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Ling Kwong would tell you, if you asked, that she had always been aware of Orm Kornnaphat in the way you are aware of weather. Always there, just something you factor in.
She first properly noticed her during the middle of Year Ten’s orientation week, which Ling was helping to run as a Year Eleven volunteer. Orm was in the second row of the auditorium, neither fidgeting nor looking around, unlike most of the incoming students. She was writing in a small notebook, eyebrows furrowing, like someone taking minutes at a board meeting, glancing up at the speaker every few lines, making a note, returning to the page.
That wasn't what caught Ling, though. What caught her was the moment the speaker said something mildly funny—the nervous-laughter kind that orientation speakers always aim for, and everyone around Orm did the polite courtesy laugh, Orm just wrote something in her notebook without looking up, and then, about three seconds later, smiled. To herself. Privately. Like she'd processed it on her own timeline and found it genuinely funnier than the room had.
Ling watched her for probably thirty seconds longer than necessary and then went back to her orientation clipboard.
She did not think about it again.
Except she did, occasionally.
They crossed paths the normal amount for people a year apart who shared a school and several overlapping circles, but not the same immediate friend group. They had mutual acquaintances. They sat near each other at the year assembly twice. Ling helped coordinate the inter-year art exhibition in the second term, and Orm had submitted a piece—a small charcoal study of hands, technically better than several of the Year Eleven entries, and Ling moved it to a better position on the wall without thinking about why.
She learned things about Orm gradually, sideways. Orm was meticulous, drier than she appeared. That she had an older sister who came to pick her up sometimes and who Orm greeted with the contained warmth of someone who loved their family and considered it a private matter. That she kept a sketchbook that she covered with her forearm slightly when she was working in it, not to hide it, but just to set a boundary.
Ling found all of it interesting.
She thought that was just what Orm was like. The kind of person you find interesting. Surely other people found her interesting, too.
They did.
But most of them didn't move her charcoal drawing to a better position on the wall.
Ling's friend Jin was the first person to say anything about it.
They were walking back from the exhibition, jackets on, the courtyard cooling after a long evening. Jin said, unprompted: "That Year Ten you kept talking to."
"Orm," Ling said.
"You know her name."
"We've met. She submitted a piece."
"You moved her piece."
"The light was better where I put it."
Jin went quiet, her mouth pressed together in a way that meant she was deciding something. Then: "She's pretty," in a tone that wasn't about Orm being pretty.
"She's a good artist," Ling said—true, and not what Jin had meant, and they both knew it.
Jin didn't push. She filed it.
The information came on a Tuesday, during third period, approximately four minutes into a free study block that Orm was using to review her history notes and not to listen to the conversation happening two desks behind her.
She was absolutely not listening.
She was very focused on the Treaty of Versailles.
"—I don't know, I just think bangs are so cute," said Nong, who sat behind Orm and had opinions about everything. "Like when a girl has those wispy bangs? I lose my mind a little."
"Mm," said Ling, two seats over, half-listening, half still somewhere else.
"Don't you think?" Nong pressed.
A pause. Then Ling, more present: "Yeah. Yeah, bangs are — yeah. Especially when they go straight across."
Orm wrote down Article 231, War Guilt Clause.
She was so focused on the Treaty of Versailles.
She underlined it twice.
That afternoon, she looked up twenty-three reference images of front-facing bangs.
That evening, she stood in the bathroom with her mother's hair-cutting shears, which she was technically not supposed to use, and assessed the situation in the mirror. She had done the research. She knew the length. She knew the angle. She lifted the shears, took a section, and cut.
It was not quite right.
She cut again, correcting.
Still not.
She was on the fourth correction when the door opened, and her mother appeared, looked at her, looked at the floor, looked at the shears, and said nothing for a moment in the way that was worse than saying something.
Then she crossed the bathroom, took the shears from Orm's hand with the calm of someone who had raised this child for sixteen years and was not surprised, exactly, just resigned, and said: "Sit."
Orm sat on the edge of the bathtub.
Her mother worked in silence for a while, evening things out, fixing the angle. Her hands were steady. Orm had gotten that from her.
"Why are you cutting your hair?" her mother said. Curious, not unkind.
"I wanted a change."
"You've wanted this change since when, this afternoon?"
Orm said nothing.
Her mother's hands paused briefly. Then resumed. "Is it a person?"
"Mom."
"I'm asking."
"Mom, please."
A pause. Her mother made one final small adjustment, stepped back, and looked at her work.
"It's even," she said. "And it looks nice." She handed Orm the mirror. "You have good bone structure for this."
Orm looked at her reflection.
The bangs sat straight across her forehead, blunt and clean, exactly the kind—front-facing, framing her face, the kind that looked professional.
"Thank you," Orm said.
Her mother looked at her for a moment. Then she leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of her head and cupped her cheek once with one hand and said, "My lovely girl." She picked up the shears. "I'm not going to ask again." She left the bathroom.
Orm looked at the mirror a moment longer.
Then she went to bed.
The next morning, she did her hair twice.
Not because she was nervous. She did not get nervous. She had simply not worked out the optimal styling yet and wanted them to land right. The first attempt was too flat, parted too far to the side, missing the point. The second was right, the bangs sat straight across her forehead, clean, the way they were supposed to.
She arrived at school. Went to her locker. Turned around, and Ling was there.
Not engineered. Ling's locker was in a different block entirely. But Jin's locker was two down from Orm's, and Ling walked Jin in on Tuesdays, and the universe had decided to be funny.
Ling was mid-sentence to Jin when she glanced up and stopped.
She looked at Orm.
Her head tilted—three degrees, the one she did when something caught her—and something in her eyes shifted, a quick focusing-in, there and gone.
"Oh," Ling said. "I like your hair."
"Thank you," Orm said, with the composure of someone who had not spent forty-five minutes styling it for this exact moment.
"Did you cut it?" Ling stepped closer, just one step, instinctive, her body deciding before she did. "The bangs are new."
"Yesterday."
"They look really good." Her gaze moved from the bangs to Orm's face and back, and then she smiled.
"Thanks," Orm said again, which was apparently all she had.
Ling held eye contact one beat longer than the moment needed, then turned back to Jin. Jin was looking at Orm with her chin slightly up, eyebrows raised in amusement.
Orm turned to her locker. Closed it. Stood facing the metal for two seconds, very still.
In the locker's small mirror, the bangs looked perfect.
At lunch, Jin sat down across from her uninvited.
They were friendly, overlapping circles, easy enough, but Jin didn't usually seek her out.
"She talked about your hair for a while," Jin said.
Orm unwrapped her rice roll. "Did she?"
"She said, quoting directly, I don't know what it is, she just looks really— and then she did this." Jin made a gesture that conveyed a great deal. "And then she needed a snack and went to the vending machine."
"Mm."
"You cut your bangs for her."
"I wanted a change."
"You've had the same hair since year seven."
Orm ate her rice roll.
Jin watched her. Her eyes narrowed slightly, not hostile, just evaluating. "She doesn't know," she said. "She'll notice things and not connect them. She thinks you're pretty. She doesn't know she thinks you're pretty."
"I know," Orm said.
"And you're okay with that?"
"I'm playing a long game."
"How long?"
"As long as it takes."
Jin looked at her. Pursed her lips, not quite disapproval, not quite respect, somewhere between the two, and then she said "Okay" and left without elaborating.
She didn't need to.
The thing about Orm was that she did not hide it.
This took people a while to understand. She wasn't loud about it. She didn't announce anything or perform it. But she didn't do the thing most people did when they liked someone: look away, pretend not to watch, deny. When Ling walked into a room, Orm looked up. When Ling said something funny, the corner of Orm's mouth moved. When someone brought Ling up in conversation, Orm went quiet in a way that was different from her usual quiet.
Inevitably, people noticed.
Her classmate Prae noticed first, two weeks after the bangs, and cornered Orm at their lockers with the directness of someone who had been sitting on a question long enough.
"Is it Ling?" Prae said. "The year eleven. The one with the—" a gesture that seemed to mean all of that.
Orm looked at her. "Yes."
No elaborating. Just: yes.
Prae blinked. She had prepared for deflection and received instead something wide open, and she had nowhere to put it. "Oh," she said. "Okay."
"Okay," Orm agreed, and went to class.
Prae stood at her locker.
Three weeks later, Orm arrived at school without a jacket.
Orm had checked the weather app (31 degrees, clear) and arrived accordingly, no layer, because she used data to make decisions, and the data had not suggested a jacket.
The data had not anticipated Block C's air conditioning deciding unilaterally that it was sixteen degrees inside.
By the time the fourth period ended, and she stepped into the corridor, she'd been cold for fifty minutes and wasn't going to acknowledge. Her handwriting had been perfectly steady for the full duration of class. She was fine.
She was also, and she was managing this, slightly hunched at the shoulders.
She heard Ling before she saw her, that was how it usually worked, some low-register awareness tripping before the visual caught up—and then Ling was there, coming from the year eleven corridor with Jin, mid-sentence, her own jacket on. The faded blue one. Orm had catalogued it: faded blue, worn in, a small, embroidered patch on the left sleeve she'd never been close enough to read.
Ling saw her. Stopped mid-sentence. Her head tilted.
"Are you cold?"
The corridor was full of people moving around them. Jin stopped too, slightly behind, looking at the middle distance with great focus.
"I'm fine," Orm said.
"You're hunched."
"I'm leaning."
"You never—" Ling shook her head, small and dismissive, already shrugging her jacket off. "Here."
She held it out. No ceremony. Just a hand extended across the space between them, the way you hand someone a pen.
Orm looked at it.
It was Ling's jacket, worn and personal, and Ling was holding it out in the middle of the corridor without having given it a second thought. Around them, students streamed past.
"I run warm," Ling said. "Take it."
True. Orm knew from watching that Ling was always the last person in any room to need a layer, always the one complaining about heat. The offering meant nothing beyond itself. Just Ling, being Ling, in a corridor, on a Tuesday.
Orm took it. Put it on.
Slightly too large, Ling's shoulders broader than hers. The warmth hit immediately, deeper than fabric should hold. Her fingers curled slightly inside the sleeves, as if her body had decided on its own to keep the heat there. It smelled like Ling's fabric softener, faint and floral, something Orm had once registered when they were standing close and had immediately told herself not to register.
"Thank you," she said.
"Of course." Ling was already turning back to Jin. "Oh—give it back whenever." Over her shoulder, unbothered.
Then she and Jin were moving away, Ling's voice resuming somewhere in the middle of a sentence, perfectly oblivious.
Orm stood in the corridor in Ling's jacket.
Two year eleven girls nearby—friends of Ling's—watched Ling walk away and then looked at each other. One of them turned to Orm.
Orm looked back. Said nothing.
The year eleven girl looked at Jin, still retreating down the corridor.
Jin glanced back. She met the girl's eyes and gave a very small, very controlled shake of her head. I know. There is nothing to be done.
The girl looked at her friend and mouthed: I'll explain later.
Orm went to class.
Whenever.
Extremely flexible word.
She did not give it back on Wednesday. Block C again, the air conditioner still committed to the freezing temperatures.
She did not give it back on Thursday. Forgot it at home.
She did not give it back on Friday, because she wore it.
Twenty-eight degrees on Friday. She was not cold. She wore it because it was Ling's and it was soft and she'd finally been close enough to read the embroidered patch—a small yellow sun, thumb-sized, sewn on because someone liked suns, and she wasn't examining her reasons further than that.
She arrived, and Jin looked at the jacket and said, "It's twenty-eight degrees."
"I know," Orm said.
"That's Ling's."
"She said whenever."
Jin stared at her. Then, slowly: "Okay." She said it the way you say okay when you've just watched something happen that you can't argue with. "Okay."
She didn't tell Ling.
Here is what Ling noticed about the jacket, over the weeks that followed, and what she did with it:
First time she saw Orm wearing it—the Thursday after, Block C again, which explained it—she felt a small thing. Pleasant. She didn't think about it.
The second time, two weeks later, the weather was fine. She did the tilt. Thought hmm. Thought about something else.
Third time—a full month later, no reason at all for a jacket, twenty-six degrees, she saw Orm in the corridor, faded blue jacket over her uniform, yellow sun visible on the sleeve, sketchbook under her arm, hair up, walking somewhere. She stood watching Orm turn the corner and disappear, and then went to class and didn't mention it to Jin.
Jin, who had been six feet away and seen everything, didn't mention it to Ling either.
This was, apparently, their arrangement.
Jin said something eventually. She'd been watching Ling stop mid-conversation three times in the past month to track Orm across a corridor or a courtyard, and she’d learned to wait for Ling to arrive at things.
"Can I ask you something?" she said at lunch on a Friday, in a tone that meant she was asking regardless.
"Yes," Ling said.
"Orm. The Year Ten."
Ling looked at her tray. "What about her?"
"She's been wearing your jacket for a month."
"I told her to give it back whenever."
"Ling."
"She runs cold. The Block C—"
"Ling." Gentle. "It's been a month. And every time she walks into a room you're in, you know exactly where she is."
Ling was quiet.
"I'm not saying anything," Jin said. "I'm just asking."
A moment.
"I don't know," Ling said. Honest. She just had the pull, steady, present always accounted for. "I just—I don't know."
Jin nodded. Didn't push. Picked up her drink.
"She's pretty, though," she said, the same tone she'd used at the exhibition. Ling said nothing, and that was also an answer.
In November, the inter-year exhibition ran again.
Ling was coordinating again. She liked the work, logistics came naturally, and she liked how the walls looked when everything was placed right, each piece earning its space.
Orm submitted again.
Last year: the charcoal study of hands. This year: a small ink drawing of a staircase—spiral, architectural, careful enough that she'd clearly studied the geometry—lit from one side so the curve threw a shadow that was almost more interesting than the staircase itself.
Ling looked at it for a long time when she was hanging it.
Moved it to a better position.
Didn't think about why.
During the exhibition, she found Orm standing near it, looking at the neighboring piece.
She was wearing the jacket.
Of course.
"It's very good," Ling said, coming to stand near her. "The staircase."
Orm looked at her. "You moved it."
"The light was better there."
A pause—Orm looked at her— then: "Thank you."
"Do you study architecture?"
"No. I just—" a beat, deciding how much to give. "I like things that have a logic to them. The way a staircase solves a problem. Going up in a contained space. The spiral is the most elegant solution."
Ling looked at the drawing. At the shadow doing something the staircase itself wasn't.
“The shadow is the best part," she said.
"I know," Orm said. "That's why I drew it that way."
They stood near each other for a moment.
"Your jacket," Orm said, glancing at the faded blue sleeve at her own wrist.
"Mm?" Ling said.
"I've had it for two months."
Ling looked at the sleeve. At the sun patch. "I know."
A beat.
"I can give it back," Orm said—even, offering, with something very small and careful underneath it.
Ling looked at her, at the jacket settled on her shoulders like it had always been there.
"It looks good on you," Ling said simply, and turned to greet someone across the gallery.
She didn't look back. Already filing it, in the place she kept things she wasn't ready to name.
Across the gallery, Jin watched Ling walk away and then watched Orm turn back to the neighboring artwork and, within ten seconds, glance at Ling twice.
Jin crossed her arms and rolled her eyes, somewhere between fond and exasperated, and said nothing.
The year turned.
Ling: Year Twelve. Orm: Year Eleven.
First day back, Orm walked in wearing the faded blue jacket.
Two months, separate lives, the normal scatter of the off-season. Ling had not thought about the jacket specifically. It had existed in the background of her break, the way Orm existed in the background of her thinking: present, not examined.
She saw Orm in the Year Eleven corridor—she always passed through it on the first day, a faster route. Orm at her locker, sketchbook under her arm, bangs still laying flat across her forehead. The jacket, which had stopped being Ling's in any active sense sometime in the autumn, without either of them saying so.
She looked comfortable in it. That was the exact word. Comfortable.
Ling walked past. She did not stop.
She thought, privately: it's still there.
Then: good.
Then she went to class and did not examine either of those thoughts.
Jin examined them for her.
"You saw her this morning," she said at lunch.
"I pass through that corridor."
"Every first day. Always."
"It's faster."
"Ling."
"What?"
"She's still wearing your jacket."
"I know."
"It's been—"
"I know."
"I'm not saying anything. I'm noting that you know."
Ling ate her lunch.
"She looks good in it," she said, to her food, after a while.
Jin said nothing. This was, as Ling had learned, her loudest possible response.
Orm's first day back was normal.
Schedule. Books. Seat in new classes. In the second period, her new seatmate looked at the jacket and said, "Is that Ling’s?" Word had traveled over the break, apparently, through the small ecosystem of a school where everyone knew everyone.
"Yes," Orm said.
"Are you—"
"Yes," Orm said, before it finished, because it was always the same question and the answer was always the same.
Her seatmate blinked. "Okay."
"Okay," Orm agreed, and opened her textbook.
This was, by now, simply how these conversations went. She liked Ling. She also wasn't going to discuss it at length with people who were mostly just curious. Yes was a complete sentence.
It happened on a Wednesday in June, on the external staircase between the main building and the arts block. There was a step slightly lower than the others. Everyone who used it regularly knew about it and acted accordingly.
Orm used it regularly.
On this Wednesday, she was reading something on her phone while walking, a lapse in judgment in her otherwise consistent standards of spatial awareness, and she missed the step entirely.
Nothing dramatic, no falling. She caught the railing immediately, reflexively, and was upright in under a second. But her left ankle had turned sharply on the way down and sent a very clear signal that it had not enjoyed that.
She could walk; it was just twisted, not damaged. Tender, swollen probably within the hour. Annoying. Fine.
She started walking.
She was managing the limp carefully, weight shifted, slow pace, not too obvious—when she came around the corner into the main corridor and found Ling coming the other way, alone, going somewhere with purpose.
Ling stopped.
She looked at Orm. Then at Orm's feet. Then back up.
"What happened?"
"Nothing. I missed a step."
"You're favoring your left side."
She had been very deliberate about not obviously favoring it. "I'm fine."
"How long ago?"
"Two minutes."
Ling looked at her for a moment—not the tilt this time, something more direct—then she said "Okay," crossed the corridor, bent slightly, put one arm behind Orm's knees and the other around her back, and lifted her.
The world reoriented.
Orm was being carried.
Ling was carrying her down the corridor with apparent ease. Orm was at a completely different elevation than usual, and Ling was warm and smelled like her fabric softener and was walking completely unbothered, and Orm's brain had essentially stopped working.
"Put me down," Orm said.
"Nurse's office is at the other end of the building." Walking. "You'll make it worse."
"I can walk."
"You were limping."
"I was not—"
"Orm." The gentle tone. The one for things that were simply true. "You were limping."
Orm closed her mouth.
She was being carried down the main corridor. In Ling's jacket, which she was wearing, which meant Ling's jacket was on Orm while Ling carried Orm, a level of situational density that her internal filing system had no category for.
This was unprecedented. She could feel her face burning and could not stop it, and she was looking at the ceiling because looking at Ling from this proximity was not something she was currently capable of, and she was a person who prided herself on capability, and the ceiling was a neutral thing to look at.
They passed two year ten students who stopped and stared.
They passed a teacher who raised her eyebrows, apparently decided this was medical rather than disciplinary, and said nothing.
"You can put me down now," Orm said, to the ceiling, for the third time.
"Almost there," Ling said.
Outside the nurse's office, Ling set her down, softly, hand still on Orm’s back—and stepped back.
"Ice it," she said, already in problem-solved mode. "Stay off it if you can." She glanced at Orm's face. "You're okay."
Then she was gone. Back down the corridor. Back to wherever she'd been going, apparently without it registering as particularly significant.
Orm stood outside the nurse's door.
Her ankle hurt.
She pressed both hands to her own cheeks, which she had never done in her life, which was a measure of the situation.
The nurse opened the door. "Come in—oh, you're flushed, are you feverish as well?"
"No," Orm said. "Just the ankle."
Ling mentioned it to Jin at lunch like a footnote.
"I carried Orm to the nurse's office."
Jin looked at her. "You carried her."
"She twisted her ankle. She was trying to walk it off."
"So, you—"
"It was faster," Ling said. Reasonable. Clear-eyed. "She would have made it worse."
Jin looked at her for a moment—a long moment, considering — then said "Okay" and ate her lunch and said nothing else.
Ling ate. She thought, briefly, about Orm's face in the corridor, the pink cheeks, the deliberate ceiling-staring, some expression she didn't have a category for. She noticed it and filed it in the back.
The file stayed there.
Ling thought about it again that night.
Sat at her desk, notebook open, pen down—she'd stopped about ten minutes ago and not picked it up. She worked until she was finished. Not tonight.
Her jacket had been gone for over a year.
It had not felt like a loss.
She'd handed it over on a Tuesday and said give it back whenever and then watched it become, gradually and without comment, simply part of how Orm looked. The same way the bangs had. The same way the sketchbook was.
Ling had been paying close attention for a long time without knowing it.
She thought about the corridor this afternoon. Orm saying I'm fine, clipped. The way Ling had just moved, before deciding to, Orm's weight easy in her arms.
Orm's face after. The red cheeks. The ceiling. The composure held by habit, not intention.
Oh, she thought.
Then, slower: oh. For how long?
She looked at her notes. At the pen in her hand, she didn't remember picking it back up.
She put it down. Sat with it.
Three weeks later, on a Saturday at Jin’s house, Jin apparently decided she’d been patient enough.
"You have a crush on Orm," she said, to the ceiling, at the forty-five-minute mark.
Ling was quiet.
Jin waited.
"I know," Ling said.
Not what Jin had prepared for. She turned her head. "You know."
"Figured it out about three weeks ago. I was at my desk, and it just arrived." A pause. "The jacket. The carrying thing. The way I always know where she is in a room. The drawing, from last year's exhibition—I moved it, and I didn't know why until three weeks ago."
Jin stared. "You've been sitting on this for three weeks."
"I was thinking about it."
"Ling."
"I didn't know what to do with it." She turned her head. "She's a year below me. We're not in the same circle. I don't know if she—" she stopped.
Jin rolled her eyes.
"What?" Ling said.
"I need to tell you something," Jin said, carefully. "And I need you to hear it without asking how I know, because some of it I watched and some of it I overheard and none of it I was supposed to have."
Ling sat up slightly.
"She cut her bangs for you."
Silence.
"What?"
"Last year. You said something in third period, about bangs, front-facing, the kind that go straight across." Jin held eye contact. "The next day she had exactly those bangs."
Very quiet.
Ling thought about the morning at the lockers. Her own head tilting. They look good. How completely she'd meant it. How she'd gone to the vending machine afterward because she'd needed somewhere to put whatever that was.
"She heard me," Ling said.
"Two desks ahead."
"She cut her hair because I said—"
Ling pressed both hands over her face.
She stayed like that for a moment.
"She heard me say one thing once and cut her hair the next day and has been wearing my jacket for over a year."
"And sat with you at the exhibition and moved conversations toward the things you care about and has your seat saved at Thursday assembly without mentioning it," Jin said. "And when Prae asked her, she just said yes and went to class. No explanation. Just yes."
Ling looked at the ceiling.
She was not smiling exactly. It was bigger than that—the whole-face version, the one that took over, the one she couldn't do anything about. Her eyes were bright.
"Not hiding," Jin said. "Just waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"You." Jin paused.
"I need to talk to her," she said.
"Finally," said Jin.
Wednesday after school. The art room was empty at four o'clock. Ling had checked.
She knocked on the open door. Orm inside—side table, sketchbook open, fine-liner in hand, working a detail. She looked up and went still.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi." Ling pulled out the stool across from her. Sat down. She had prepared sentences. She was going to use them.
She looked at the jacket first.
Orm was wearing it. Of course. Faded blue, yellow sun on the sleeve, worn into something that was simply part of how she looked now. A year and two months.
She looked at it for a beat. Then at Orm.
"I figured something out," she said. "About three weeks ago."
Orm set the pen down. She had a way of waiting that Ling had come to know—no sound, no shift, just a quality of space opening up.
"I've been aware of you for a long time," Ling said. "Since Year Ten orientation week. You were in the second row, and you were taking notes like you were the only person there who'd come to actually learn something, and I watched you for about half a minute before I went back to my clipboard." She paused. "But I kept thinking about it. “
Orm was very still.
"I moved your drawing at last year's exhibition. The charcoal hands. It needed better light and I just did it, didn't think about why. I didn't know why until three weeks ago, when I was at my desk and the whole thing just came together. Like the right answer finally."
A beat.
"What was the answer?" Orm said. Not a question. Tell me.
"That I like you," Ling said. "That I've probably liked you since last year, in some form. It took me this long to name it because I just assumed the pull was normal. Like the weather. Something you factor in and don't analyze." A pause. "It wasn't weather."
Orm's face didn't move. But her eyes did.
"Jin told me about the bangs," Ling said.
"She wasn't supposed to."
"I know. She did anyway." Ling held her gaze. "You heard me say one thing once."
"You were two desks behind me. And you said it like you meant it."
"And the next day—"
"I'd been thinking about it anyway," Orm said. Confession and deflection, both.
"Orm."
"The bangs needed to happen eventually."
"Orm." Softer.
A pause. Orm looked at the sketchbook. Then back. Then, with the even tone of someone very carefully handing something over: "Year Ten. From the beginning of it. You moved my drawing, and you didn't even look at me when you did it, you just saw where it needed to be and put it there, and I—"
She stopped.
Ling waited.
"I wanted you to see me," Orm said. Simply. "I kept looking for ways to be visible to you without making it something you had to respond to. The bangs. The jacket." A short pause. "Though the jacket was somewhat accidental."
"Somewhat," Ling said.
"You said whenever."
"I know what I said."
"Open timeline."
"It is," Ling agreed. She looked at the sun patch. "I almost asked for it back twice."
"What stopped you?"
"I looked at you wearing it. The question just didn't come."
The art room was quiet. Somewhere outside, a door closed. The afternoon light came through the high windows, flat and gold, across the table between them, across the sketchbook, across Orm's hands.
"I don't know what you—" Orm started. And stopped.
She looked down at the sketchbook. She was quiet for a moment.
"I've been patient," she said, to the table. Her voice was even. "Over a year. I'm good at it." A breath. "But I'd like—"
She stopped again. Looked up.
Her eyes were direct and open, lighter than usual, amber in the afternoon light, and Ling recognized what was in them. The wanting.
"I'd like not to have to be, anymore."
Ling looked at her.
She looked at the bangs cut overnight for a sentence she'd said, not knowing she was being heard. The jacket on her shoulders, worn in until it was simply Orm's. The sketchbook under still hands and the fine-liner, and all the precise attention aimed for a year at being visible to exactly one person.
She looked at Orm's face and did not want her to wait another second.
"You don't have to be," Ling said.
Orm looked at her.
"You've been visible to me since Year Ten orientation week," Ling said. "I just didn't have the word for it." She reached across the table without planning to—the bangs were slightly in Orm's eye from looking down, and she pushed them back, one clean motion, as naturally as reaching for something that needed to be adjusted. "I see you."
Orm's face went quiet. The held tension releasing. Her eyes closed briefly.
"Good," she said. Soft.
Ling tugged gently on her hand, and when Orm leaned in, pressed her lips to her cheek. Stayed there a moment.
Ling pulled back. Just enough to see her face.
A moment passed. The light through the high windows had shifted slightly, longer and lower. Outside, somewhere, someone dropped something, and it echoed in a corridor and went quiet.
Orm's hand moved across the table.
Found Ling's hand, which was resting there, and settling against it—her fingers finding the spaces between Ling's, turning Ling's hand slightly, then back, the small movement of someone who is finally allowed to do the thing they've not been doing and is finding out what it feels like.
Ling watched her do it.
She didn't move. Didn't say anything. Just watched Orm's fingers trace the line of her knuckle and then stop and then start again, and Ling looked at the top of her head, the bangs, the careful part, all of it, and felt something in her chest so complete and uncomplicated it didn't need a name.
She turned her hand over. Held on.
Orm looked up.
Ling was just looking at her.
Orm looked back.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
They talked for a long time after that. About Year Ten and Year Eleven and the things they'd each been accumulating—Orm deliberately, Ling without knowing she was accumulating at all. The drawing. The jacket. The bangs. The two times Ling had nearly asked for it back, and the one morning Orm had nearly left it at home because the weather was warm, and had brought it anyway because she wasn't ready.
"You should know," Orm said at some point, "that I'm going to be like this. I notice things and I act on the noticing in ways that are hard to explain."
"I know," Ling said.
"You know."
"Orm." She looked at her. "I moved your drawing before I understood why. I've been factoring you in since the second row of an auditorium in orientation week." A pause. "I think I'm like this, too. I was just slower to know it."
Orm looked at her for a moment.
"The jacket," she said.
"The jacket," Ling agreed.
"I'm keeping it."
"I know."
"It's mine now."
"It has been," Ling said, "for a while."
The next morning, they walked in together.
Orm's locker first, because Ling's was further, and they had time. The corridor was the same corridor it had always been, same light, same noise, same stream of students moving between classes, and Orm worked her combination and pulled the door open and reached for her textbook, and Ling stood beside her.
Their hands were joined. Loosely, naturally, Ling's fingers through hers, the way you hold something you've decided to keep.
Orm got her textbook. Turned around.
Ling was looking at her. That look, the one from the art room, the one that didn't need a name. Then she reached up, unhurried, and brushed the bangs back from Orm's forehead. One clean motion. The same way she had in the art room—except this time she knew exactly why she was doing it.
Ling let her hand drop. Squeezed her fingers once.
"Come on," she said. "You'll be late."
Orm looked at her for a moment, and then she closed her locker.
They walked to class.
The corridor carried on around them, indifferent and loud, and neither of them said anything, and it was enough.