Our Sun Below The Horizon

(Editing)

Katherine "Kathy" Chan is the girl who can't be kissed by the sun. Literally. It's a whole medical thing.

She's had Xeroderma Pigmentosum since the day she was born, a rare genetic condition with no cure, one that means actual sunlight could kill her. Homeschooled, friendless by circumstance more than choice. She has her routines. Her grandmother Lola Linda's cooking and unsolicited opinions on Filipino teleseryes. Her sketchpad, drawn in shades of gray because color never seems to stick. And Kathstillo, the crumbling, abandoned mansion on the hill that's been hers and only hers for years.

But even before the sun became her enemy, her father's death took away whatever freedom she had left, and being the only thing her mother has left in the world comes with its own kind of confinement. Grief, it turns out, is its own kind of curfew.

Then a moving truck pulls up next door, and Alexander King steps out of it.

Their first real meeting doesn't happen through a fence or over coffee. It happens in the middle of the night, in Kathy's hideout, both of them equally sure the other is either a killer or a ghost, until Kathy faints dead away and wakes up to find the new boy next door has been standing guard over her the entire time.

Inspired by the movie Midnight Sun.