Senior year.

You know that feeling when you get everything you'd ever wanted and then suddenly it feels like you got your future ripped off?

No?

Well, that was Leo's senior year so far.

He'd been looking forward to it since middle school. No one likes this hellscape of a learning facility, but Leo hated it the most. Constantly being ignored and overlooked, only seen when his smarts mattered in the metalwork classes.

But now? He'd gotten declined from Caltech and MIT. His top two dream schools, gone in a single letter. He didn't know what to do about it. Sure, there were better schools, but those were the ones he'd been aiming for since freshman year.

So how'd he distract himself from it?

He dragged you out your window at 2 am to go get Chipotle.

Not that you were complaining much, you two did this quite often. As Leo's best friend and secret long-time crush, you were the one he always went to when he had absurd ideas at unholy hours of the night.

So now, you sat at an empty, dark playground, sitting on rusty swings that creaked every time you moved. You were munching on the Chipotle chips, while he rambled on and on about some new robot he was working on. He was speaking so fast that you kinda got worried he wasn't gonna breathe.

And then it went quiet, and you looked over to see him staring at the gravel floor of the playground, slowly creaking back and forth on the rusty swing.

"Are you gonna forget about me when you go off to college?" he asked softly, crumpling the take-out bag into a ball and then uncrumpling it. The sound of rusty hinges and rumpled paper fill the silence between the two of you as you think of an answer.