The chemistry lab on the third floor of the science building permanently smelled like burnt hair and sour vinegar. It was the last period of a Thursday, and the giant clock above the blackboard was ticking with agonizing slowness, its heavy clicks sounding like a countdown to execution.
"If we mix the blue one with the yellow one, do you think it'll make a cool green or do you think the glass will shatter?" Krit asked, his safety goggles pushed up onto his forehead like a pair of high-tech sunglasses. He was twirling a plastic pipette between his fingers with terrifying speed.
"Krit, if you blow up this table, I will personally report you to the principal," Mali muttered, not looking up from her lab manual. Her knuckles were white around her blue ballpoint pen. "We need exactly four milliliters of the copper sulfate. Four. Not five. Not a 'splash.' And definitely not whatever you're doing with that dropper."
"I'm innovating," Krit said smoothly, dropping a single, unauthorized bead of clear liquid into their beaker. It hissed faintly.
"You're going to get us detention," Mali countered, finally looking up to glare at him. "Where is Phuwin? He was supposed to be washing the graduated cylinders five minutes ago."
They both turned their heads toward the back corner of the lab.
Phuwin was standing by the rusted iron sink, but he wasn't washing anything. He was holding a glass beaker up to his face, tilting his head from side to side, using the curved, reflective surface to examine his eyelids.
"They're still puffy," Phuwin called out, his voice echoing hollowly inside the glass container. "Mali, look at me from over there. Do I look like a person who hasn't slept since Tuesday, or do I just look like I have severe seasonal allergies?"
"You look like a fish," Krit yelled back. "Put the glass down, the teacher is looking."
Phuwin sighed, a deep, theatrical sound that vibrated through the entire back row, and dragged his feet as he walked back to their station. He dropped the cylinders onto the black slate table with a loud, glass-on-stone clack that made Mali flinch.
"I checked his Spotify," Phuwin whispered, leaning over the table until his face was inches from Mali's ear.
Mali froze, her pen stopping mid-sentence. "Phuwin. We talked about this. You deleted the apps."
"I deleted Instagram and Line," Phuwin said, his eyes wide and manic. "But Spotify isn't a social media app. It's a utility. It's for music. And it just so happens that you can see what your friends are listening to on the desktop version if you log in through Safari. And do you know what he's listening to right now?"
Krit leaned in, suddenly invested. "What? Something pathetic?"
"The Scientist by Coldplay," Phuwin whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of betrayal and triumph. "On loop. For the last three hours. What does that mean? Why is he going back to the start? Is he thinking about me? Is he regretful? Or is he just doing a group study session and needs background noise?"
"It means he has basic taste in British alt-rock," Krit said, reaching out to tap Phuwin's forehead with the plastic pipette. "Focus. Help me measure this before Mali pops a blood vessel."
"I'm serious!" Phuwin grabbed Krit's wrist, his grip surprisingly tight. "He hated Coldplay. We literally argued about it in the taxi three months ago. He said Chris Martin sounded like a sad goat. And now he's listening to it? It's a sign. It has to be."
"Phuwin," Mali said, her voice dropping into her trademark 'mom tone' as she gently took the pipette from Krit's hand. "People change their minds about music. It's not a secret code. You need to stop digging for buried treasure in his listening history."
"I'm not digging, it's right there! It's on the right side of the screen!"
"All right, settle down back there," Mr. Sanan's sharp voice cut through the hum of the lab. The elderly teacher poked his glasses up his nose, glaring toward their corner from behind his desk. "Table four. Less talking, more titrating. The lab reports are due before the bell rings, and I see a distinct lack of data on your sheet, Master Krit."
"We are right on the verge of a breakthrough, teacher," Krit called back, flashing a brilliant, completely fake smile that had successfully saved him from suspension at least three times this semester.
Mr. Sanan gave a doubtful grunt but turned back to his laptop.
The immediate threat passed, and the chaos returned to its normal, low-level buzz. Krit went back to secretly collecting plastic pipettes from neighboring tables, and Mali began furiously scribbling numbers into her workbook, her elbow shoved firmly against Phuwin's side to keep him from drifting away again.
"Hey," Krit muttered, nudging Phuwin's shoulder with his knuckles. "Pass me the yellow bottle. The one that looks like lemon juice."
Phuwin didn't move.
He was staring out the large, grime-streaked window of the lab. Outside, the school courtyard was empty, baking under the fierce afternoon sun. On the concrete basketball court below, a forgotten red-and-white sports towel was draped over the metal bench, moving slightly in the stagnant breeze.
It was the exact spot where they used to wait for the bus together. Every Tuesday and Thursday.
The bell would ring, they would run down the stairs, and he'd be sitting right there on that bench, holding an extra bottle of green tea because he knew Phuwin always forgot to buy one after gym class. Five months of Tuesdays and Thursdays. Five months of sitting on that exact piece of green-painted metal, talking about nothing until the sky turned orange.
And now, it was just a bench.
The theater seemed to drain out of Phuwin all at once. The frantic energy that had driven him to check Spotify through a clunky browser interface just evaporated, leaving his shoulders small and slumped under his white uniform shirt.
He reached for the yellow bottle Krit had asked for, but his fingers misjudged the distance. His hand clipped the edge of the glass graduated cylinder they'd spent the last twenty minutes filling.
Smash.
The glass didn't just crack; it shattered beautifully, perfectly, into dozens of tiny, glittering pieces across the black slate table. The clear, acidic liquid rushed outward, soaking right into Mali's carefully written lab manual, turning the blue ink into a blurred, weeping smear of running color.
The entire back row went completely quiet.
Phuwin pulled his hand back, his fingers hovering in the air. He looked down at the mess, his chest rising and falling in short, shallow breaths. For a second, it looked like he was going to launch into another dramatic speech—apologize loudly, make a joke about his clumsiness, or blame the ghost that had possessed him.
But he didn't. He didn't say a word. He just stared at the running blue ink, his lower lip trapped firmly between his teeth, his eyes turning glassier than the shards on the table.
Mali looked at her ruined notebook. The hours of work, the neat handwriting, the perfect columns of numbers—all gone, turned into a soggy gray pulp.
She didn't yell. She didn't even sigh.
Without a word, Mali reached into her backpack, pulled out a thick packet of tissues she kept for emergencies, and began dropping them over the liquid, watching the paper bloom with wetness. She worked methodically, her hands steady, completely ignoring the fact that her own uniform cuff was getting damp.
Krit didn't make a joke. The sarcastic comment about Phuwin's lack of motor skills died before it even reached his lips. He looked at the side of Phuwin's face, noticed the way his throat swallowed hard twice, and quietly reached across the table.
With his bare hands, Krit began gathering the largest shards of glass, stacking them in a neat, dangerous little pile away from Phuwin's arms. One of the sharp edges nicked the pad of Krit's thumb, leaving a tiny pinprick of bright red blood, but he didn't even blink. He just wiped it on his shorts and kept clearing the space.
"I'm sorry," Phuwin whispered. It was so quiet it was almost lost beneath the sound of a nearby Bunsen burner. "Mali, your notes. I'm sorry."
Mali stopped dabbing the paper. She looked up, her expression soft, entirely stripped of the annoyance she'd been wearing two minutes ago. She reached out, caught Phuwin's wrist, and pulled his hand away from the edge of the table where a stray piece of glass was resting.
"It's just paper, Phuwin," she said. Her voice was incredibly quiet, a tiny island of calm in the middle of the noisy classroom. "I have the data memorized anyway. It's fine."
"I ruin everything this week," he said, his voice cracking, his eyes fixed stubbornly on the black stone. "I can't even hold a piece of glass right."
Krit dropped the last large shard into the sink with a dull clink. He walked back, took his safety goggles completely off, and tossed them onto the table.
"You're an idiot," Krit said, his voice rough but completely devoid of malice. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a half-melted, slightly squished piece of strawberry chewing gum, and tossed it into the center of the clean space he'd just made. "Eat that. It tastes like chemicals, but it'll give you something to do besides looking like you're about to faint into the copper sulfate."
Phuwin stared at the sad little piece of gum.
"And stop looking at the court," Krit added, his eyes darting toward the window for a fraction of a second before returning to the desk. "The bus takes ten minutes longer on Thursdays anyway. We're taking the skytrain today. My treat."
"You don't have any money," Mali pointed out, though her lips twitched with the ghost of a smile.
"I have exactly forty baht and a coupon for a free soft-serve," Krit said proudly, leaning his hip against the table. "We can split it three ways. Don't ruin the moment, Mali."
Phuwin looked between the two of them. The heavy, suffocating weight in his chest didn't magically disappear—the court was still empty, and the bench was still there—but the air in his lungs felt just a little bit lighter.
He picked up the squished piece of gum, unwrapped the silver foil with trembling fingers, and shoved it into his mouth.
"It tastes like soap," Phuwin sniffled, wiping his nose with the back of his sleeve.
"Told you," Krit grinned, the menace finally returning to his eyes as he grabbed a fresh pipette. "Now help Mali rewrite her charts before Sanan comes over here and gives us all zeroes for the semester."