second episode

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The next day, Maya sat in her classroom tapping her pen against her notebook. She wasn’t thinking about homework. She wasn’t thinking about lunch either. She was thinking about the new boy—Rishav—who stared at her for a second too long yesterday.

Her friends were already whispering theories.

“He must have mistaken you for someone else.”

“Or maybe he was judging your hair, you didn’t comb it properly yesterday.”

“Shut up!” Maya groaned, though she couldn’t help smiling.

She didn’t admit it out loud, but the curiosity was eating her alive.

When the bell rang, the class shifted to the auditorium for orientation. Maya walked with her friends, half-listening, until she spotted a familiar tall figure at the edge of the crowd.

Rishav.

He wasn’t talking to anyone. Just standing there with a calm, unreadable expression, hands in his pockets, glasses slipping slightly down his nose. A few classmates tried to approach him, but he answered with short, polite replies before returning to his own quiet space.

Hard to read. Hard to approach. Hard to get.

Of course.

Maya rolled her eyes at herself. Why was she even noticing this? She already had one complicated crush in her life. She didn’t need another.

But fate—or bad timing—had other plans.

Inside the auditorium, the last empty seat next to Maya happened to be the one Rishav took. Her heartbeat stumbled, which she found ridiculous. She was Maya—loud, confident, chaos itself. Why was she nervous?

He didn’t even look at her.

Not even once.

He just sat down, straight-backed, focused on the stage like he was attending a conference and not a boring school orientation. Maya glanced at him from the corner of her eye. No reaction. No curiosity. Nothing like yesterday.

Had she imagined that look?

After fifteen minutes of staring at a PowerPoint presentation she didn’t care about, Maya leaned slightly toward him. “So… you’re new here, right?”

A normal person would at least look at her.

Rishav didn’t. “Yeah,” he said simply.

No follow-up. No smile. No interest.

Maya blinked. Okay. Rude.

She tried again. “Which section?”

“12-B.”

Still not looking.

Maya made a face. She wasn’t used to conversations dying so fast. “Right. Cool.”

This time, he finally turned his head. His eyes met hers for exactly a second before he looked away again. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“I was trying to be friendly,” she muttered.