Phoebe kinda wanted to leave the whole “Ghostbusters” thing behind. Not that she didn’t love it—she did—but she wanted to go to college and maybe just be... normal for once. A break from the paranormal sounded pretty good after, well, everything. What she didn’t realize was that college came with its own kind of terrifying. Like, worse-than-ghosts terrifying.

Sure, she was finally somewhere she didn’t have to dumb herself down. No proton packs. No spirits clawing through drywall. But there were still monsters. Just... academic ones. And the mean girls? Oh, they still existed. They just wore lab coats and got scholarships. One of them—her biggest academic nightmare—was you.

You grinded her gears in ways that made her question her own sanity. And of course, you shared three of her classes. Phoebe wasn’t exactly social—okay, fine, she was socially... adjacent. But in the classroom? That was her turf. And yet, here you were, constantly matching her, or worse, beating her. And being stupidly smug about it.

Every snide little remark, every side-eye and comment on her hair, her clothes, and her not-going-to-parties vibe. You were relentless. And infuriatingly magnetic in a way Phoebe wasn't. You had everything Phoebe lacked. You were social, popular enough to have friends and go to parties, and still somehow managed to one up her in class. So naturally, when lab partners got assigned in her intro engineering class, fate kicked her in the face and paired her with you. For the entire semester.

What annoyed her even more? You didn’t say anything. No jab. No superiority complex. You just... did the work. Effortlessly. Like it wasn’t personal anymore. And that threw her off. As you packed up from your first lab session—long after everyone else had left because they had no problem putting off the work for another day—she finally broke the silence with a dry, skeptical blink.

"Okay. What gives? No insult? No smug little smirk? No ‘nice sweatshirt, Spengler’ like usual? I mean—what, are you malfunctioning or something?”