Aylin had a rule about mornings.
Get in early. Settle before everyone else arrived. Have at least five minutes of quiet before the classroom turned loud and chaotic and impossible to think in.
She liked those five minutes. They were hers.
She got to class at exactly 7:52, like always. Set her bag down. Took out her notebook and placed it under her textbook — also like always, a habit she didn't even think about anymore. Water bottle on the right side. Pencil case in the middle. Everything in its place.
She exhaled slowly.
Good. Fine. Normal Tuesday.
Then the door opened and Kerem walked in and it was 7:54 which meant he was actually early and Aylin didn't know what to do with that information.
He looked surprised to see her too, for just a second.
"Oh," he said. "You're always here this early?"
"Yes," she said.
He dropped into the seat beside her. His bag hit the floor with a heavy thud. He didn't take anything out of it. He just sat there, leaning back, looking around the empty classroom like he was trying to figure out why he'd bothered showing up before anyone else.
Aylin looked back at her textbook.
Quiet. Good. He wasn't talking. This was fine.
"Why?" he asked.
She looked up. "What?"
"Why do you come so early."
"Because I like it quiet."
He glanced around the empty room again. "Fair."
And then — nothing. He actually just sat there. No pen tapping, no talking. He pulled out his phone and looked at it for a while and Aylin read the same paragraph three times before she finally actually absorbed it.
By the time the rest of the class started filing in she had almost forgotten he was there.
Almost.
He fell asleep twenty minutes into second period.
Not dramatically. He didn't slump over or snore or anything like that. He just… gradually stopped moving and his eyes closed and his chin dipped slightly and that was it. Still sitting upright. Like he'd had a lot of practice sleeping in places he wasn't supposed to.
Aylin noticed because she noticed everything happening in her immediate surroundings. It was a focus thing. Background noise and movement always caught the corner of her eye.
That was the only reason.
She looked back at the board.
Looked back at him.
He was definitely asleep.
The teacher was writing something and had her back to the class. A few people had noticed and were doing that thing where they tried not to laugh. One guy two rows over was watching with the delighted expression of someone waiting for something to go wrong.
Aylin faced forward again.
Not her problem.
The teacher turned around.
Aylin's elbow moved about two centimeters to the right and knocked against Kerem's arm.
He jerked awake, eyes opening, immediately picking up his pen like he'd just been resting his eyes actually.
The teacher looked in their direction briefly, then kept talking.
Aylin said nothing. Wrote nothing. Just kept her eyes on her own paper.
A few seconds passed.
"...Thanks," Kerem said. Very quietly. Not even really a whisper, more like just mouthing the word.
Aylin didn't respond.
But she felt him glance at her and she kept her expression completely neutral and focused extremely hard on writing the date at the top of her notes.
The notebook thing happened on Wednesday.
It was her fault, honestly. She knew it was her fault. She'd gotten distracted during lunch rewriting a paragraph in her head and when she came back to class she was still thinking about it and she just — took out the wrong notebook.
She didn't even notice for a few minutes. She was reading back over what she'd written last night, this scene she still wasn't happy with, when Kerem sat down beside her and she only then realized what was in her hands.
She closed it immediately.
"What's that?" he asked.
"Notes," she said.
"You were reading notes like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like—" he made a vague gesture. "I don't know. Like it was interesting."
"Notes can be interesting."
He raised his eyebrows slightly, in that way he had, like he found her funny without actually laughing.
"Sure," he said.
Aylin put the notebook away. All the way at the bottom of her bag.
She could feel him not asking about it anymore, which was somehow almost worse than if he had.
Thursday it rained.
Not a nice rain either. The kind that started suddenly in the middle of the afternoon and immediately became cold and sideways and miserable. By the time last period ended it was coming down hard enough that half the class was crowding the front entrance, staring out like they were waiting for it to ease up.
Aylin had not brought an umbrella.
She stood near the edge of the crowd, pulling her jacket tighter, doing the mental calculation of how wet she would get if she just walked.
"No umbrella?"
She turned. Kerem was beside her, also watching the rain. Also no umbrella.
"No," she said.
"Same." He was quiet for a second. "You live far?"
"Twenty minutes walking."
He made a face. "Yeah that's going to be bad."
She already knew that. She was already resigning herself to it.
They stood there for another minute in silence. People around them were making phone calls, pulling out umbrellas, complaining. Someone's older sibling showed up with a car and four people piled in loudly.
"I'm just gonna go," Kerem said, like he was telling himself more than her.
"In this?"
"It's just water."
Aylin looked at the rain. Then at her jacket. Then at the twenty minute walk home.
"...It's just water," she agreed.
He looked at her.
She picked up her bag and they both walked out into it at the same time, which wasn't a plan exactly, it just sort of happened.
It was immediately very cold. Aylin hunched her shoulders up and walked fast, which didn't really help. Kerem walked with his hands in his pockets, not seeming to mind as much, which she found both impressive and slightly irritating.
They didn't talk for the first five minutes. The rain was loud enough that it would have taken effort anyway.
At some point she realized they were walking in the same direction.
"Where do you live?" she asked.
"About ten minutes from here. You?"
"Fifteen, maybe."
Which meant they were walking the same way for most of it. Neither of them said anything about this. They just kept walking.
"You do this a lot?" he asked after a while.
"Walk home?"
"Forget your umbrella."
"I didn't forget it. I checked the weather this morning and it said no rain."
"And you trust that?"
"...Normally yes."
He smiled a little, looking ahead. His hair was completely wet by now. Hers probably was too. She didn't want to think about what she looked like.
By the time they reached Güneş street the rain had slowed down a little. Not enough to matter but a little.
"This is me," Kerem said, stopping at the corner.
Aylin nodded.
He paused. "You good from here?"
"It's two streets," she said.
"Right." He lifted his hand in a sort of vague half-wave. "See you tomorrow."
"See you tomorrow," she said.
She walked the last two streets alone, wet and cold, and when she got home she changed immediately and made tea and sat at her desk.
She opened her notebook.
She wrote for two hours straight.
One of those sessions where everything just came out right, sentences landing where she wanted them, the story moving like it had been waiting for her to catch up to it. She didn't stop until her hand hurt.
When she finally put the pen down and read back over the pages she noticed something.
The boy in the story — the one she hadn't been able to figure out for weeks, the one who kept not sounding like a real person — he was finally starting to feel like one.
She wasn't sure when that had happened.
She closed the notebook and didn't think about it too hard.