There are some cities that are like ex-boyfriends. You can go years without thinking about them, convinced you're over it, and then you catch a whiff of a specific cologne damp earth and pine needles after a rain, maybe and suddenly you're seventeen again and hopelessly, irrevocantly in love. This place was that kind of ex for me.

Ten years. A full decade since I'd last set foot here. The sun still insisted on casting everything in that same buttery, cinematic gold, but the wind hadn't gotten the memo, slicing through my jacket like a professional pickpocket stealing what little warmth I possessed. I was dragging my suitcase, which I had packed with the gravitational density of a dwarf star, and cursing my past self for believing I needed my entire known universe for a weekend trip.

"God, it's still freezing here, isn't it?" Quinn's voice, sharp and bright, shattered my internal monologue. She was doing this weird, full-body shiver thing, her arms wrapped around herself like she was her own last hope for survival.

Thea, walking beside her, performed a theatrical eye-roll that could have won awards. "What did you expect, Quinn? Palm trees? If you wanted warm, you should've stayed in Saigon with the rest of the carbon emissions. Anyway, it's been what, five or six years, V?"

Five or six years. Thea's memory, it seemed, was as empty as my bank account at the end of the month. I just pressed my lips together, letting the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of my suitcase wheels on the pavement drown out the number stuck in my throat: Ten years.

Ten years. Enough time for a kid to graduate middle school, for a student loan to metastasize into a life-altering debt monster, and for a wound in your heart to scab over and peel away so many times you forget what the original injury even looked like. And yet, standing here, it felt like nothing had changed at all. Except me. I had changed. I had gotten old.

"Wait, has it really been that long?" Quinn asked, her eyes wide, having apparently overheard me muttering the correct figure to myself.

I didn't answer. My gaze was fixed on a pack of students in school uniforms, laughing as they coasted by on their bicycles. Their laughter was so clear and effortless, colliding and shattering in the thin air like expensive crystal. It felt like an impossible luxury. And then I stopped, my heart doing a little stutter-step in my chest. A skinny boy was hunched over his handlebars, pedaling furiously, his bike a blur of motion. The sun caught the back of his white uniform shirt, and the image was so familiar it hurt.

The wind picked up, whipping a few strands of hair across my face. And for a second, I wasn't there anymore, standing on a broken sidewalk with my two best friends and a suitcase full of regrets. I was seventeen, sitting on the back of a different bicycle, behind a different boy. A boy with a back just as bony and just as steady. The boy from my seventeenth year, the one whose smile was as clear as the sunlight and who always, always carried me up every impossible hill in this city on his beat-up bike.

"Hey!"

Thea's voice yanked me out of the past and slammed me back into the unforgiving present. I flinched, nearly tripping over a rogue paving stone that was sticking up, seemingly for the sole purpose of injuring nostalgic fools. It's true what they say: you can't live on memories, but they can sure as hell make you face-plant on a sidewalk.

Thea gave me a long, searching look, a slow grin spreading across her face. "You know," she said, her voice laced with a meaning that was anything but subtle, "it makes you wonder. Does anyone remember their seventeen-year-old boy?"

A question as light as the wind, and it stabbed me right in the gut.

Of course I remembered. How could I not? I remembered him the way you remember your first real debt—the exact amount, the impossible interest, the feeling of it hanging over you. It's just that some memories are like obscure indie films with ambiguous endings. You want to re-watch them, sure, but only by yourself, in the dark, where no one can see your face. You definitely don't want to live-tweet the experience with a running commentary from your friends. Especially when, even after all this time, the ending is still a mystery.

Ten Years Earlier.

Recess at my high school was, on a good day, a barely controlled riot. But in the midst of that symphony of chaos, I had found my own pocket of stillness. I was celebrating this rare moment of freedom with a book, letting the breeze play with my ponytail. There is a certain kind of stupid, pointless happiness you only get to experience when you're young, and this was it. I was mainlining it.

Suddenly, a voice I knew to the point of nausea sliced through my perfect little bubble.

"Nimbus!"

That godforsaken nickname. I didn't even have to look. Only one person on planet Earth called me that with that exact blend of mockery and affection: Nam Phong. I snapped my head around, my eyebrows knitting together, preparing to unleash a verbal torrent that would scorch the very earth he stood upon.

"What?" I snapped.

He had his hands up, fingers and thumbs forming a perfect rectangle, framing my face like he was some indie film director and I was his tragic, misunderstood protagonist. Before I could process the sheer pretentiousness of the gesture, he yelled.

"Look out!"

Look out for what? My eyes went wide, and for one precious, fatal second, I was just... confused. And in that second, I turned my head.

An Unidentified Flying Object which I would later learn was a basketball, made a perfect, non-consensual landing directly on the top of my head.

WHOMP.

The world went from Technicolor to a fuzzy, silent black-and-white movie. My ears rang. I staggered, then crumpled to the ground in a heap. The last thing I saw was the stupid hand-frame, trembling.

"Oh, crap," his voice said. He sounded vaguely apologetic, but I swear on my life I could hear the laughter bubbling underneath it.

It took a few seconds for my brain to reboot. I scrambled up, a curtain of my own hair obscuring my vision, probably looking like the heroine of some drama who'd just survived a tragic, yet photogenic, accident. I pushed the hair out of my eyes and hissed, channeling every ounce of my rage into two words.

"Nam. Phong."

The hand-frame vanished. And there it was—his infuriatingly handsome face, split by a grin that other people might describe as 'angelic' but to me, looked purely demonic. He flashed a crooked tooth and then, like an animal sensing its impending doom, turned and bolted.

"GET BACK HERE!"

A surge of adrenaline erased all pain. I shot after him like an arrow. The crowd of students parted instinctively, clearing the stage for our classic, never-ending chase scene. Pulling Nam Phong's ear had become one of my body's conditioned reflexes, like flinching at a loud noise or immediately wanting anything with a fifty-percent-off sticker. And, as always, I caught him.

"You are so dead," I growled, twisting his ear. "You think that was funny?"

"Ow! Let go! It was a joke! Why are you always so intense?" he yelped, his face scrunching up in pain.

I ignored him, dragging him by the ear back toward the school building. As we passed the throngs of onlookers, I caught snippets of commentary.

"It's like watching a nature documentary."

"Seriously. They've been doing this since kindergarten."

Nature documentary, I thought. Please. This is a blood feud. A generational curse.

The school bell shrieked, signaling the end of recess. I hauled my mortal enemy into class, still fuming, but underneath the anger was a weird sense of... completeness. A day without a dramatic confrontation with Nam Phong just felt like a meal with no salt.

Or maybe the missing ingredient was... dynamite.

If someone tells you that a classroom is a place for learning, that person has never been in room 11A2 five minutes before the bell. It was less a classroom and more a poorly managed circus.

In the front row, 'Saint' Chau, the patron saint of final exams, was buried in a review book thick enough to stop a bullet, radiating an aura of academic martyrdom. Directly behind her, Thea was staring into a compact mirror, negotiating with a new pimple on her chin with the gravity of a UN summit.

"It's the first of the month, dude," she whined at our class treasurer, who was trying to collect dues. "Don't ask me for money, it's bad luck. Can you see this thing? Is it huge?"

The treasurer glanced over and delivered a verdict with zero compassion. "It's in the middle of your face. If I couldn't see it, I'd be legally blind."

Meanwhile, in another corner, Quinn was masterminding a coup. She and two co-conspirators were huddled over Bao, who was fast asleep, decorating his face with permanent markers. Their motto was simple: Never sleep when your friends are awake.

And I, as class president, was the ringmaster of this entire chaotic circus. When the literature teacher walked in, I cleared my throat and yelled, "Class, stand!"

Bao, jolted awake by the noise, shot up like a firecracker. The entire class erupted as they got a look at his face, which now sported a magnificent unibrow and a curly, villain-style mustache. Karma, it turns out, has a wicked sense of humor.

The literature lesson began on a sleepy, sun-drenched afternoon. The teacher paced, her voice a low drone as she spoke of some long-dead poet. "...as a man who stands between heaven and earth," she quoted, "'one must make a name for himself that echoes in the mountains and rivers.' With a philosophy like that..."

A name that echoes in the mountains and rivers? I propped my chin on my hand, staring out the window, a familiar heaviness settling in my chest. All that grand, heroic stuff felt a million miles away. Last night, I'd overheard my mom on the phone. She wanted to transfer me to a school in Saigon. Immediately. The thought made my entire world feel like it was tilting off its axis. Forget echoing in the mountains; I was about to be exiled from my own tiny kingdom.

"...are you capable of sleeping through that, Mr. Bao?" The teacher's voice, sharp now, cut through my thoughts. The class held its breath. She looked at Bao, then at all of us, and let out a long, weary sigh before launching into her favorite sermon.

"This school, this classroom, it has room to cradle all of your dreams," she began, her voice rising. "But life? Life does not have enough compassion to keep from smacking you in the face! Why would you waste this time—your YOUTH—on sleep? Your parents are breaking their backs for you and you sleep? You sleep!"

BRRRNNNGGG! BRRRNNNGGG! BRRRNNNGGG!

The final bell rang, a divine intervention, cutting her off mid-crescendo. She froze, the piece of chalk in her hand falling to the floor with a pathetic little click. She looked at our faces, all of us poised to explode out of our seats, and waved a hand in utter defeat. "Fine," she sighed. "Go home. Go sleep some more."

The classroom emptied in seconds, a flood of pent-up energy.

Only my group remained. I slumped onto my desk, watching the last golden stripes of sunlight fade outside the window. The anxiety about moving was a physical weight on my chest.

"Have you guys thought about it yet?" I asked, mostly to the table. "Like, what universities you want to apply to?" It was a desperate, Hail Mary question, my only hope for a future that still included them.

Bao, rubbing the marker from his face, yawned. "Already? We're not even done with junior year. We've got a whole semester."

Thea rested her head next to mine. "And you want to wait until graduation to start thinking about it?" she said, her voice muffled. "Time moves as fast as an ex-boyfriend finding a new girlfriend, Bao. You blink and it's gone."

"Exactly," Quinn added. "Which is why we can't waste our youth sleeping. Right, Phong?"

We all turned to look at Nam Phong. He'd been quiet the whole time, perched on a nearby desk, just looking out the window. Hearing his name, he turned, nodding with the air of a wise old philosopher.

"Yeah, that's right. Youth..." He paused, as if searching for the perfect, poetic phrasing. "...it's like a roll of toilet paper. It seems like a lot when you first get it, but it runs out way, way faster than you think."

The four of us, all slumped over our desks in various states of ennui, slowly lifted our heads to stare at him. A strange, profound silence filled the room. It was, objectively, the crudest, most un-poetic metaphor I had ever heard. And it was, somehow, the truest.

"What? Was it something I said?" Phong asked, scratching his head. "Hey, wait up!"

He grabbed his bag and ran to catch up as we headed for the door. I walked out into the fading light, a cold knot of dread tightening in my stomach.

He was right. Youth wasn't this infinite resource I'd always imagined. And my roll of toilet paper? It felt like someone was about to rip half of it right off the spool.