Chapter One: Rain

Josie threw up at 6:17am.

The tile bit into her knees. The dorm bathroom smelled like Cassie’s strawberry shampoo and something sour Josie didn’t want to name. She flushed, then gripped the sink.

_Again? It’s not even finals week_

Josie glanced into the mirror and saw something that looked like a monster. No. It was her.

Brown skin gone ashy, eyes rimmed red, bonnet askew. She splashed water on her face and wiped it down just to see it clearly. Still her. Still dying.

Cassie pounded on the door. “You breathing? Dr. Iro takes attendance!”

“Breathing,” Josie said to the drain. “Unfortunately.”

She shoved things into her bag. Servo diagram. Meds.

The black notebook she never let anyone touch. Her hands shook too badly to check which went where. _Doesn’t matter. Just move. Dad didn’t raise a quitter._

Outside, ’s quad had been mowed. The smell of fresh cut grass hit her like a promise.

For three seconds, Josie let herself believe she was just another 19-year-old engineering student who liked the smell of wet grass and robots.

Not a girl with a clock ticking in her chest.

_Grass and gears. Hold onto that._

Dr. Iro’s class was already starting. Josie slipped in late, head down, and dumped the first notebook she felt onto the submission pile. She didn’t look.

Her tongue still tasted like acid and her vision was doing that fuzzy thing it did when she stood too fast.

“Submit and sit, Ms. Adebayo,” Dr. Iro said. “This isn’t Poetry 101.”

Josie froze. Then sat. Then looked in her bag.

The servo diagram looked back at her.

The black notebook did not.

_No._

_No no no._

Her poems. The ones about faulty wires. About mothers who didn’t come home. About wanting one more summer. They were on his desk.

About to be graded for load-bearing capacity.

Josie ran.

She didn’t remember deciding to. One second she was in her seat, the next she was in the hall, nearly bowling over a first-year. She had to get it back. If Dr. Iro read _Dad thinks I’m strong but I cough up blood_, it would get back to him. And Dad couldn’t break again. Not for her.

She rounded the corner to the department office and collided with a wall. A warm, breathing wall that smelled like engine grease and clean laundry.

Hands caught her elbows before she hit the floor.

“Whoa.”

Josie looked up. And up. And up.

The guy was unfairly tall. Pale, frayed hoodie, dark circles under his eyes like he hadn’t slept since enrollment. Not muscular, just… long. Lanky in a way that made Josie, who was slender but not skinny, feel like she’d been built at the wrong scale.

_Who the hell—_

“Running from Dr. Iro?” he asked. His voice was low, like he didn’t use it much. “He’s scary, but not chase-you-down-the-hall scary.”

Josie yanked her arms back. “I submitted the wrong thing. I need— I need to get it before he—”

The words clogged. _Can’t say poems. Can’t say dying. Can’t say anything._

His brow pulled together. He didn’t step closer, which she appreciated. He was already too much room.

“Wrong thing like…?”

“Personal,” Josie managed. Her heart was doing that fluttery, bad thing. “It’s personal and it can’t—”

_Don’t cry. Don’t you dare cry in front of Tall, Pale, and Nosy._

He studied her for a second. Not like she was a specimen. Like she was a circuit he was trying not to short. Then he sighed and moved past her, toward the office.

“Wait here,” he said over his shoulder.

Josie wanted to argue. She didn’t. Her knees felt like wet paper.

He was back in under two minutes. Her black notebook was in his hand. Closed. He held it out like it might bite.

“You Adebayo?” he asked.

Josie nodded, snatching it to her chest. “How did you—”

“I’m the course rep,” he said. “Orwell Ferguson. I was dropping off the attendance sheet. Saw your name on this. Figured it wasn’t your robotics spec unless you’re building a very emotional servo.”

_He didn’t open it._ The relief almost buckled her. _He didn’t read it._

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Orwell shrugged. The motion made him seem even taller. “Don’t submit your diary to Iro. He has no soul. Also…” He reached into his beat-up messenger bag and pulled out a stapled stack. “You dropped this in the lab last night. After you left.”

Her servo diagram. With notes in the margins. Red ink, all angles. _Current calc wrong. Fixed. You’re 0.3A off. —O.F._

Josie stared. “You were in the lab last night?”

“We have the same class, Adebayo. Tuesdays and Thursdays.” He said it like it was obvious. Like she should’ve noticed him before. “You always take the corner by the window. Smells like grass after it rains.”

_He’d noticed. He’d noticed the seat. The grass. He’d fixed her work._

_Dangerous. This is dangerous._

“I—” Josie started, then coughed. Hard. She turned away, curling into herself.

She didn’t see him move, but she felt him there. Not touching. Just… present. A wall that wasn’t closing in.

“You good?” he asked.

_No. I’m dying and you’re tall and you smell like safety and I can’t._

“Fine,” she lied. “Wrong pipe.”

Orwell didn’t call her out. He just nodded toward the hall. “Lab’s open. Smells like the quad today.”

Grass and gears. He’d said it like a password.

Josie clutched the notebook tighter. “Yeah,” she said. “It does.”

He walked off, slouching, hands in his hoodie pocket. Like he was trying to take up less space and failing.

Josie stayed against the wall for a full minute.

_Orwell Ferguson. Course rep. Noticed the grass. Didn’t read the poems. Fixed the circuit._

Her heart, the faulty, traitorous thing, skipped.

_Don’t. You don’t have time to fall for tall boys who rebuild things._

---

The rain came sideways.

It hit the window pane next to Josie like a thousand tiny fists, each drop racing the next to leave a silver scar on the glass. The rhythm was arrhythmic.

_Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap. Drag._ Like the sky was trying to write in Morse code and couldn’t remember the letters.

Josie didn’t notice.

She was watching the condensation bloom on the inside of the glass, how it blurred the quad into watercolor greens. Fresh cut grass. She could almost smell it through the pane. Almost taste summer. _One more summer_, her brain whispered, the line from a poem she’d never submit. _Just one more and I’ll be—_

“Ms. Adebayo!”

Dr. Iro’s voice cracked through the rain.

Josie blinked. The lecture hall snapped back, hard and fluorescent. Twenty heads turned. Twenty pairs of eyes, all carrying the same thought she could feel pressing against her skin: _idiot_, or _unstable_, or _what’s wrong with her_. No one said it. They didn’t have to.

She looked down. Her left arm was soaked. Her notebook was warped. The window had been open. When? How long? The rain had been coming in, baptizing her sleeve, and she’d sat there, drowning, and called it weather.

“Are you with us?” Dr. Iro asked. He didn’t sound kind.

_No_, Josie thought. _I’m with the rain. I’m with the grass. I’m with the clock in my chest._

“Sorry,” she said out loud. Her voice was small. “Window.”

A boy two rows down snickered. A girl whispered something. Josie didn’t catch the words. She caught the meaning.

She closed the window. The sound it made was a verdict.

---

The rain didn’t stop.

By the time the lecture limped to an end, Wellington’s campus was a drowned thing. Josie walked with her bag pressed to her stomach like a shield. Her sleeve was still damp. Her bonnet was damp. Her pride was damp.

She made it to the Engineering Block patio and stopped.

No one was out here. Smart people were inside. Dry people. People who didn’t get called out by lecturers for communing with storms.

Josie sat on the low wall. She stuck one leg out, the tip of her sneaker breaking the surface of the puddle that had collected on the stone. She drew slow circles. _Ripple. Ripple. Ripple._ The water was cold. It matched her.

_You’re an idiot, Josie. A soaked, spacey, dying idiot._

_Dad didn’t raise you to drown in 2 inches of rain._

_They think you’re crazy. Maybe you are._

She kept playing with the puddle. Toe in, toe out. Watching the water split and heal. _Like me. Except I don’t heal._

---

The dorm door slammed behind her.

Josie was still damp. Still quiet. Still holding the morning in her teeth.

_Thwack. Thwack. Thwack._

Cassie was on the bed, on her back, one knee bent, bouncing a rubber ball off the wall. The rhythm was chaos. Cassie was chaos. She didn’t look up.

“You look like a drowned rat,” Cassie said to the ceiling.

Josie didn’t answer. The hollow in her stomach had teeth. She dropped her bag and went straight for the kitchenette. Cabinet. Pot. Two packs of Indomie. Water. Stove.

_Thwack._ The ball stopped mid-air. Cassie sat up.

Josie ripped the seasoning with her teeth. Dumped it. The fake chicken smell hit the room like a warning.

Cassie narrowed her eyes. “You only cook like that when you’re either starving or spiraling. So which is it? Health thing again?”

Josie stared at the boiling water. _Don’t ask me. Don’t make me say it. If I say it, it’s real._

“Josie.”

The noodles went in with a hiss. Josie finally looked up. And just like that, she wasn’t in the dorm anymore.

---

_Flashback — Engineering Block patio, 40 minutes earlier_

She was still playing with the puddle. Toe in. Toe out. _Ripple. Ripple._

She didn’t hear him approach. She only knew he was there when the rain stopped hitting her head.

Josie looked up.

An umbrella. Black. Fraying at the edges like it had seen things. And holding it was him.

Orwell Ferguson.

Course rep. Unfairly tall. Pale like he’d been carved from the underside of a desk. Hoodie. Boots. Eyes that didn’t miss much. The same mysterious, put together, _who IS that tall guy_ energy.

He wasn’t standing close. But the umbrella was. Angled over her, not him. His shoulder was getting wet.

Josie stopped playing with the water.

“You’re going to catch a cold,” he said. No hello. Just that. Like it was data.

_You’re going to die_, she thought. _We all are. Some of us faster._ She didn’t say it.

“Window was open,” she muttered.

Orwell glanced at her sleeve. At the puddle. At her. His eyes did that thing again — debugging her face, looking for the short in the wire.

“Bus stop’s that way,” he said, nodding down the path. “Unless you’re planning to rust.”

She stood. Her leg was numb. The umbrella moved with her. He didn’t let the rain touch her.

They didn’t talk as they walked. The quad smelled like grass and endings. Josie counted her steps. _One. Two. Three. Don’t look at his hands. Four. Five. Don’t fall._

At the bus stop, he stopped. So did she.

The rain was a wall around them. The black umbrella was a ceiling. He looked at her. Really looked.

And Josie saw it. In his tired, pale eyes — recognition. Like he saw the faulty wiring. Like he saw the girl who was already gone.

_That look would be the death of me_, she thought. _Even if I was already dying._

Then he turned and walked away. Into the rain. No umbrella. Just tall, hunched, gone.

---

_Back in the dorm_

The noodles were done. Josie didn’t remember stirring them.

Cassie was still staring. “So? Health thing? Or…”

Josie dished the Indomie into a bowl. Her hands were steady now. Lying did that.

“Some guy,” she said. Voice flat. “Course rep. Orwell.”

“Orwell Ferguson?” Cassie’s eyebrows shot up. “Rich boy? Lives like a hobo? That Orwell?”

“He walked me to the bus stop,” Josie said. “Under his umbrella.”

She picked up the fork. Didn’t say _he looked at me like he knew_. Didn’t say _it scared me_. Didn’t say _I think I could fall for a boy who sees me and doesn’t run_.

She just ate.

Outside, the rain kept coming. Josie could still feel it. On her skin. In the puddle she’d been playing with. In the look Orwell Ferguson had given her.

The look that would be the death of her.

Even though she was already dying.

---

▪︎▪︎▪︎

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***