Chapter Text
So, Kieu My never meant to go this far. Too bad she was a hopeless slash desperate romantic with horrible, horrible ideas which she just happens to be stupid enough to follow through with.
Being at school after hours wasn’t unusual, many would use the library and study rooms for homework or to work on group projects. So no, that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual however, was stealing keys from the teachers’ lounge, sneaking into the classroom reserved for the English class, finding the paper where the English teacher has partnered up the students for a future team project, stealing it, sneaking out, copying it, swapping around the names in a way that won’t be noticeable, sneaking back in and leaving the altered paper.
Kieu My could admit that that was an out-of-character move for her, but hey, it worked didn’t it? You might think, that’s kind of drastic, don’t you think? Well, yes, but also… let’s just start from the beginning.
-
Kieu My was about a week into the school year when she noticed her. She was skating around the schoolyard in khakis, a thin purple see-through sweater and a yellow and purple Hawaiian shirt, looking like she owned the place. The look really shouldn’t have worked, but it did, and she looked so damn good. The sight of her had stopped Kieu My in her tracks, forcing her to pay attention as she swiftly skated through the crowds of students until she stopped before a familiar blonde. Nora. Zoe’s sister. Interesting…
Later that day, during lunch, Kieu My tried her best to subtly ask Zoe about her sister’s friend, but she didn’t seem to catch on. Like at all.
“So... how’s Nora? She settling in okay? Got some new friends?” subtle, Kieu My, real subtle.
“Oh, she’s great! She got this new boyfriend, have you seen him? His name is Josh, and he is hot, seriously, wait let me show you a picture.” Turned out it was subtle. Too subtle.
“Oh, good for her, uhm, how about-”
“He’s just the sweetest guy, she’s really happy-” so she spent the next ten minutes looking at pictures of Nora’s boyfriend and listening to her best friend talk him up. Not the way she planned this lunch to go. Before she knew it, they parted ways and she was none the wiser.
She did contemplate asking Nora personally, but decided it would be weird considering she didn’t know her that well. So instead, she spent the rest of that day daydreaming. None of her classes got as much of attention as the skater did. How had she never seen here before? School had been in full motion for a week, and she hadn’t seen any traces of the girl before today, which would mean that they had zero classes together. Sigh.
The weekend was spent trying to find her on Instagram, which was a tedious job. First, she went to Zoe’s account to find Nora’s, which was easy enough, but as it turns out, Nora has a private profile, so she had to improvise further. She spent half an hour trying to remember her boyfriend’s name, and when she remembered that his name was Josh, she looked through the people Zoe follows to find him.
Bad news: Zoe doesn’t follow him.
Good news: Zoe did show her his photos on Instagram, which means he has an open profile.
Bad news: She had to actually find that profile.
Initially, she was going to just write in the name Josh and look through every profile Instagram recommended, but then she came to her senses and realized that that’s a shit idea. So, she logged into the school’s website and looked up the list of current students to go through until she found every single person named Josh.
And bingo. Josh Zimmermann.
Kieu My let out a cry of happiness when she finally found his profile but was again let down when she didn’t see any pictures of the girl. She knew this had been a longshot, but she was still disappointed.
So yeah, she gave up. She took her defeat with stride, and started look through Josh’s pictures, because let’s face it, she had nothing else to do. Maybe she’d find a comment left by the girl or something. Josh was cute, she’d admit. If she wasn’t so hung up on a girl she saw once for five minutes, maybe she’d spent more time admiring, but she was, so she didn’t.
She stopped scrolling when she landed on about the fifth picture Josh had posted of this one girl, a pretty brunette woman. The curiosity got the best of her, so she clicked on her tag. Her name was Yara, and her profile was filled with pictures of her with Josh, and some other girls. Her heart skipped a beat. She had a picture with Nora and another brunette. She was friends with Nora.
She quickly scrolled down her profile, continuously looking for the skater girl. She found it almost at the bottom. The picture was taken from the side, but it was without a doubt her. She was wearing glasses and had white locks in her hair, and she was holding a tortoise in her hands. The caption read “meet Maike” . It took an embarrassingly long time before Kieu My realized that Maike was the name of the turtle, and not the skater girl, but let’s not dwell on that.
Yara, bless her soul, had tagged the girl. Kieu My was in such a rush to click on the tag, she accidentally liked the picture. A picture from four months ago. The only picture of Fatou on Yara’s profile that was posted four months ago. She’d liked it. She wished she could say that she unliked it right away, but she was frozen for so long she was sure Yara had gotten the notification. Well, better late than never, right?
She unliked the picture as she cursed herself, and proceeded to click onto Fatou’s profile, which of course, was private. But she wasn’t mad, nor that disappointed, because she had a name now. Her name was Fatou. She’d found her! Fatou. Fatou.
She went back to the list of students.
-
Fatou Jallow. She continuously spun the name around in her head in English class the following Monday, she’d chosen a window seat this time, which she looked out of while daydreaming yet again.
So when someone sat down next to her, with a quick hello, she was startled to say the least. She was even more startled when she looked up to see the girl. The skater girl. Girl of her daydreams. Fatou. Fatou Jallow.
She just looked at her, in shock mostly, did she just manifest this? Is she starting to have visions now? Is she going crazy? And while Kieu My came up with a hundred reasons to how this could’ve happened, Fatou seemed to shrink under her gaze, seemingly backing off. Wait, no, no, no, no. Goddamn resting bitch face.
She was just about to speak up when the teacher clapped his hands, demanding attention as he started the class, and she was left looking like an asshole. She would’ve physically banged her head into the table if that wouldn’t turn Fatou even more off her.
“And you must be Fatou, nice of you to finally show up-”
Five seconds ago, Kieu My wouldn’t be so sure that Fatou could get any smaller, but the teachers comment seemed to make her especially uncomfortable, and Kieu My found herself wanting to chop his head off. Respectfully.
But Kieu My didn’t say anything, she never did, and she always cursed herself for it. Instead, she found herself looking at Fatou’s hands, placed on the desk next to her. She was fumbling with her thumb ring, which was yellow, and while focusing longer on it, Kieu My realized it was a mood ring. She had half a mind to whip out her phone right then and there to look up the different colors and their meanings, but instead made a mental note to do that later.
“Kieu My? Are you paying attention?”
Her head whipped up as the teacher said her name, and she blushed as she looked to Fatou who had clearly noticed where her focus was as the teacher called her name. The girl displayed a knowing smile, and instead of looking bashful as she did before, she almost looked a little smug. Her ring had turned into a blue-green color and Kieu My’s blush deepened as she caught herself looking at her hands once again.
She just nodded to the teacher, willing him to move on.
“So, as I was saying, I’m pairing you up to work on a project that’s due at the end of the month. You and your partner will be tasked to pick a classic work, rewrite it, and then perform it in front of the class. Got it? Great. Before anyone asks, you will not get to pick your partner, I have already paired everyone up randomly-” he pulled out a paper from under the desk, quickly displaying it before putting it back into the drawer. Fatou groaned and Kieu My rubbed her forehead, already hating this assignment.
“You’ll get more info on Wednesday, but if you go onto page 16-”
Kieu My made sure to pay extra attention to the rest of the class and when it was over, she had almost forgotten about the girl next to her.
That was a lie, she didn’t forget, quite the opposite actually, but she wasn’t about to flaunt that. She took her time packing up her stuff, seeing if Fatou would try to talk to her. She couldn’t be sure if Fatou had left yet, seeing that Kieu My had used up all of her will power to not look her way, but when she’d finished packing up all of her stuff and went to leave, she could see Fatou spending even more time than her to pack her bag.
Fatou looked up from her bag when she finished, smiling at Kieu My. God, she had a beautiful smile. As she stood up to leave, she looked into her eyes and said, “too bad we can’t pick our own partners” . Kieu My doesn’t remember how she reacted, all she remembers is the heat taking over. However, the way she’d reacted had seemed to delight Fatou though, who grinned at her as she left the classroom.
At lunch she sat with Ismail, Zoe being off somewhere with Finn. Kieu My didn’t say much, her mind somewhere else, but that didn’t stop Ismail from talking their head off. As they were talking, Kieu My was only half listening while looking up mood rings on her phone. She looked through different type of mood rings until she found one that looked like Fatou’s, and quickly found the color chart.
So, it seemed like her mood ring consisted of seven main colors, black, gray, yellow, green, blue-green, blue and violet. She thought back to this morning, and what colors Fatou’s ring had been.
At first it had been yellowish, when Kieu My had accidentally blown her off with her deadpan. Okay, yellow; “nervous, mixed emotions, unsettled”. Great. She had unsettled her. She pinched the bridge of her nose as she reminded herself that mood rings weren’t necessary correct. She’d get a chance to fix it, it was fine. It’s fine.
“and you have English with Mr. Strauss, too right? That paired up assignment is already enough for him to be my least favorite person in the world-”
“yeah, and we can’t even pick partners…” Kieu My adds absentmindedly, just to keep them going. She thinks about what Fatou had said, and her smile.
The second color she’d seen on her finger was blue-green, after she’d caught her staring at her hands. Kieu My cringed at herself just thinking about it. Blue-green; “inner emotions, charged, somewhat relaxed” hmm…
“Right?! What an idiot. God, I swear, we should break into the classroom and swap the papers or something…” Ismail joked with a laugh. This got her attention though. She looked up from her phone as Ismail just kept on rambling, further joking about hacking into the school system or something, but she again wasn’t paying attention, because now she was stupid enough to form an even stupider plan.
-
And that’s how she ended up here. Broken into the classroom, swapping the papers. It seemed like a bad idea when she thought about it after Ismail had said it, and now that she’s doing it, she knows it’s an even worse one than previously imagined.
Kieu My wasn’t one to speak up when she wasn’t called for, or to do anything that would incriminate her, so to say that her hands were shaking and that she was freezing cold out of her own skin was an understatement. She cannot afford to be expelled. But the worst was over now. On the way out she didn’t even bother to drop the keys off where she found them, she was too scared to, so she simply dropped them right outside of the teachers’ lounge and didn’t stop running before the school was too far away to see.
That following Wednesday Kieu My was so paranoid and so sure that she would be found out. When the time for English class came around, she seriously contemplated skipping class for the first time ever. She didn’t though, but she purposefully came just a little late so that the teacher wouldn’t have time to speak to her before class. She was freezing and her hands were shaking.
When she entered the class, the only seat available was the same she sat in last, and she was confused at first, because Fatou sat at the same place at last too. Not the window seat, but the one next to it. She hesitated towards the seat, not sure if it was held off for someone or something, but when Fatou saw her she smiled. And Kieu My melted onto her seat.
The class was surprisingly uneventful, and towards the end she found herself relaxing. Or that was until the teacher decided to announce the partners. As he went through the list, she didn’t blink once.
“Kiey My and Fatou-” …he didn’t even flinch. Kieu My waited just a little longer before letting out a huge breath. Oh my god. He didn’t even notice.
She looked to Fatou, who was already looking at her, smiling.
This time Kieu My smiled back.