There are two kinds of kids in this world.
The ones who stay in one place their whole life and grow roots. And the ones who get split in half before they're old enough to understand what that even means.
I was the second kind.
Two schools. One private, one public. The private one was where I actually belonged my friends, my class, my everything. The public one felt like someone else's life that I had been accidentally dropped into. And because I'd joined it late, I was bumped back a grade. So while my real friends sat in one classroom, I was one floor down, one year behind, feeling like a ghost in a school that had never asked for me.
What ended up happening was this weird split existence. Twenty days a month at the private school. Ten days at the public one. On those ten days, whenever I wanted to see my actual friends, I had to go up to their floor. Walk into their classroom like I didn't belong there.
That's when I first saw her.
She was just there. Sitting in that class I had no real reason to be in. I'd catch a glimpse of her — nothing more than that. I wasn't old enough to feel anything yet. Second grade, maybe third. Just some girl in a room I passed through.
I didn't think about her at all.