You’d mastered the art of starting over.

Different bases, different states, different schools. You were a military brat through and through—three high schools in four years. You knew how to read a room faster than most people could find their locker. Flash a smile, name-drop the right brands, fake just enough boredom to seem cool. By fifth period on your first day, you had the popular girls inviting you to sit with them. By lunch the next day, they were already tagging you in mirror selfies.

You played the part like it was muscle memory.

But this place—this school in the middle of nowhere suburbia—had something the others didn’t.

Her.

You didn’t notice Grace Town until she was assigned as your partner in bio. She walked in late, dragging her limp leg slightly behind her, her oversized hoodie swallowing the rest of her. She didn’t look at anyone. Just sat down, opened her notebook, and ignored the teacher’s voice as he mumbled something about the transfer.

Later, someone would lean in at lunch and say, “She wasn’t always like that. Something happened.”

They’d say it like it was gossip. Like trauma was an accessory she wore too loudly.

You’d heard a thousand stories like hers in a thousand variations on a thousand campuses. Car accidents. Dead brothers. Missing mothers. Grace didn’t need to say a word; you recognized grief when it sat in someone’s bones.

You weren’t unfamiliar with it yourself, though yours had taken a different shape—fading into the background, watching friends disappear every time your parent got a new assignment. Learning not to get attached. Learning to leave without flinching.

Grace didn’t speak the first day you were paired. Or the second. She’d slide the worksheet toward you, fill in her half with slanted writing and ink smudges, then go back to scribbling in the margins of her notebook. Sketches, you noticed. Some of them looked like bones. Others like poetry no one would ever read aloud.

On day four, she caught you looking.

“Don’t romanticize it,” she said without looking up.

“What?”

“My limp. The hoodie. The sad girl routine. I’m not your story to fix.”

You blinked, heat rising to your face. “I wasn’t—”

“You were.”

You didn’t defend yourself. You were too used to being liked. Grace didn’t care about that.

After that, something changed. Not in any dramatic way. But she started handing you the worksheets without looking so irritated. Sometimes she’d even ask you a question—not about the class, but something offhanded, like “Do you actually like those girls you sit with?” or “How many schools have you been to?”

You answered honestly. No. Five.

She didn’t smile, but her expression softened. Like she understood something unspoken about you.

One afternoon, you found her alone in the greenhouse behind the science building—skipping class, knees pulled up to her chest, headphones tucked under her hood. You didn’t know why you walked in. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was the silence that surrounded her like armor. Maybe it was the look in her eyes that reminded you what it felt like to be known and left anyway.

She looked up when you stepped in.

“You following me now?”

“No,” you said. “I was just… walking.”

She didn’t buy it. But she didn’t tell you to leave either. i’m You didn’t ask what she was listening to. You just put it in your ear.

The song was slow. Sad. Beautiful. Neither of you said anything else that day. But something had shifted.

You found yourself thinking about her when you didn’t mean to. In the halls, in the way she twisted her pencil between her fingers, in the smell of smoke and lavender that always seemed to cling to her hoodie. You noticed how she never touched anyone and flinched when people brushed past her in crowded hallways.

And still—you wanted to be near her.

It wasn’t romantic. Not exactly. Not yet. You could didn’t think of girls like that. She didn’t, either, as far as you could tell. But there was something there. A pull. A want.