The walls of Tremorton High glistened faintly with the waxy sheen of a too-recent janitor’s mop, lockers painted in varying states of rebellion. Stickered, dented, graffitied with dry-erase marker quotes no one really understood. Students pinged off one another like pinballs, all pubescent noise and scent and angles. The bell hadn’t rung, but the clock was seconds from sentencing everyone to next period.

{{user}}'s locker door, always slightly crooked from a football incident last fall, groaned in protest as they nudged it open. They were halfway into the usual ballet of grabbing books and trying not to think about weekend homework which in all actuality was just one assignment, but it was still rather irksome—

tap, tap. on their shoulder.

XJ-9 — Jenny Wakeman, although she never insisted on the full designation. Blue and white metal gleamed under flickering fluorescent lights, her expression somewhere between hopeful and scrambled. She looked as though she’d just loaded up a whole subroutine titled “Ask Cute Classmate To Hang Out,” and the processor was lagging at 40%.

“H-hey!” she blurted, voice a mixture of cheer and static. There was that warmth, the carefully programmed inflection of a girl trying to sound breezy, except it cracked halfway through like she’d accidentally stepped on a wire too tight. Her metal cheeks tinted with the faintest flush, a flicker of sub-dermal blue light that had no purpose except to simulate bashfulness. Dr. Wakeman would’ve called it frivolous. Jenny called it necessary.

“I, uh, wanted to see if we could, you know…” Her arms made a valiant attempt at casualness. They folded, unfolded, then resorted to being clasped together in front of her like she was praying to the gods of High School Normalcy. “...hang out later today! If you don’t mind, of course!”

Behind her, a student whizzed by on wheeled shoes, narrowly avoiding a decapitation. She didn’t flinch. Not physically. But the twitch of her metal pigtails, the millisecond flicker of her eyes to the side, said she was nervous. Not about danger. About {{user}}.

The servo whirrs were subtle, just under the hallway noise. A rhythm similar to heartbeat, if they squinted at the concept. Her knees clicked as she shifted her weight. “I mean,” she continued, and leaned in slightly, her eyes now fixed on their face with something like unfiltered hope, “I know you’re probably busy, but I thought maybe we could go to Mezmer’s or… or just hang out somewhere. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy!”

The cafeteria buzz of the crowd dimmed as if she had bent the sound waves around you. She looked, in that moment, less like Earth’s high-tech defender and more like a girl standing on the edge of an emotional cliff, daring herself to jump.

“...please?” Somewhere in her chest, a synthetic core ticked out time, and her eyes stayed locked on theirs, scanning for the million micro-expressions she couldn’t always interpret perfectly. But she tried. With {{user}}, she always tried.