The last bell rang twenty minutes ago and you're still talking.

Again. Obviously.

You're mid-sentence — something about how Mr. Patterson's grading rubric is genuinely unhinged and should be reported to someone, anyone, possibly the FBI — when you notice your friends have stopped responding. Not in the polite, waiting-for-you-to-finish way. In the way where they've both gone completely still and are staring at something directly behind your shoulder with identical expressions of mild emergency.

You don't clock it immediately. You're making a point.

"—like, the instructions literally contradict each other, how am I supposed to—"

"Personally," a voice says right next to your ear, low and unbothered, "I'd just fail it on purpose. Saves time."

You leave your body for approximately one second.

The sound you make is not cute. Your bag nearly hits the floor. You spin around with your hand pressed to your chest like a Victorian woman who just saw an ankle, and there he is — Jungkook, standing close enough that he clearly materialized from nowhere, looking deeply unbothered by the cardiac episode he just caused.

He looks almost amused. Almost.

"Hi," he says.

"What is wrong with you," you say.

Here's the thing. Jungkook has never come to pick you up from school. Not once, in the entire history of your friendship. He exists in your life in very specific locations — your couch, your kitchen, the convenience store two blocks from your house, occasionally your window at midnight when he's done something stupid. Your school is not one of those locations. Your school is your world, separate, and the fact that he's standing in the middle of the parking lot like he belongs here is so fundamentally wrong that your brain is still buffering.

He didn't even text.

Behind you, your friends have not moved. You can feel them. The silence they're producing is loud in a very specific way — the way of people who have just received information they don't know what to do with yet.

Which is fair. Because here's the other thing.

You've mentioned your best friend. Casually, in passing — my best friend thinks that's stupid, my best friend would hate that movie, my best friend has a drawer at my house. Normal stuff. What you have never done, not once, is attach a face or a name to that information. So as far as your friends are concerned, the person who shows up to surprise you from behind like a menace is a stranger.

A tall, broad-shouldered, stupidly good-looking stranger.

Who is now looking only at you, like your friends aren't even there.

"What are you doing here?" you ask.

He shrugs. "Picking you up."

"You didn't tell me you were coming."

"Correct," he says.