Daryl Dixon is nineteen years old and still a senior at a Georgia high school.
Not because he wanted to be.
He repeated a year. Then another.
Teachers blamed discipline. Attendance. “Lack of motivation.” The polite school words for a kid who grew up in a house where making it to class in one piece was already an accomplishment.
What confused him more than anything was what happened last year.
Somehow… he’d become popular.
Not loud popular.
Not football-star popular.
The other kind.
The kind where people talked about him in quiet voices. The kind where girls looked a little too long in the hallway and boys either wanted to challenge him or sit at his table.
Daryl had never tried for any of it.
He was nineteen, stuck finishing senior year with kids two grades younger than him.
Nothin' impressive about that.
But people loved a story, and apparently the quiet Dixon kid had become one.
So he ignored it the same way he ignored most things.
By keeping busy.
Lately that meant spending time in the school gym before classes started, not for football, but for something the school barely even advertised.
Archery club.
The school had an old program tucked away in the equipment room — a handful of recurve bows, targets stacked against the wall, and a faded banner from some county competition twenty years ago.
Most students thought it was weird.
Daryl liked it immediately.
Archery was quiet.
No shouting. No teammates yelling plays. No crowds.
Just breath. Focus. Patience.
Things he understood.
That morning the gym lights buzzed overhead, half the building still asleep. Pale winter sunlight slipped through the tall windows near the bleachers.
At the far end of the court, several circular straw targets stood lined up against the wall.
Daryl stood about fifteen yards back, boots planted firm on the polished floor.
A worn flannel hung over a chair nearby, and a small row of arrows rested in the open quiver beside him.
He lifted the bow smoothly, movements practiced from weeks of repetition.
Left hand steady.
Right hand pulling the string back slowly until it touched the corner of his mouth.
His shoulders tightened slightly as he held the draw.
Then—
Thwip.
The arrow sliced across the gym and sank into the target with a dull, satisfying thunk.
Not dead center.
But close.
Daryl lowered the bow and rolled his shoulder once before reaching for another arrow.
He didn’t notice the gym doors opening behind him.
Most students weren’t even in the building yet.
He nocked another arrow, raising the bow again.
Pull. Aim. Hold.
That’s when he felt it.
That quiet prickling sensation crawling up the back of his neck.
Someone's watching..
He paused mid-draw.
The arrow tip dipped slightly before he relaxed the string and turned his head toward the entrance.
A girl stood in the doorway.
He had never seen her before.
Which meant the whispers in the hallway yesterday were probably true.
New transfer student.
The rumors had spread fast. Rich family. Out-of-town. Fancy clothes. Something like that.
Daryl hadn’t bothered listening much after the first sentence.
Now she stood there just inside the doorway, watching him like she hadn’t expected to find anyone in the gym this early.
He studied her for a second.
Clean clothes. Expensive backpack. Definitely not someone who looked like they’d grown up around red dirt roads and pickup trucks.
He exhaled slowly through his nose and rested the bow against his thigh.
One hand reached up to brush damp hair off his forehead.
Then he nodded once toward the archery targets behind him.
“School don’t advertise this much,” he said, voice low and rough from the quiet morning.
His eyes flicked toward the bow still in his hand, then back to her.
“Most people think it’s weird.”
A faint half-smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Or you just standin’ there tryin’ to figure out if I’m about to shoot somethin’ important?”