Yuna's POV
I had made it through the morning without any major disasters, which, at this point in my life in San Esteban, felt like an achievement worth acknowledging.
No wrong classrooms.
No tricycles.
No accidental band room visits.
Just a regular morning of existing in a school, which was all I had ever asked for.
I was walking down the main hallway with Erika after second period, doing absolutely nothing of note, when I became aware of a shift in the atmosphere ahead of us.
It was the specific kind of shift that happened when someone who expected to be noticed was walking through a space — a subtle parting of the crowd, a few heads turning, the kind of attention that moved ahead of a person like a small weather system.
A girl was coming down the opposite end of the hallway.
Long hair, impossibly straight, the kind that moved in a single smooth sheet rather than individual strands.
Designer shoes that had no business being in a school hallway.
The posture of someone who had decided a very long time ago that every room they walked into was already theirs.
She had a small group around her — not exactly a crowd, but enough people that her presence had a kind of gravity to it, pulling their attention along wherever she moved.
I clocked all of this in about three seconds and immediately looked away, because this was none of my business and I had things to do.
Then I felt it.
That particular sensation of someone's gaze landing on you from across a hallway.
I looked up.
She was staring directly at me.
Not in a threatening way.
More in the way someone stares when they have just spotted something they have been looking for and are now deciding what to do about it.
I glanced behind me, just in case she was looking at someone else.
She was not looking at someone else.
I turned back.
She was already walking toward me.
Erika, who had picked up on the situation about half a second before I did, made a small quiet sound beside me that I can only describe as knowing.
The girl stopped a comfortable two steps too close.
"You're new," she said.
It wasn't a question.
"I transferred a few weeks ago," I said, keeping my voice level.
She tilted her head slightly, studying me with the focused attention of someone conducting an assessment.
"I'm Avery," she said.
"Avery Villanueva."
She said it the way people say a name when they expect it to mean something.
I waited a moment to see if it did.
It didn't, particularly.
"Yuna," I said.
"I know." She said it like she had already looked me up, which was strange because I was fairly certain I had done nothing here worth looking up.
"You have a vibe about you."
I blinked.
"A vibe."
"Mm." She was still studying me, calm and certain.
"I can usually tell.
You're the type who doesn't show their hand.
Keeps things close.
But there's something there."
I looked at Erika.
Erika looked back at me with an expression that said: I am watching this unfold and I have no plans to stop it.
"I appreciate that," I said to Avery, "but I genuinely just got here.
There's no hand.
I'm just a transferee trying to find my classroom most days."
"That's what someone would say," Avery said, with the serene confidence of someone who has already decided that my denial was simply further evidence of their theory.
She looked me over one more time — my uniform, my bag, my general state of someone who had barely gotten enough sleep — and nodded to herself like I had confirmed something.
"I've been at the top here for two years," she said, not unkindly, just as a statement of fact.
"Music.
It's my thing.
And I know my competition when I see it."
"I don't sing," I said.
"Yet," she said.
"No," I said.
"Not yet as a temporary condition.
Not yet as in, not ever.
I'm not in music."
She smiled, and it was the kind of smile that contained a whole argument she had already won in her head.
"We'll see," she said pleasantly, and then she was turning back to her group, her hair swinging in that one smooth sheet, and the small weather system of attention moved away with her.
I stood in the hallway and watched her go.
"What," I said.
"You have a rival," Erika said.
"I don't have a rival.
You need to be doing something to have a rival.
I am doing nothing.
I am actively trying to do nothing."
"She doesn't know that."
"I TOLD her that."
"She didn't believe you."
I looked back down the hallway where Avery had disappeared around a corner, back into whatever part of the school she occupied.
"This is insane," I said.
"She picked a competitor based entirely on the way I was standing in a hallway."
"You do have a vibe, though," Erika said.
I turned to look at her.
"Don't," I said.
She adjusted her glasses.
"I'm just saying."
"Don't."
She had the grace to let it drop, but I could see the corner of her mouth doing something.
We walked the rest of the way to class in silence, and I spent most of it trying to figure out how I had acquired a rival before I had done anything rival-worthy, and whether this counted as a new problem or just a continuation of the general chaos that had been my life since I arrived in San Esteban.
I decided it was a continuation.
Everything here was a continuation.
I got home that afternoon to the familiar sounds and smells of Aunt Rosa's house — something cooking on the stove, Lily's voice carrying from somewhere upstairs, the TV in the background doing what it always did.
I dropped my bag by the door, kicked off my shoes, and sat down on the couch.
For a moment I just sat there, letting the noise wash over me, not thinking about anything in particular.
My phone buzzed.
I picked it up.
My manager.
I answered it.
"Yuna." His voice had that specific quality it got when something had happened — that overlap of excitement and barely-contained chaos.
"Talk to me. Tell me you're sitting down."
"I'm on a couch."
"Good.
Good.
Okay.
They loved it."
I stayed very still.
"What?"
"The song.
They loved it.
They're putting it on the album.
Your song is going on the album, Yuna."
The room stayed exactly the same.
The TV kept going in the background.
Something on the stove made a quiet bubbling sound from the kitchen.
Lily's voice drifted down from upstairs, something about a unicorn kingdom.
I sat in the middle of all of it and tried to let the words land somewhere.
"The whole song," I said.
"The full track.
Album cut.
Done deal."
"That song," I said.
"The one I sent at 2:57 in the morning."
"That's the one."
I looked up at the ceiling.
The ceiling of Aunt Rosa's living room, with its slightly uneven plaster and the small water stain in the corner that had been there since before I arrived.
My manager kept talking — about what it meant, about the placement, about how this was the kind of thing that built careers even when nobody knew your name — and I heard most of it, but mostly I was just sitting there.
Somewhere in the background of everything, behind the months of deadlines and the late nights and the notebooks full of words that nobody would ever connect back to me, something had landed.
Something I had made at almost three in the morning in a room full of unicorn stickers, running on instant coffee and stubbornness, had found its way to where it was supposed to go.
I let that sit for a moment.
Just a moment.
"Okay," I said finally, when my manager paused for breath.
"Thank you.
Really."
"Don't thank me.
You wrote the thing."
"Yeah," I said.
"I know."
We wrapped up the call, and I set the phone down on the cushion beside me.
Lily appeared at the top of the stairs.
"Ate Yuna!
Are you home?
Can we watch a movie later?"
"Yeah," I called back.
"Later."
"YESSS—"
She disappeared again, already announcing this to someone or something down the hall.
I leaned back into the couch cushions and stared up at the ceiling for another minute.
Then I closed my eyes.
I'd let myself think about what it all meant later.
For now I just needed to sleep for approximately one thousand years.
To be continued.