Letters to No One

First.

Toko knew someone was playing a nasty trick on her. It just had to be that.

She stared intensely at the note that tumbled from her locker right at her feet, pondering the pink envelope with a heart sticker that sealed it. She glared at it, like she hoped the world would open up and swallow it whole.

A sick joke like this... seriously, this is childish—

"Toko?" The voice beside her made her flinch and she glanced up to see Aoi standing there.

"W-what do you want?" Toko asked bitingly, quickly taking up her notebooks for the next class.

"I just saw you standing there with the most weird expression and wanted to know if you're okay," she explained. "Ah, not that I'm saying you're weird. Just..." Aoi noticed the envelope and pointed at it. "Oh, is that—" Toko immediately snatched it up from the floor, trying not to blush.

"It's nothing... y-you should get to homeroom before you end up being late." Toko clutched her notebooks to her chest as she all but ran off to ignore Aoi's reaction, the letter hidden away from plain view.

As she sat in class, she couldn't help but let her mind fixate on the letter tucked away in her desk. She could open it... but what if it was some cruel words disguised in a pretty pink note? No one really liked her, nor did she have any friends. Maybe acquaintances, but she did her best not to get too close; people seemed to get disgusted by her easily.

I can just rip it up and toss it out, she reasoned, no need to look at a bunch of ridicule scrawled on some paper. Toko discreetly held the letter in her hands, twisting it to go through with tearing it apart. Something stopped her, probably that curiosity. What did it say? Maybe... maybe she could just glaze over it a bit, it wouldn't hurt... no insult could hurt her at this point. She removed the red heart that sealed the envelope and with slightly shaky hands, took out the paper.

Surprisingly, the letter was in calligraphy, the writing flowed prettily on the page.

It read:

Fukawa-san

You don't know me, and we'll probably never meet, but ever since I saw you from afar I couldn't get you out of my head. I thought "what an interesting girl, she seems so quiet and reserved. She has the prettiest eyes I've ever seen!" Hopefully this doesn't come off as strange, but I wanted to at least know who you are. So I learned that you were an Ultimate Writing Prodigy from Hope's Peak and suddenly I became a bit intimidated. I thought, "there's no way someone as talented as her would pay attention to someone as normal as me"...

Still, I just wanted to get these feelings out on paper, I didn't have any intention of sending it to you at first, but I decided to take a shot in the dark. Maybe one day I'll gather up the courage to meet you face to face, but now I just want you to know that I think you're very pretty, and you seem like such an interesting person. I'd like to become your friend at least, but it seems like I'm too much of a coward to approach you yet (haha).

— Your Secret Admirer

Toko blinked once, then twice, reading it again in confusion. Was this... not a joke? It was real? Does this person mean it? Despite how plainly it was written, the writer seemed sincere about their intentions—

Toko immediately squashed that train of thought. No way this could be real. This person somehow had to be pulling a prank, probably for the long haul to get her hopes up only to humiliate her.

Tear it up, tear it to pieces... I can't believe I wasted my time reading this garbage. Instead, she quietly balled up the letter and envelope, stuffing it into her tote bag. She'd decided that she'll throw it all out later. At that moment though, she had to focus on the lesson in front of her.

——

The apartment Toko stayed in was only a block from Hope's Peak. The royalties from her novels made it so that she could easily live on her own, plus the idea of being in those stuffy, thin-walled dorms with all those people surrounding her made her cringe. After taking of her shoes and setting her bag down, she flopped onto the bed, sighing heavily.

She couldn't get rid of that note after all.

She felt silly, holding onto something so insignificant, but also... the feeling of being noticed and liked by someone made her feel warm. Granted, she had no idea who it could be and probably never would. What mattered to her, though, was that someone out there liked her enough to the point they'd send a love letter straight to her locker.

Toko fished the crumpled letter out from her bag and smoothed it over. She read it over and over again, focusing on the part where they said her eyes were pretty and wanted to be her friend. The idea that she never would meet this person was somewhat disappointing, but also relieving. The last thing she needed was a secret admirer realizing that she wasn't the perfect, aloof, pretty ideation they believed and start hating her.

She suddenly came back to her senses and realized that she needed to finish up her novel. Toko shuffled over to her desk, and decided while setting up to write to pin that letter on her already crowded cork board, next to a cut out of Byakuya's picture from a news article. She plopped down on her desk chair, stretching every which way to prepare for the next few hours of writing. The goal for the day was to get at least fifty pages in to wrap up her story— another romance novel.

Glancing over at that wrinkled up pink envelope, she was able to find some inspiration. "Okay, time to get to work."