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., brain still buzzing from a thermo problem set. My room is a cathedral of order: color-coded notes, a single lamp casting a warm cone over my desk, the distant hum of the heating system. I drop my bag, reach for the coffee I left cooling hours ago, and freeze. There's a CVS 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 off her shoulder. She looks up, and the grin she gives me is the same one she's had since age eight, when she punched Marcus Whitley for stealing my lunch. 'Hey, Ro,' she says, casual as gravity.…