“And I’m guessing you know the rest,” Lilia says, her voice light but pointed as she nods toward Will, Liam, and Christian.
I follow her gaze.
I nod. “Yeah. Hard to miss.”
Lilia hums, like she agrees, but there’s something else in it too, amusement maybe, or warning.
“But one of them isn’t here,” she says, and I feel her watching me even as I keep my eyes on the back row.
My stomach tightens slightly.
I already know who she means.
“Kai,” I say, carefully. Not a question.
Lilia’s lips tug into a smirk. “Yep. The golden boy himself.”
She leans in, lowering her voice. “He misses classes a lot, and no one dares say anything. He’s top of all his classes anyway.”
I blink. “Not even the teachers?”
She laughs once under her breath. “Especiallynot the teachers. They love him. Can’t help it. He’s their prized student. Eventheyget flustered around him.”
She shakes her head slightly. There’s disbelief in the gesture, but there’s also something else.
Admiration, I realize.
Someone across the row, some guy with half a bagel in his hand, chimes in. Low enough for only the small group around us to hear. “I heard he only sleeps like two hours a night. That’s how he’s so ahead of everyone.”
Lilia sighs, already over it.
But the guy keeps going, clearly oblivious to her dismissal. “I mean, it’s easy to be brilliant when you have no social life.”
Someone two seats over snorts. “Right, becauseyou’dbe a genius too if you skipped brunch.”
Before Bagel Boy can defend himself, another voice cuts through. A girl with short curls and winged eyeliner, legs crossed poshly. “I heard he speaks, like, seven languages. Fluent.”
Another girl chimes in from behind me, whispering just loud enough to be heard. “Didn’t he teach himself piano in a week?”
Then someone else says, half-laughing. “He took his A-Level Physics exam at sixteen and finished it forty minutes early. Then just sat there reading abook.”
A beat.
“In French.”
Lilia exhales through her nose. “Okay, now you’re all making stuff up.”
***
I try so hard to focus on the teacher’s lesson, so hard it actually makes my brain hurt a little bit. Believe it or not, it’s fairly difficult to absorb the massive amounts of information he’s spurting out at the speed of light, but just as I start to really immerse myself in the subject, a faint buzzing sound erupts from my bag. My heart skips a beat with a glimmer of hope. Perhaps my sisters have finally replied to my text? Slowly, I take the phone out of my bag, hoping for a message from either of my sisters.
Confusion flickers across my face.
Unknown number?
But it’s the words that send a shiver down my spine.
What if I told you it wasn’t your imagination?
