. Finished. New topic." He cleared his throat and picked up his fork again with great dignity. "How's the food."
"Fine."
"Good." A pause. "Eight hundred and forty-two likes, by the way."
I put my fork down.
"I checked once," he said. "Just once. For informational purposes."
"Eat your food."
"Eating."
I looked across the cafeteria.
Bella was at her usual corner. Earbuds in, a book open beside her tray, posture loose and sideways in her chair like she'd arranged herself for comfort rather than visibility. She was eating. She was reading. She had not once, as far as I could tell, looked up to check whether anyone was talking about her.
She probably already knew they were.
She had decided it was not worth the energy.
I picked my fork back up.
The afternoon moved.
More classes. More hallways. More fragments of conversation that I was getting better at not hearing. At one point, walking between buildings, I passed a group of girls who went noticeably quiet when I appeared and noticeably resumed when I was past. I caught one word on the way out.
Romantic.
I kept walking.
By the time the final bell rang I had successfully completed an entire Monday without incident, which felt like more of an achievement than it should have.
Sky peeled off at the stairwell — homework, he said, and also his grandmother was calling at six and he needed to be home for it. I watched him go with the particular gratitude I always felt for the fact that he existed the way he did — loud and warm and entirely himself, with the kind of loyalty that didn't need to announce itself.
Then I went upstairs.
The balcony that evening was mine first.
I'd made tea — a success this time, genuinely — and stood with the mug between my palms, watching the city do what the city did after dark. Below, the last of the dinner traffic moved through the lit streets. A group of students were heading somewhere with the purposeful energy of people who had plans. Far above, the first stars were negotiating with the light pollution.
The click of the partition door.
I didn't turn around.
Bella appeared at her side of the railing. She'd changed into an oversized white shirt and soft shorts, her hair loose around her shoulders. She had a bowl of something that smelled like it had garlic in it. She set it on the railing and leaned beside it, looking out.
Neither of us said anything for a while.
This had become, without either of us deciding it, a normal thing. The silence between us wasn't the silence of people who didn't know what to say. It was the silence of people who'd found that not saying anything was also an option.
"Long day," she said finally.
"The photo again," I said.
"Mm."
"Someone said you were carrying me emotionally."
A pause.
"Were they right?" she asked.
I glanced at her. She was looking at the city, but the corner of her mouth had done something small and private.
"I think they were projecting," I said.
"Probably."
I took a sip of my tea. Below us, someone's window had music coming through it — something soft and low, jazz or something close to it.
"What did you eat?" I asked.
"Pasta. Garlic, olive oil, cherry tomatoes." She looked at the bowl. "The tomatoes in the market downstairs are finally decent. They've been terrible for three weeks."
"You've been tracking the tomatoes."
"I've been buying tomatoes." She picked up the bowl. "It's the same thing."
"Is it?"
"If you buy something regularly you end up tracking its quality whether you mean to or not."
I thought about this. "That's either very practical or very sad."
"Most practical things are."
She ate. I drank my tea. The music from the window below shifted into something slower.
"What's your worst subject?" I asked.
She considered it properly, which I appreciated. She didn't give the social answer — didn't say something strategically humble.
"P.E.," she said.
I stared at her.
"I'm not bad at it," she said immediately. "I'm fine at it. But I hate being assessed on things that are supposed to be functional. Running isn't a performance. It's transport."
"Alden's running assessments around the track in the third week," I said.
"I know." She didn't sound worried about it. More resigned. "You?"
"History. Dates."
"Just dates?"
"The dates feel disconnected from everything else. I can follow the logic of an event, cause and effect, what it meant. But the specific year just — doesn't stick."
She tilted her head slightly. "Try attaching them to something else."
"Like what?"
"Anything. The year something happened and the year something personal happened to you in the same decade. They connect." She tapped the railing once. "Your brain doesn't store isolated numbers. It stores relationships between things."
I looked at her. "Did someone teach you that?"
"My grandmother." She said it simply, without the careful quality people sometimes put around things that carried weight. "She couldn't remember faces after a certain point but she could remember exactly which year each of her grandchildren was born because she'd attached them all to world events." She paused. "She remembers me as the year the big storm hit the coast. Said it was appropriate."
"Was it?"
"I'm told I cried for three days straight and refused to sleep unless she was in the room."
"That does sound like a storm."
Something moved through her expression — not quite a smile, not quite not one. Something that happened in the space between.
"What's the best thing you've ever eaten?" I asked.
She didn't hesitate. "Jollof rice from a place in the old quarter. There's a woman there, older, she sets up every Saturday morning. The line is always long. It's always worth it."
"What makes it the best?"
"She doesn't rush it." Bella set the bowl back on the railing. "Most places rush the base. They get the tomatoes in and move on. She lets it sit. You can taste the difference."
"You've analysed the jollof rice."
"I've appreciated the jollof rice. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
She gave me a sideways look. "You asked what made it the best. I answered. That's not analysis, that's attention."
I thought about that. The particular care in the distinction — between analysing something and simply paying enough attention to it that you understood why it mattered.
"What about you?" she asked.
I thought about it honestly. "There was a bakery," I said. "In Lyon. Near where I grew up. They made this bread — just bread, nothing fancy, just the plain loaf they made every morning. But the crust. The way it sounded when you broke it." I paused. "I've had better food since then. More expensive food. But that bread is still the answer to this question."
She was quiet for a moment.
"Lyon," she said.
"Yeah."
"That's France."
"It is."
She didn't ask anything else. She just nodded once, the way she nodded at things she was filing rather than things she needed more information about.
The music from the window below drifted up between us.
"What's the worst thing you've ever eaten?" I asked.
She answered immediately. "A protein bar that tasted like chalk and sadness. Someone gave it to me after a training session with the confidence of a person who believed it was food."
"Was it not food?"
"Technically it contained nutrients. Spiritually it was a punishment."
I laughed. She didn't, but her mouth did the thing it sometimes did where it fought a smile and came to an arranged truce.
We stayed like that for another hour.
The tomatoes came up again. The bakery in Lyon. The library's restricted section, which Bella confirmed contained mostly outdated physics textbooks and a single volume about tropical fish that nobody had checked out since 2003. Whether Alden had secretly enjoyed Sky's explosion — Bella's verdict was yes, unambiguously, the nod of approval had been genuine. Whether the Sunfire Festival happened every year — it did, and Bella had attended twice before, alone, in the early mornings before the crowds arrived.
Nothing heavy. Nothing that required anything.
Just two people on a balcony at night, being ordinary people, which was — in the context of everything else — the strangest and most comfortable thing I had done in months.
When she finally said goodnight and went inside, I stayed a few minutes longer.
The city breathed below.
I thought, very briefly, about Thursday.
Then I finished my tea and went to bed.