Vanilla

Forty One

A/N: I'm sorry for being half an hour later than usual! ;-; I had this written in one and a half days even though it's about 6k words but I made it through (with quality, I hope) thanks to the zoneeee hahahaha! I hope you enjoyed Xander's Diary #3 on Inkitt :> It was hilarious to write. I'll be writing Chip's Diary #1 and Flight School Adventure #6 (?) for next Thursday's update (yes! It's a triple update next week) and it's basically in line with the global stay-home-notice/lockdown period. In which you get to see what the characters do and how they cope with it, just like how you may be doing the same :')

I'm so sorry I haven't been able to reply to the comments from last week's chapter. The usual few (you know who you are), especially. I did read them!! And gush over them!! Hehe. Thank you for your support as usual.

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[Vanilla]

"Your man's looking sharp," was all Si Yin had to say through a pair of binoculars she had produced from her bag before the start of assembly period; which, today, consisted partly of the headmaster's speech, followed by an official re-ordering of the school's top thirteen students on the ranking board. With the rest of the school seated comfortably in red cushioned seats, nearly half of them were falling asleep. "They're kinda just standing there, huh. Pretty boring. Oh, the Birchwood girl's got this really nice crown braid thing."

The thirteen of them were up on stage, standing in a line a couple of feet behind the announcer's podium, waiting for their segment and mostly just staring into blank space. I felt oddly empathetic. Leroy had texted me near midnight, an hour after I'd arrived at my apartment and fallen asleep on the bean bag and it was the first thing I'd woken up to this very morning, leaving me rather anxious and confused.

I fucked up, it said.

My immediate instinct had been to give him a call and then, because he wasn't picking up, send a series of texts asking if he was alright. It was only after I'd given my academic inbox a brief scan that I understood what this morning's assembly period encompassed, which gave some insight into why he wasn't exactly responding to my text messages.

Admittedly, Leroy wasn't the kind of person I'd peg as easily flustered. For him to be thrown off by something completely beyond his expectations and actually use those words felt nearly surreal, and if anything, I couldn't stand seeing him on stage, quiet and alone, unable to wholly appreciate the new title he was about to receive.

On the outside, he looked just about how Si Yin had described him as. 'Sharp.' Which, frankly speaking, felt like a term for icicles and the cold, more so than candles and flames.

We were dismissed at the stroke of half-past-nine, held up by sleepy students funnelling out of the auditorium at a crawl. Si Yin had shooed me towards the general direction away from the door, assuring that she had next period's Chef Lindy 'all covered.' I thanked her for reading my mind.

"Hi. Are they backstage? The thirteen," I asked, going up to a photographer at the front of the stage with my media pass. He nodded.

"You're the writer on duty? Need a camera for the interview?" He was about to walk me down the side of the stage to the back of it but I told him, upfront, that I wasn't the writer he was looking for and then hurried off backstage.