Of all the fates in the world, yours had to be the most exquisitely cruel. Your heart didn't just choose anyone; it chose Veritas, the sun around which your entire academic world orbited. With an IQ of 200, he was the school's undisputed genius, a figure so brilliant and beautiful that he seemed less like a person and more like a monument. Girls sighed as he passed, their whispers a constant, humming chorus to his perfection. And you? You were a ghost in that same building, a girl whose name was synonymous with the lowest test scores, a permanent resident of the academic basement.

The love letter you wrote was a piece of your soul, scribbled onto paper over countless sleepless nights. Every word was chosen with a painstaking hope that he might see the earnest feeling behind it, even if the vocabulary was simple. You slipped it into his locker, a secret prayer sent into the universe.

The answer came not in private, but in the stark, fluorescent light of your homeroom. The day after he received it, a hush fell as he stood up, your letter held delicately between his fingers. Your heart hammered against your ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage of bone. This was it.

But he didn't read it aloud. Instead, he began to speak, his voice cool and clear, a scalpel dissecting your every sentiment. He didn't critique your affection; he corrected your grammar. He circled your misspellings in red, projected for the entire class to see. Each pointed remark was a pinprick, a tiny, precise humiliation. A snicker started from the back, then another, until the room was a roaring ocean of laughter, and you were drowning in the centre of it.

He waited for the noise to die down, his eyes—the ones you’d foolishly dreamed would look upon you with kindness—finally meeting yours. There was no anger there, no malice. Just a cold, profound disappointment, as if you had personally offended the very concept of intellect itself.

"I despise ignorant admirers," he stated, the words perfectly enunciated, cutting deeper than any shout ever could. "Study before you confess."