If there was such a thing as love at first sight, then I certainly did not fall prey to its power the moment my eyes met his. I only felt a poke of wonder, as if seeing a book with a unique title.

Clover, however, surrendered to it easily. She had been attracted to Michael Summer from the minute she saw him in her AP Music, first day of senior year. She didn't admit it openly, but it was too obvious, anyway. It doesn't take a genius to see that a girl likes a certain boy. You can see it in her eyes and smile whenever she speaks of him.

Clover was boy-crazy. Not that she hooked up with numerous guys. She just ceaselessly talked about cute boys or about that time a cute boy smiled at her. I lost track of how many of them she liked and cried over because she was quick to hop from one crush to another. It wasn't like I was bitter or anything, but the downside was that she spent so much time trying to make herself look good for them when she shouldn't.

"This is your fault, Clover," I said, running along the footpath one morning. The cold wind blew against my face, making me clench my teeth.

"My fault?" she exclaimed behind me.

"Yes. You and your thirty minutes of doing that winged eyeliner. We missed the bus again." I could've taken my bike but forgot to fix the loose chain the day before.

"Thirty minutes? It was only like two."

"Two minutes of forever, you mean."

"I wanted my look to be perfect!"

"Clover, you don't need to worry about making yourself look perfect. You could wear a potato sack and still look pretty," I said. And meant it. She was pretty. She was named Miss Photogenic in her middle school pageant.

Clover smugly lifted her chin. "I can always look prettier."

"Sure," I deadpanned. "But I don't think that qualifies as an excuse for being late to school."

A sleek black car drove by, and her gaze followed it until it disappeared into a corner.

"It would sure be nice to have a car right now," she mused. "It sucks that Mom doesn't want me to get one."

"Because we can't afford it," I replied. "And ever since that news about a highway accident, she thinks all the drivers on the road are incompetent."

"Yeah, but think about it—us having the freedom to travel anywhere. Going to parties. Road trips. The luxury of not having to ride that stinky school bus every morning."

I hummed. A road trip sounded like a dream. "Well, I heard that the human body can still function with just one kidney, so if you want to volunteer..."

She pushed me playfully, and I laughed. Then, a vague memory flashed across my eyes all of a sudden.

"Hey, didn't we use to have a car before? It was a black one. A Toyota or something. And then..."

"Oh, no," I heard her groan under her breath, but I couldn't stop myself from talking. The picture was becoming clearer in my head by the second.

"And then I remember Dad driving all of us to the mall, and he got mad that we bought so many things."

She widened her eyes at me. "How on earth do you remember it? You were, like, six."

I shrugged. "I don't remember what happened to that car, though. I wonder where it is now."

There came a weighty pause between us. The calm before the storm. Clover was moving her jaw as if chewing on the words before spitting them out.

"Clover...?"

"He went away with it," she snapped. "Dad. He packed up and left with that stupid car. You don't remember it because you were asleep when it happened."

I bit my lower lip and stared at the ground. Fragmented memories rose from the depths of my mind and played like an old film. Little me waking up to a quiet house one morning. My dad missing. My mom scolding me for asking too many questions about him. And Clover telling me not to speak of him again.

I still did it. No matter how many times I reminded myself not to talk about him, I still did it. She hated him with passion. She always questioned how cowardly a man had to be to abandon his children.

"I'm sorry," I said. "It just popped into my mind. I shouldn't have asked."

"Don't be sorry. I know you miss him. You were his favorite." Her voice was hard and steady, but I could tell it was all to hide her sadness and resentment. "But don't hold on to the possibility of him coming back. It's been years. We've never heard a word from him."

"I know..." I remember all those days and nights of thinking the question: how can a person entirely disregard something he holds dear?

Another cold breeze brushed through, and the fallen leaves danced around the pavement. I tightened the knitted scarf around my neck. Clover checked her wristwatch.

"Fifteen minutes left," she announced, her usual joviality coming back. Her steps went faster, and she grinned at me. "Wanna race?"

"You're on," I said. "But I wish your winged eyeliner could fly us to school to make up for the time it took."

──────

I had a lab partner in biology class. Her name is Sunshine Lee, but she was best known as Sunny. Her nickname suited her personality. She was vibrant, and she always wore bright colors to school. We would always share a good laugh during experiments, but that was just it. Sunny was an occasional friend, and we hardly talked outside the classroom.

So, it was a surprise when she invited me to join her friends for lunch.

"Why?" I asked incredulously, looking up from the test tube that I was examining. "Is that a joke?"

"No." She giggled. We were keeping our voices low because our teacher, Mr. Brooks, was roaming around and he didn't tolerate noise. "I'm serious. I noticed that you always eat alone, so I was wondering if you could use some company."

"I don't—" I was about to reply when guffaws erupted from the back of the room.

Half of the class turned to the source. The two class clowns, Lance Moore and Finn Hunter, had been playing with the yeast and lab tools again. Mr. Brooks had already given them two warnings, but they didn't listen.

"Ugh, so immature," Sunny murmured.

Finn flicked his gaze in my direction and nodded at me. I frowned in confusion before returning to my work.

"So? You in?"

"I don't mind eating all by myself," I told Sunny.

"Don't you feel lonely being alone most of the time?"

"I don't."

Sunny's voice dropped as she asked carefully, "You're not being bullied, are you?"

"I'm not." I did hear a few whispers behind my back but all of them were just comments on how quiet I was. Most of the time, people didn't care about me.

Sunny smiled with a hint of sympathy. "Just for today, Autumn, sit with us. My friends won't mind."

I wasn't sure about that. I knew who her friends were and what kind of people they were. The loud, fun-loving, and sophisticated head-turners. Talking to them would be like facing the wolves.

"That's it!" Mr. Brooks barked at Lance and Finn. "You two should split up. Next week, Lyne is assigned to Hunter, and Lee to Moore." Sunny and I tensed up at the mention of our surnames. "I hope this new arrangement will put an end to your misbehavior."

"But sir, I work well with Autumn!" Sunny exclaimed. It was true. I wrote the reports, and she did the talking during presentations. We were the perfect team.

"No buts. Continue your work. You only have seven minutes left," Mr. Brooks said.

Sunny and I glared at the boys over our shoulders. Lance was grinning so wide as if this had been his plan all along. Meanwhile, Finn caught me looking at him, and he quickly hid his face with his hand.

──────

Masks. Everyone wears them in many forms. From wearing fake smiles to cracking the funniest jokes to pretending they're the toughest person in the room. These masks are worn because of reasons that vary from person to person. I wore my smiley mask during social situations because it was the most acceptable emotion to make people engage with me.

However, as I sat with Sunny and her three friends in the cafeteria, I was itching to bolt out of there and take my mask off. I'd never felt so out of place.

These girls were no strangers to me. It was a small New Hampshire town with one high school and an elementary school, so kids met the same faces every school year. Gia, Adara, and Sunny had been my grade school classmates, while Aislin had been my classmate since kindergarten. She and I were not childhood friends, though.

Aislin had witnessed all the weirdness I did when I was a kid. For example, when I was seven, I used to talk to my imaginary friend Penny because I had no friends and was highly imaginative, and she found it hysterical and called me a "freak."

While Sunny ranted about her new lab partner, I kept rubbing my sweaty palms against my skirt. Aislin had been staring at me since I got to their table. Maybe she was waiting for me to jump up and yell, "Pennyyy! It's been years since I last thought of you! How are you?"

"Yuck, no way! I don't like Lance." Sunny was crying.

"I know he's kind of socially inept, but he's cute. You should give him a chance," Aislin responded, eyeing me at the "socially inept" part. I tried not to roll my eyes.

Sunny scrunched up her nose. "No! He smells weird. It's like he bathes himself with macaroni cheese every morning. And God, he doesn't seem to know how to pull his damn pants up! Can't he tell he looks stupid walking around with his underwear showing?"

"Exactly why he's forever single," said Gia as she sipped on her juice box.

They giggled. I tried to match their giggle, but I did it quietly to avoid being called "annoying and noisy" again. My mind drifted back to sixth grade when Aislin had called me those exact words because I had been sitting behind her and laughing over a magazine. Thanks to her comment, I became conscious of my laugh and stopped talking out loud.

"Hellooo? Earth to Autumn?"

Aislin's voice and her hand tapping on the table snapped me out of my thoughts. Everyone at the table was staring at me with a what's-wrong-with-you look.

"You okay?" asked Sunny.

"Yes. Sorry for spacing out," I replied.

"Welcome back, space cadet," Aislin said, throwing sidelong glances at her friends. "We thought you stopped breathing there for a sec."

"I... I was just thinking about something."

"Like what?"

"Oh, is it about Finn? He's going to be your new lab partner, isn't he?" Sunny cut in as if to rescue me. "At least he's a lot less troublesome than Lance."

I went along with her. "Uh, yes. He is."

"No way, what? Finn? The Finn Hunter?" Aislin stared at me. It was the first time she showed interest in my existence.

The? He's not an object, I wanted to bite back. But I was afraid I would ruin my comeback by stuttering, so I settled with the simple: "What about him?"

"Duh. He's the cutest guy in our batch, and you get to be partnered with him. Lucky."

"What do you like about him, Aislin?" I asked, taking this opportunity to divert the topic from me. One thing I learned from people-watching was that letting them talk about their interests was one way to make them warm up to you.

Aislin looked over her shoulder to watch Finn hanging out with his friends a few tables away from us.

"Well, not only is he gorgeous..."

"His family is rich, too," Adara interjected, laughing at her joke.

Aislin spun back to us and rolled her eyes. "Well, yes, but that's just a bonus. I like him because he's funny and awkward. When he gets shy, his ears turn crimson, and it's so adorable. And his blue eyes... ugh!" The smile on her face was the most sincere expression I'd seen her wear in a long time, an indication of her genuine crush on him.

"Oh, I see," was my only reply.

Their conversation went into relationship topics, and I ended up knowing about everyone's love life problems. To fight my uneasiness, I took out my phone and pretended to be busy.

Not even a minute later, I stood up and they immediately stopped talking to gape at me.

"Excuse me. I'll just get myself a soda," I declared.

Before they could react, I sprinted with my bag out of the cafeteria and exhaled in the hallway. Well, I guess that's the first and last time I get to hang out with them, I thought. Smiley mask off. Back to my poker face.

After getting a soda from the vending machine, I went to my favorite sycamore tree to have my alone time and replenish my social battery. But this plan was interrupted when I saw a guy sitting on a thick branch. And he was smoking a cigarette. One of my biggest pet peeves.

"Hey," I called out. Noticing the black headphones covering his ears, I raised my volume. "Hey, excuse me!"

The guy took off his earphone and bent his head down to look at me. I stopped breathing.

It was Michael.

Oh, God.

I wanted to dash away and forget about the cigarette, but I had already got his attention. My bravado vanished in a snap, and I stuttered, "Um, you—you're smoking. You should... stop it before the teachers see you. It's a school violation."

He smiled humorlessly before looking away and taking a drag. "Stickler for the rules, huh?"

"No... not exactly." I paused. He still didn't stop smoking. "But in this case, I am. Your cigarette butts might burn the whole field."

"That's crazy."

"But plausible. They also pollute the environment." I bit my tongue right after that. This guy was a total stranger, and there I was lecturing him like an old lady. I was out of my mind. Realizing the trouble I could get myself into, I was about to apologize when he laughed. It was a deep, rich laugh that played along with the wind.

"You're an environmentalist, too. Fine, if you insist." Michael pressed the cigarette against the branch to snuff it out and showed it to me before putting it inside his hoodie pocket. "There. One less pollution to worry about."

I felt my cheeks go hot in embarrassment. "Sorry. And thank you," I mumbled.

He turned his head away and stared into the distance. "Is this your spot?"

"No, but I like staying here sometimes."

"It's cool and cozy, isn't it? You should climb up here sometime. You can see the chapel and park from up here." He pointed his finger at the places I couldn't see.

"Um, I'd rather sit here." I sat tentatively on the grass, thinking he might not want someone else to share this place with him. He didn't say anything, so I relaxed. The unopened soda can was getting warmer in my hand. I pulled the tab and drank.

It wasn't until my soda can was empty that Michael talked again. "I'm sorry if I was rude to you the other day."

"Huh?"

"In the band room. I must've scared you."

"Oh, no. I was the one looking around. I should apologize," I said.

"It's cool," he replied.

I smiled to myself, glad to find out that he was nice.

The bell rang, and I swiftly shot up to my feet, dusting the back of my skirt and hoisting my bag over my shoulder. I didn't see him budge from his spot on the branch, so I said, "Lunch is over. Aren't you gonna—"

"No. Skipping class."

"Oh... okay. Suit yourself."

I turned around and started to walk away.

"Hey!" he called.

I stopped and turned back to him. "Yes?"

"Will you... visit the band room again?"

His question made me perk up. "Yeah, I will."

There was a pause on his end. I couldn't see what face he was making because he was looking up at the foliage rustling around him.

"Okay. Later," Michael said.

I added a skip to my step as I entered the school building.