Before anything else, a small clarification.
If anyone from my family ever reads this and feels an uncomfortable sense of familiarity, I would like to make one thing very clear: this is not my life.
Not exactly.
Stories borrow emotions the way memories borrow faces. They change a little each time. Which is also why you won't find my name printed anywhere on this book.
Some stories are easier to tell when you don't have to answer questions later.
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My name is Ayaan, and in my school, rules have always felt... flexible around me.
If I'm missing from class, nobody panics. If I turn up late, attendance somehow still gets marked. If something happens anywhere on campus—good or bad—someone eventually says my name.
I'm in Commerce.
Sarah is in Science.
That difference should have mattered more than it did.
Sometimes, I'm supposed to be in an accounts lecture, but I'm sitting quietly at the back of a physics class instead. Not because I understand anything on the board, but because Sarah is two rows ahead, listening carefully, unaware that I've skipped an entire period just to be there.
Teachers notice.
They don't say anything.
Our school is strange like that. Relationships are not whispered about or shut down. Teachers don't patrol corridors looking for hand-holding. They watch, they observe, and they trust. Maybe that's why it never felt rebellious to love someone here—it felt allowed.
Encouraged, even.
Sarah and I are never loud about it. We don't make a show of being together. No dramatic entrances, no exaggerated affection. And yet, everyone knows.
Teachers smile when they see us walking together between departments. They pretend not to notice when I linger outside the science block longer than necessary. Once, a teacher even asks me, amused,
"Changed streams, have you?"
I smile. "Thinking about it."
She laughs and lets me stay.
We are, quietly, everyone's favourite couple.
Not because we try to be—but because we are serious. In a school full of fleeting crushes and loud infatuations, ours is steady. Real. The kind that doesn't need proving. Other relationships exist, of course, but teachers don't notice them the way they notice us.
Sarah is different.
She speaks little. Keeps her world small. Two friends, no more. She doesn't try to be seen—and yet, she is. Every guy notices her. Some stare openly. Some pretend not to. She walks through corridors as if she has no idea how many eyes follow her, untouched by the attention she never asks for.
I notice everything.
Maybe that's why I sit in science classes that aren't mine. Maybe that's why I wait longer than necessary near her department. Being around her quiets something in me.
Which is saying a lot—because silence and I have never been friends.
I am the football team captain. One of the fastest runners in school. Always involved when something goes wrong. Zaid and Faris are my shadows—loud, reckless, endlessly loyal. Rohit balances us out, calm where we are chaos, confident without needing to prove it.
Together, we are known.
Individually, I am labelled.
So much potential. Completely wasted.
I hear it from everywhere. At home. At school. From people who don't know me well enough to care. It's said with disappointment, sometimes with affection, often with certainty.
I don't listen.
Teachers like me anyway. Especially my class teacher. She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were saying mid-sentence. I have a ridiculous crush on her and make no real effort to hide it. I flirt harmlessly, stay back with unnecessary questions, volunteer for things I never finish.
She sees none of it.
To her, I am just a boy with too much energy and not enough direction. Someone to guide. Someone to protect from himself. She knows I'm emotional—knows it in the way adults know when children are softer than they pretend to be.
Most people don't see that side of me.
Sarah does.
Our fights are small. Immature. Usually about nothing. Who spoke to whom. Why a message wasn't replied to. Why I stayed longer somewhere else.
They never last.
We grow together within school walls, believing—without really questioning it—that what exists here is strong enough to survive beyond it.
Everyone thinks we are permanent.
So do I.
I don't yet know that some stories only feel like the main ones while they're happening.