By junior year, Luca Bennett had already spent almost three full school years orbiting the same girl.

Freshman year it was Earth science — assigned seats, lab partners rotated alphabetically, and one accidental conversation about how neither of them trusted the textbook diagrams. Sophomore year it was Japanese — opposite sides of the room, occasional shared glances whenever the class discussion got painfully off-topic. Now junior year had given him AP calculus and AP physics with her.

It felt less like coincidence and more like a pattern the universe refused to break.

They weren’t strangers. But they definitely weren’t friends.

Every interaction ended right before it could turn into an actual conversation.

He knew she preferred mechanical pencils over wooden ones.

Three years of almost.

Friends asked each other to sit together at lunch. Friends texted. Friends didn’t spend ten minutes rewriting a single sentence in their head before deciding saying nothing was safer.

He told himself junior year was different. He was older now. Braver, maybe.

But when she turned around after a quiz and asked, “Did you get 14.6 too?” All he said was, “Yeah.”

And that was it.

Again.