Chapter 56: When the Season Asks for Courage
The seasons had started to change again.
Not quickly, not dramatically. But quietly. The kind of change you could only feel in the early mornings—when the light lingered longer on the floorboards, or the breeze carried just a whisper of something unfamiliar.
It was the beginning of a new term.
Uniforms pressed. Shoes cleaned. Notebooks untouched, their pages crisp and waiting for a new version of themselves to be written in.
Anya stood in front of the mirror that morning, brushing her hair slowly. She wasn't hurrying. She wasn't stalling. She was just… present. A little older in the eyes. A little steadier in the hands.
Oriana came out of the bathroom tying her hair up with a ribbon—navy blue, the color they always had to wear. But her hair, now a little longer, didn't sit neatly the way it used to.
"I don't think I like this ribbon anymore," she said.
Anya smiled from across the room. "Then don't wear it."
"We're supposed to."
"And since when have you done everything you're supposed to?"
Oriana grinned and pulled the ribbon off. "You're right."
She tossed it on the bed.
Anya walked over and adjusted Oriana's collar gently. "There. Perfect."
For a second, they just stood there, close and quiet.
"I feel different," Oriana said.
"You are," Anya replied. "You're lighter."
Oriana's smile faltered slightly. "Is that okay?"
Anya nodded. "It's beautiful."
They walked to school together, just like always.
Except this time, everything was subtly changed—not in the way people greeted them, but in how they moved beside each other. No longer hiding. No longer uncertain. There was something more honest in how their shadows curved together on the sidewalk, how their laughter didn't shrink when other students passed.
They weren't louder.
Just more real.
The school building rose in front of them like it always did—gray, a little weathered, with chipped paint near the stair railings and the faint scent of chalk dust already hanging in the air. The bells rang the same way. The announcements crackled the same way.
But inside them, something had softened and sharpened all at once.
They were no longer pretending to be fine.
They simply were.
As they entered the classroom, some heads turned.
Not out of cruelty. Just curiosity.
The last few months hadn't gone unnoticed—Anya's absence, Oriana's silence, the way they began showing up together more often than not. There had been whispers. Of course there had.
But neither of them looked away.
They found two seats by the window.
Not in the back.
Not in the corner.
Just somewhere they could see the sky.
The first week passed in fragments.
Pencil shavings. Group assignments. New names called in roll. A teacher who liked metaphors too much. Another who hated phones.
Oriana found herself sketching again—little things in the margins of her notebook. A moth. A hand holding a branch. The outline of Anya's profile, barely visible in the corner of the page.
And Anya—she had started writing again. Nothing finished, nothing for class. Just lines on paper during lunch breaks. Words she didn't read out loud, but that left her eyes warmer when she returned to them.
They didn't spend every moment together.
Sometimes Anya would eat with classmates while Oriana stayed behind to finish a drawing. Sometimes Oriana walked home alone because Anya had a literature club meeting. But there was never distance. Only rhythm. Like breathing in and out.
Until Thursday.
That was when the teacher assigned partners for the semester's main project—a presentation on memory and identity in literature.
And Anya was paired with someone else.
A boy named Thun.
Oriana watched as Anya glanced back at her—just briefly. A silent flicker of apology.
And Oriana smiled, nodding once.
But later that day, she sat alone at the edge of the courtyard, her sketchbook open, her pencil not moving.
She wasn't angry.
Just… displaced.
Anya found her a little later.
"Hey," she said, dropping beside her. "I would've switched if I could."
"I know," Oriana said. "You don't have to."
Anya looked at her carefully. "But you're sad."
"No. Not sad." Oriana closed the sketchbook. "Just... adjusting."
"To what?"
"To the world not stopping just because I'm okay now."
Anya exhaled. "It's okay to miss me even when I'm only a few desks away."
Oriana looked down at her hands. "I miss the silence between us. Even when we're apart, I want to keep that space. That… softness."
Anya leaned against her. "Then let's promise something."
"What?"
"That even when we're busy—even when things pull at us—we come back. To this."
Oriana turned her head. "What's 'this'?"
Anya reached out and touched Oriana's cheek gently. "Whatever we are when we don't have to try."
And Oriana closed her eyes and leaned into the touch.
As the days passed, they both moved through school with grace and effort.
Anya met with Thun three times a week, their project slowly taking shape—discussions about memory as resistance, personal history as authorship. And Oriana watched, listened, never interfering. She trusted her.
And that trust gave her wings.
Oriana found herself walking new paths. Sketching strangers in the library. Sitting with a girl from her math class who cried once between lessons and later brought Oriana a dried flower with no explanation.
They were becoming something larger.
Not apart.
But beyond.
One evening, as they sat side by side at the park near school, Oriana spoke first.
"Do you think we'll always be this?"
Anya tilted her head. "What's 'this' now?"
"Not just close. But tethered. Like two threads woven through different fabrics, but always pulling toward each other."
Anya thought for a moment. Then she reached down and picked up a fallen leaf, brittle and orange.
"I think," she said, "that we'll change. Maybe slowly. Maybe not always together. But I think you're a part of me that doesn't disappear, no matter how far I walk."
Oriana took the leaf and tucked it into her journal. "That's enough for me."
On the last day of the month, Oriana received a message from her father.
Just one line.
Thank you for letting me be human in front of you. I will not forget it.
She didn't reply.
She didn't need to.
Instead, she closed the message, opened her sketchbook, and drew a window with no glass.
A space for wind. For light. For growth.
And then she walked to meet Anya.
They were going to the bookstore.
Anya wanted to find a book about constellations, and Oriana said she didn't need one—because Anya already mapped stars every time she smiled.
Anya had rolled her eyes and kissed her shoulder.
And now they were walking down the sidewalk together, arms brushing, the future not something far away, but something here.
In the warmth of each other's steps.
In the bravery of showing up.
In the quiet courage it took to keep loving—not despite the world, but within it.