Puppy

The second-floor hall at school was too bright, too loud. Sun poured through high windows, sneaker soles squeaked across tile, lockers slammed like percussion. John kept one hand on his bag strap and the other in his pocket, letting the crowd carry him.

Nate peeled off a locker and joined him.

“You alive?”

“Barely.”

“Big night.” Nate grinned the grin of someone who remembered things John did not.

John rubbed his eyebrow. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“You were glued to Maya.”

“I wasn’t glued.”

“Bro. You followed her from the kitchen to the porch to the fire pit. You orbited.”

John opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “I was being social.”

“You spilled beer on yourself when she bent over to fix her sandal. Then you spilled more to make it look intentional.”

A warm, fuzzy, humiliating memory slid into place. Maya’s red dress under string lights. Her braid falling over her shoulder as she bent to hear a joke. The sixth shot of tequila making him stupid. The way he’d hovered like a stray dog hoping she’d pet it.

He strangled the memory and focused on the hallway.

They reached their lockers at the same time Alina appeared. Binder at her hip, ponytail shining in the morning sun like she’d invented hygiene.

“Morning,” she said. “Nate, you look awful. John, you look like you need a defibrillator.”

“Tell her about last night,” Nate said. “Tell her about puppy mode.”

Alina raised a brow. “Puppy mode?”

John resisted the urge to slam his head into the locker. “It wasn’t like that.”

“He was trying to shove an entire slice of pizza in his mouth to impress Maya.”

Alina actually sighed. “God, I should’ve gone to that party. Watching you humiliate yourself is free entertainment.”

John could feel heat rising up his neck. He tightened his grip on his bag strap.

“She was flirting too,” he muttered. “Everyone always acts like girls don’t get like that, but—” he shrugged, trying for casual, failing miserably—

“Um, actually, girls our age are way hornier than guys. They just hide it better.”

It came out too loud. Too confident for someone who couldn’t remember half the party.

And there it was again: that weird buzz in his chest, faint and electric, a second-long spark. Gone before thought could reach it.

Alina blinked. “Wow. That’s a top-tier mansplain.”

She slid past them toward class. Nate snorted. John exhaled like he’d been underwater.

When he turned slightly, he spotted Emma farther down the row, closing her locker. Her face was composed, but he caught the faintest flush high on her cheeks. Their eyes didn’t meet.

She adjusted her backpack strap and walked toward class without a word.

The hallway noise swallowed everything again—voices, lockers, fluorescent hum.

John let Nate drag him toward their room. His headache faded a notch.

The classroom smelled like pencil shavings and stale coffee. Ms. Lindstrom stood at the front with a stack of tests like she was guarding a national secret.

“Phones off. Bags closed. Names at the top.”

John dropped into his seat. Nate sat next to him. Maya slipped in just before the bell, braid shifting over one shoulder. She gave John a tiny nod as she passed. Not a smile—just acknowledgment. Just enough to land.

The test packets reached his row. John wrote his name; the letters trembled. He inhaled. Exhaled. Inhaled again. Found a center-point that wasn’t spinning.

Causes, the first question said.

Bread drifted stupidly through his mind. He shooed it away and wrote about tax and grain and crowds and how pressure builds when you put a lid on it.

The room settled around him: the click of the vent, the scratch of pencils, the shuffle of paper.

He caught movement in his peripheral vision—a girl at the far window smoothing her lip with her thumb while she read. Alina pausing, pen at her mouth, letting her gaze drift. Maya spinning her pencil in slow circles like she was conducting a silent song.

He dropped his eyes and kept going. Paragraph by paragraph. Sentence by sentence. A rhythm formed. His headache retreated another half-step.

“Two minutes,” Ms. Lindstrom said.

He set his pencil down. No point in adding more now. The room filled with the sounds of zippers and scraping chairs. Papers stacked. A hush before the hallway chaos returned.

Alina dropped her test on top of his, tapped his desk once, and murmured, “You look less dead now. Good for you.”

Back in the hall, Nate nudged him.

“Puppy.”

“Shut up,” John said, but he smiled anyway.

And that surprised him.