Yuna's POV
I woke up to Lily's alarm blasting an aggressively cheerful pop song directly into my skull.
For a full three seconds, I had no idea where I was. The ceiling was wrong. The walls were too pink. Something with button eyes was staring at me from the shelf across the room, and the mattress beneath me was approximately the width of a parking space.
Then it all came back.
Lily's room. The cockroach. The Barbie Dream House I had destroyed with my own body. The spoon. Aunt Rosa at two in the morning. The lyrics I never finished.
I groaned and rolled onto my stomach, pressing my face into the pillow.
The alarm kept going. The same song, looping back to the beginning with aggressive cheerfulness, completely unbothered by my suffering.
I peeked over at Lily.
She was still completely out. Face smushed into her pillow, blankets pulled up to her chin — all the blankets, every single one that had started on this bed — drooling slightly, breathing with the deep, peaceful rhythm of someone who had zero responsibilities and absolutely no regrets.
Her alarm. Her obnoxiously happy song.
My suffering.
The injustice of it sat on my chest like a physical weight.
With the slow, deliberate movements of someone who had made peace with their situation and chosen not to fight it anymore, I reached over and turned the alarm off. Then I lay back down and stared at the ceiling. The unicorn stickers stared back. The slightly crooked horse poster stared back. The stuffed octopus on the shelf stared back with its eight button eyes, offering nothing.
I was late. I was almost certainly already late. And my body felt like it had been through something — which it had, technically, between the mud and the rice field and the cockroach and the approximate forty-five minutes of sleep I had actually managed.
I considered staying in bed. Genuinely considered it, for about thirty full seconds.
Then I sat up, swung my legs over the side of the mattress, and stood up at the speed of someone whose spirit had already clocked out but whose legs were still technically reporting for duty.
I moved through the bathroom in a kind of autopilot haze — shower, teeth, face, done. My reflection looked exactly how I felt, which was not great, but there wasn't much to be done about it.
By the time I made it downstairs, Aunt Rosa had already decided that breakfast was an emergency intervention.
She took one look at me standing in the kitchen doorway and immediately turned back to the stove with renewed purpose, like my presence had personally reminded her of everything she needed to fix.
"Sit, sit," she said, waving her spatula. "You look like you didn't sleep."
"I slept," I said.
"You look like you didn't sleep well."
I sat down. There was no point arguing with someone who was already piling food onto a plate with the focus of a person on a mission.
Lily appeared two minutes later, bright-eyed and completely awake in the way that only small children and people with clean consciences could manage. She had somehow already gotten her pigtails in, though one of them was slightly lopsided, and she dropped into her chair across from me with enough energy to power a small appliance.
"Good morning, Ate!" she announced, like this was the best day of her life.
I looked at her. "How."
She blinked. "How what?"
"How are you like this. Right now. This early."
She tilted her head, genuinely confused by the question.
Aunt Rosa set a mountain of food in front of me rice, a fried egg, some leftover something from last night that smelled incredible despite everything. "Eat," she said. "You need energy. You're too thin to be skipping breakfast."
"I'm not skip—"
She was already putting more rice on my plate.
Lily shoved something small and slightly sticky into my hand. I looked down at it. It was vaguely round and definitely homemade and I had no idea what it was made of.
"I made it last night!" she said. "Try it, Ate!"
"What is it?"
She grinned. "A surprise!"
Before I could decide whether to risk it, Uncle Ramon appeared in the doorway, keys already in hand, looking at his watch with the expression of a man who had learned long ago that waiting for women to finish eating was a losing game.
"Yuna! Ready? We should go."
Saved.
I managed to get three actual spoonfuls of food into my mouth before I was ushered out the door and into Uncle Ramon's ancient van, which announced our departure with a series of groans and rattles that suggested it was doing this under protest.
Every time we hit a bump — and there were many bumps — the van made a sound that was somewhere between a complaint and a warning. I sat in the passenger seat with my bag on my lap, watching the province slide past the window, houses and trees and the occasional carabao standing in a field like it had nowhere to be and was fine with that.
Inside my bag, wrapped carefully in a plastic bag, was my backup uniform.
I had packed it before bed last night — or what counted as before bed, which was somewhere around three in the morning after the kitchen incident. Something in my gut had told me to do it. Some small, tired, self-preserving part of my brain that had looked at my track record over the past twenty-four hours and decided that hope was not a strategy.
I was glad I listened.
Because the moment Uncle Ramon's van rolled up to the school gate and I stepped out onto the street, the universe collected on whatever debt it had decided I still owed.
I heard it before I saw it — the high whine of a motorcycle engine moving too fast for a school zone, cutting through the morning noise. I turned my head just in time to see it coming down the street at a speed that was genuinely impressive and also completely irresponsible.
And between the motorcycle and me: a puddle.
Wide. Dark. Deep in that specific way that puddles near school gates always are, fed by the uneven concrete and whatever drainage situation this street had decided not to have.
I had exactly one second to register all of this.
The motorcycle didn't slow down.
The puddle didn't move.
I didn't move either, which in retrospect was my critical error.
The impact was spectacular. A wall of cold, muddy water hit me from the knees down, shot up my skirt, splattered across my blouse, caught the side of my face, and soaked through my socks so fast I felt it between my toes before my brain had even finished processing what had happened.
I stood there.
Completely still.
Dripping.
Behind me, I heard Uncle Ramon's van give a single, solitary honk. I turned just in time to see it pulling away from the curb, merging back into traffic, disappearing around the corner without slowing down.
He had honked. He had witnessed it. And he had driven away.
I turned back to face the school gate.
A group of students had stopped walking. They were looking at me with the particular expression people get when something has gone badly wrong for someone else and they're not sure whether to help or just absorb the spectacle.
One guy, to his credit, winced. "Oh, man. That's rough."
A girl beside him elbowed him in the side. "Don't laugh, or karma's gonna get you."
Another guy — further back, arms crossed, grinning openly like he had already made his decision about how to handle this — said, "Welcome to San Esteban High," with the relaxed delivery of someone who had seen worse and wasn't particularly moved by this.
I stood there for another second, water still dripping off the hem of my skirt, feeling it pool inside my left shoe.
I could scream. I could cry. I could sit down on the wet pavement and simply refuse to continue existing for the rest of the morning.
Instead, I exhaled very slowly through my nose, nodded at nothing in particular, and turned to the guy who had been grinning.
"Where's the faculty office?"
He blinked, clearly not expecting that response. Then he pointed. "End of that corridor. Big sign. Hard to miss."
"Bathroom?"
"Left side, near the stairwell."
"Thanks."
I walked toward the gate with as much dignity as a person could manage while soaking wet and making a squelching sound with every step. I kept my eyes forward. I did not look at anyone. I pretended very hard that the squelching was not happening.
The bathroom first.
I changed into my backup uniform in the third stall from the left, which was the only one with a functioning latch, and stuffed my soaked clothes into the plastic bag I had — thank every available deity — also packed. I rinsed my face at the sink, wrung out my socks as best I could, and looked at my reflection in the mirror above the tap.
Clean uniform. Slightly damp hair at the edges. The expression of someone who had already used up their daily quota of resilience and it wasn't even eight in the morning yet.
Fine. Moving on.
The faculty office was exactly where the guy had said — end of the corridor, large sign above the door, impossible to miss unless you were me on a normal day. I pushed the door open to a room in full morning motion: teachers flipping through papers, someone on the phone, two people having a fast, overlapping conversation about a lesson plan.
I stood near the door for a moment, not sure who to approach.
A woman looked up from the desk closest to the entrance. Late forties, neatly tied hair, eyes that did the specific thing where they assessed you completely in about one second and filed the result away.
"You must be the transferee," she said, before I had opened my mouth.
"Yes, ma'am. Yuna Castellano."
She was already flipping through a folder on her desk. "Documents are in order. Everyone else is occupied, so I'll handle your enrollment." She moved through it efficiently — a few forms, a few signatures, no small talk — and slid a single printed sheet across the desk when we were done. "Your schedule. Class is on the second floor. Your adviser is already in the room."
I took the paper. "Thank you, ma'am."
"Straight up the stairs, then follow the corridor."
I nodded and stepped back out into the hallway.
Second floor. Follow the corridor. Simple enough.
The hallway had filled up since I walked through it — students everywhere, moving in clusters, catching up with friends, one guy asleep against a wall with his bag as a pillow, a group of girls sharing something on a phone and laughing at it. I moved through them with my schedule in hand, checking the room numbers as I went.
They were not in order. I had expected them to be in order. They were not.
I turned left at what felt like the right point. Walked to the end of the hall. Checked the numbers. Wrong end. Turned around. Found a stairwell, went up, came out into a different corridor that looked exactly like the one I had just left, and spent a full minute standing in the middle of it trying to figure out if I had somehow ended up back where I started.
I hadn't. I was just lost in a school that was apparently designed by someone who didn't believe in logical sequencing.
Eventually, I spotted the right number at the end of a corridor and felt the particular relief of someone who had been wandering long enough that finding anything felt like a victory. I straightened up, took a breath, and pushed the door open.
Thirty heads turned to look at me.
The room went very quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet when something unexpected has just walked through the door. Some of the faces were curious. Some were neutral. A girl in the front row raised one eyebrow at me like I had just walked into her house uninvited.
At the front of the room, a man in his mid-thirties with glasses had been in the middle of writing something on the board. He turned around, looked at me, and then looked at the door behind me like he was checking whether I had the right building.
"Can I help you?"
I looked at the board. At the students. At the room number I had failed to check before walking in.
"Is this... Class 2-A?"
The teacher adjusted his glasses. "This is Class 2-B."
The silence that followed lasted approximately one full geological era.
"Right," I said. My voice was very calm. My soul was not. "Haha. Wrong room. Sorry. Please pretend this never happened."
I was already most of the way out the door when I heard the first chuckle from somewhere in the middle of the room, and then a second, and then I was in the hallway with the door closed behind me and I was staring at the wall directly across from it and breathing very carefully.
A voice came from my left. "That was 2-B."
I turned. A woman was standing a few feet away, arms crossed, with the expression of someone who had watched the whole thing and had already made several quiet judgments about how the rest of my year was going to go. She sighed one of those sighs that carries a full sentence inside it and tilted her head down the hall.
"This way."
She led me two doors down, stopped in front of a room, and stepped aside. "Here."
"Thank you," I said, quietly.
She gave me a single look that communicated several things without using any words, and walked away.
I pushed the door open.
This room felt different immediately settled, mid-morning, the particular atmosphere of a class that had been sitting together long enough to have a rhythm. At the front stood a woman in her late thirties with a face that was strict without being unkind, the kind of face that meant business but wasn't personally invested in making anyone's life difficult. She looked up as I came in with the expression of someone who had been expecting me and had already done the mental math on how this introduction was likely to go.
"Yuna Castellano," she said. Not a question.
"Yes, ma'am."
She nodded toward the front of the room. "Go ahead and introduce yourself."
I stepped forward. Thirty new pairs of eyes landed on me.
I cleared my throat. "Hi. I'm Yuna Castellano. I just transferred here."
Silence.
That was it. That was genuinely all I had. My brain offered nothing else — no fun fact, no interesting detail, no smooth follow-up line. Just my name and the bare fact of my existence in this room.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and waited for someone to do something with that.
My teacher, graciously, moved things along before the silence could become a full social event. "Welcome to 2-A, Yuna. You can take the empty seat by the window."
The window seat. Of course. I had read enough stories to know exactly what the window seat meant, and I was too tired to have feelings about it.
I made my way to the desk quickly, keeping my head down, sat down, and let out a slow breath. If I stayed very still and didn't draw any more attention to myself for the rest of the day, maybe the morning's disasters would start to feel like a distant memory by lunch.
Roll call started. Names moved down the list one by one, each answered with a quick "present" or "here," steady and automatic. I let the rhythm of it wash over me, and somewhere in the middle of it, my brain running on three hours of sleep and the fumes of a very bad morning quietly drifted.
Not fully asleep. Just gone. Somewhere between the classroom and wherever my thoughts went when they decided the current situation wasn't worth full attention.
I was thinking about the lyrics I hadn't finished. About whether the second verse needed a full rewrite or just a different opening line. About whether—
"Castellano, Yuna."
I blinked.
The room came back into focus. The teacher was looking at me. The class was looking at me. The silence had the specific texture of a silence that had been going on for a few seconds longer than it should have.
"Yuna Castellano?"
"Oh!" I sat up fast. "Present! Sorry — I — yeah. Present. Sorry. I zoned out."
My teacher's expression moved through something that was almost amusement before settling back into professional neutrality. "Noted."
From somewhere behind me, I heard it — barely a whisper, but unmistakable.
"Did she just forget her own name?"
"I think she actually dissociated."
"Is she okay?"
I sank an inch lower in my chair and fixed my eyes on the board at the front of the room like it contained the most interesting information I had ever encountered in my life.
No. I was not okay.
But I was present.
Technically.
That had to count for something.
To be continued.