Mira Chen POV
I didn't sleep.
Not even close.
I lay on my back staring at the ceiling while Victoria's voice played on repeat in my head — "I found something very interesting" — and my mother's restaurant reviews kept multiplying in my brain like a disease I couldn't stop spreading.
By five in the morning I gave up, sat at my desk, and pulled up Mom's restaurant page on my laptop.
Forty-one new one-star reviews overnight.
I read every single one. I don't know why. Maybe I thought if I read them all, absorbed every cruel word, I'd find the thing that would tell me how to fight back.
Mostly I just felt sick.
At six-fifteen, Mom called.
I almost didn't answer. I didn't know what my voice would do when I heard hers.
I answered anyway.
"Bao bei!" Bright, warm, already in the kitchen — I could hear the familiar clatter of prep work behind her. "How was your first night? Did you sleep? Did you eat?"
"Fine," I said. "Yes to both."
"You sound tired."
"It's six in the morning, Mom."
She laughed. "Early bird catches the worm. That's how you got to Ashford, remember?" A pause, then softer: "I'm proud of you. Every single day. You know that?"
I pressed my hand flat over my mouth for a second.
"I know," I managed. "I'll call you tonight."
I hung up before she could hear anything in my voice that would worry her.
Then I got dressed, picked up my bag, and walked out to face my second day.
Advanced Literature was first period.
The classroom smelled like old books and wood polish — one of those rooms that had existed for so long it had developed its own personality. High ceilings, tall windows, wooden desks arranged in a horseshoe.
I picked a seat near the back.
Students filed in around me. I kept my eyes on my notebook, but I tracked every entrance the way you track movement when you're not sure what's dangerous yet. Two girls who glanced at me and looked away. A boy who sat as far from me as possible without being obvious.
Then the energy in the room shifted.
It was subtle — the way a classroom changes when someone walks in who everyone unconsciously orients toward. Shoulders straightening. Conversations dropping half a volume. I looked up without meaning to.
Sebastian Ashford.
He walked to a seat at the front left of the horseshoe without looking at anyone — like he didn't need to check where his place was because it had always been his. He dropped his bag, sat down, pushed his sleeves up, and opened his textbook.
He didn't look at me.
I looked back at my notebook.
The poem was Keats. Ode to a Nightingale. Professor Hale, a small sharp-eyed woman who moved like she'd been teaching this poem for twenty years and was still annoyed people got it wrong, wrote two lines on the board and asked for interpretation.
Sebastian's hand went up immediately.
"The nightingale represents the unattainable," he said. His voice was easy, confident, the voice of someone who'd been listened to his whole life. "Keats is mourning the gap between the human experience — which is temporary, painful — and something pure that exists beyond it. The bird is immortal. He's not."
Professor Hale nodded. "Good. Anyone else?"
My hand went up.
I don't know why. It was only my second day. I knew, on some level, that drawing attention was dangerous. Victoria had already marked me.
But the interpretation was wrong. Not completely wrong — Sebastian had said something true — but incomplete in a way that bothered me like a splinter.
"Miss Chen?" Professor Hale looked surprised but not unwelcoming.
"He's not mourning the gap," I said. "He's asking whether he even wants to cross it. The whole poem is ambivalence — he wants to join the bird, to escape into something permanent and beautiful, but by the end he pulls back. Because immortality without feeling isn't actually better. The nightingale's song is beautiful because he can't have it. If he crossed over, it might stop being beautiful. The loss is the point."
The room was quiet.
I felt it immediately — that specific silence that means you've said something that landed somewhere.
Professor Hale was nodding slowly, writing something on the board.
I let myself look at Sebastian.
He had turned around in his seat. Just slightly — not a full turn, just enough. And he was looking at me with an expression I hadn't expected.
Not annoyance. Not the cold dismissal from last night.
Something more like — oh. Like he'd heard something he hadn't anticipated and his brain was still deciding what to do with it.
For three seconds, it was just that. Him looking at me like I was an actual person. Like I'd said something real that reached something real in him.
Then the girl to his left leaned in.
Victoria.
I hadn't noticed her sitting there. I registered her now — perfect posture, watching me with an expression that gave away nothing. She said something to Sebastian, quiet, her mouth barely moving.
I watched his face close.
That was the only word for it. Whatever had been open for those three seconds — click. Gone. His expression smoothed back into something cold and distant and utterly unbothered.
He turned back to the front.
Professor Hale continued the lesson.
I stared at the back of Sebastian's head and felt something I couldn't name — not hurt exactly. More like watching a door slam shut on a room you'd glimpsed for half a second and wanted to see more of.
I looked at Victoria.
She was already looking at me. Had been the whole time, probably.
She smiled — slow and deliberate, the kind of smile that has nothing happy inside it.
The kind that says I see you, and I've already decided what happens next.
I looked away first. I'm not proud of it, but I did.
After class, I took the long way to my next lesson — through the courtyard, where the air was cold and I could breathe without feeling watched.
I kept thinking about Sebastian's face. That three-second window before Victoria closed it.
Why does it matter? I told myself. He came to your room last night like he owned the hallway. He's one of them.
But it did matter. That was the honest answer.
It mattered because for three seconds he looked at me like I was someone worth looking at. And then someone whispered in his ear and I became invisible again — not Nyx's kind of invisible, the ordinary kind. The kind that hurts.
Don't be stupid, Mira.
I pushed through the courtyard door and almost walked directly into a boy with thin-framed glasses who was coming the other way, a camera app open on his phone, not watching where he was going.
He looked up.
We made eye contact for one awkward second.
"Sorry," I said automatically, stepping aside.
He looked at me. Looked at his phone. Something moved across his face — interest, or calculation, it was hard to tell the difference. His mouth curved into a half-smile.
"No problem," he said. "You're the new scholarship girl, right?"
He didn't wait for an answer.
He walked past me, and I had the distinct, prickling feeling of being watched from behind even after he'd gone.
I turned around. He was walking away, phone still in his hand.
The camera was still open.
And pointing backward.
At me.