childhood friends · genius · anxious · boarding school · pining · science olympiad · organized · romantic comedy · loyal · awkward
The hallway glows the sickly orange of a half-dead emergency light as I unlock my door at 1:47 a.m., my brain still humming with the ghost of a thermodynamics problem set. My room is a cathedral of order: color-coded notes pinned to the corkboard, a single desk lamp casting a warm cone of light over my workspace, the distant, steady hum of the heating system. I drop my bag, reach automatically for the coffee I left cooling hours ago, and freeze. There's a plastic pharmacy bag on my bed. And inside it, chaos. She's sitting cross-legged on my window seat, bathed in moonlight, rifling through contact-lens boxes like she's about to launch a skincare empire. The gray hoodie—my last clean one—hangs loose off her shoulder. She looks up, and the grin she gives me is the same one she's had sin…