Nightlife has made the October Editor's Pick List!

I am so grateful for this opportunity, and look forward to sharing the story with more people.

Enjoy this chapter!

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tutorial class for Biophysics was a relief.

I was glad to have a familiar face around. Viv and I had been in a majority of the same courses over the last three years of college, but this semester our class streams were majorly out of sync. She had afternoons when I had mornings. Breaks when I had classes. Zigged when I zagged.

Quentin typed away on his laptop as I approached him quietly from behind. Coloured lines of code scrawled up a dark screen, and I watched with mild fascination. Earphones shoved in, Quentin's programming completely absorbed him.

I reached out and tapped him lightly on the shoulder. He gave a slight jolt, before removing one earphone and twisting to face me.

"Krista." He nodded calmly. "You're in this tutorial class?"

"No, I like to come to roast Grant," I quipped, sliding into the empty seat beside Quentin. "He's my arch-nemesis."

The tutor, Grant, was eighty years old and very polite. In his introduction, he said he wanted to teach until he dropped dead. Didn't look too far off, going by wrinklage. Quentin took one look at him and let out a breathy exhale, cocking an eyebrow at me.

"Funny."

"So, Quen— can I call you Quen?" Quentin nodded with a curious glint in his eye, so I continued, "What's the code for?"

"A programming project," he explained, hitting Control and then S on his keyboard. He shut the lid, facing his torso to me. "I'm an Engineering major. I want to go into software engineering."

"Why are you doing Biophysics then?"

Quentin rubbed the back of his neck and craned his head, the tendon there flexing slightly. My eyes darted quickly back to his face when he turned his gaze to me. "I am also a Physics major. If software doesn't pan out, I will go into academia. Double major."

"Yikes."

Academia sounded like the most crusty field to me. What was the point of theorising all day long? I wanted to get into my industry, be hands-on, make tangible differences.

"Fancy. Be sure to let me know when you receive the Nobel."

Grant finally managed to get the projector up and running, his summary slides of the lecture content hovering on the whiteboard. He started asking the class if anyone had questions about this week's content. Hands began to rise, but the queries were all about concepts that I solidly understood.

Quentin also seemed unconcerned, as he continued our conversation. "I am hardly that good. What are you studying?"

"I'm Pre-Med."

Quen's eyebrows raised.

"Now that's fancy." Then he amended, "Expensive, at least."

I shrugged and pulled open my laptop, ready to type down anything new or relevant the tutor said. Medicine was an ambitious career. It took a lot of planning, commitment, and resilience. The study would take a lot of brainpower, the tuition would take a lot of money, and at the end of the day there was still no guarantee it would go anywhere.

But I was already this deep into it. I had already sent out my primary applications. It was the pathway Mom and I had been walking since I was a teenager. I had to keep going.

Questions fielded, Grant wrote the first halves of a set of ion-transfer equations on the whiteboard.

He asked us to complete them. "After you're done with your attempts, swap answers among your tables and mark each other's work."

I finished ten seconds before Quentin. When we marked, we found that we had the same answers. I felt a tickle of pride at having kept pace with him, because he seemed very intelligent. Yes, the bookish sort that came with study and effort, but also the natural sort.

He had innate wit, keen perception, I could tell. There was a clever glint in his dark eyes whenever he looked at me.

"So, where are you from, Quen?" I asked quietly. Might as well occupy the time we had while the rest of the class finished their energy equations.

"Carsonville," he replied. "I've been flatting since freshman year."

Carsonville, Massachusetts was where Riley was from, half an hour's drive away. Many Carsonville High School graduates—along with students from other surrounding towns—came to Halston University. It was local, familiar and gave preference to them. Fair play. Sometimes Riley and I drove through there on the way to the beach, the shop fronts along its main road flying by.

"Oh, that's like half an hour away, right? I have a friend from there," I told Quentin. "I'm from NYC."

"That's cool. Why didn't you study in New York?"

New York was too fast. Everywhere I went in high school, I felt scrutinised. I was watching my weight for modelling jobs, and comparing my follower count to my online influencer friends, and people didn't bat an eyelash when I was at a party with a fake ID. I was the next nameless girl to squeeze into a size two, or I was the diversity hire for a marketing campaign, or I was that week's headline of a trashy tabloid magazine.

At Halston, I got to walk through life instead of sprinting. I gained weight, stopped dressing for aesthetic, and found friends who were good for my soul. Here, people knew me for me. Here, I was happy.

"I like Halston. It has a slower pace. I knew as soon as I visited for a tour, and I like to think I have great instincts," I told Quen proudly.

My instincts had never steered me wrong before. They had saved me from a lot of strife, and I was proud to say I'd never been badly bullied, rejected or heartbroken. I just knew when to shoot my shot or when to cut my losses. I knew which women had potential to be great friends and which men had potential to be great partners.

And speaking of the latter, Quen was arching an eyebrow at me in a wholly suggestive manner.

His voice was deep and warm when he asked, "Do you now?"

I beamed at him. "Yup. The very best."

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"You need to sleep more," Riley chastised me over the dinner table.

We had our trays of food in front of us, the commotion of the other students in our dorm thrumming around us. "God knows how you have dark eyes in the first week already. But you do."

"It's just Tuesday nights that are rough on me," I explained. "I can catch up during the weekend."

"Actually, there was a study that showed playing catch-up doesn't reverse the ill-effects of sleep deficiency," Vivian pointed out.

Ugh. I remembered the reading from last semester's Population Health paper. Apparently, surviving on little sleep during the week had detrimental health effects, even if people chased it with a sleep binge. Bad news for college students everywhere. I found it highly ironic that while Viv and I studied to preserve other people's health, we sacrificed our own. That was the universe being cruel.

I dropped my cutlery onto my dinner tray. My hands slid to my temples, pressing lightly against my headache. "It's such small dick energy that Pre-Med students pick up unhealthy habits while trying to make others healthy."

"The smallest," Vivian agreed, popping a cube of tofu into her mouth. "Smallest ever. Like a health transfer or something."

Riley didn't say anything. She just smiled at us with a calm, smug expression. Literature major. The Jays constantly roasted her unemployability, and she'd roast their, well, everything.

Though, considering it was only the second week of semester and I was already exhausted—hence Riley's concern for my sleep schedule—she probably was the smartest one out of all of us.

"Who was the guy you were talking to after Biophys today?" Vivian asked.

Because it was a core paper Viv was also taking Biophysics, but the timetabling gods must have smiled favourably on her. She was in the afternoon stream, which enabled her to sleep more than I could.

Lucky bitch.

"What guy?" I feigned ignorance. "When was this?"

"I was on my way to a class, and you guys were just coming out of the lecture room in Science 1." When my blank stare kept up, Viv sighed. "Asian? Tall? You guys were smiling at each other."

I let the practised confusion on my face melt into clarity. A useful skill I had picked up through being an influencer and promoter was the careful control of my facial expressions, my body language, my tone of voice.

Things as subtle as these, like a gentle breeze, often swayed people more effectively than brute force. One word with an ill-fitting connotation cou throw off an entire sentence. One stare in the wrong direction for the wrong duration could paint you as judgy, or in love.

"Oh, you mean Quentin?" I asked nonchalantly. "He's just someone I met in the lecture. He's from Carsonville, too, Riley."

Riley looked up from her plate, the thick frames of her glasses emphasising the way her eyes widened in curiosity. "Is this Quentin Cheng?"

"I don't know his last name."

"Six-foot but skinny, glasses, Chinese, looks like a nerd?" she rattled off a description. "I think he was studying Physics or something."

"Yes, that sounds like him."

"Oh, wow," Riley exclaimed. "We went to high school together. Never really talked to each other though. What a blast from the past."

Vivian leaned towards Riley, her chin propped on her elbows. Vivian hooked up with a new guy every week she went to town, swearing that college-aged boys weren't worth the effort of long-term relationships. Somehow, her stance on college-aged boys as boyfriend material for me was the complete opposite.

"The important question is, does he have potential?"

"I think that's for Kris to decide," Riley said, chuckling to herself as if she was privy to a private joke.

When all three of us had finished our meals and sorted our dishes at the washing station, we took the elevator up to the eighth floor. Even when the floor wasn't having a party, there was always some sort of activity in the common room. I felt sometimes like I should join in on the socialising and make the most of my last year.

But my deadlines and introversion always prevented me from doing so.

In the common room was Jake, Jamie and their cousin, Sophie.

Jake was scribbling notes down from the online lecture that was playing on his laptop screen. He was always playing catchup because he refused to go onto campus during the day. Jake's sleep schedule was a few hours away from being completely nocturnal.

Sometimes, whenever I came home from Topaz at five in the morning, Jake would often be up studying or eating. Dinner was almost always his first meal of the day. Part of that was his natural night owl tendencies, but another was the fact that his girlfriend Avalon studied in Germany. She was only ever awake when everyone in the States was dead asleep.

Jamie and Sophie were engaged in a video game, the twins' PlayStation console propped under the TV screen. Before Sophie had moved to Carsonville in her last year of high school, she, Jamie and Jake had lived in California. Because of her friendship with Riley and her familial link to the Jays, I'd met her a number of times over the last few years.

"Hi, guys," Sophie greeted us as we walked out of the elevator.

"Hey, Sophie," Viv and I greeted.

"Soph!" Riley left Viv and I to catch up with her high school friend. "How was your summer?"

Sophie smiled as Riley came to sit on the couch next to her. She gave a few masterful jerks of her console and swiftly killed Jamie's character. Jamie growled in frustration, demanding a rematch, but the two girls ignored him.

Riley awed, "Whoa, you've gotten so good at gaming."

"I'm not that good," I heard Sophie reply as I went to fill my drink bottle at the kitchenette faucet. "Jamie's just so bad he makes me look skilled in comparison—"

"Hey!" he protested.

"—with Luke and Drew gaming all day, every day, I got tired of being their punching bag. They also got tired of me being dead weight on whichever team I joined. So I had to upskill."

"That's so typical," Riley scoffed fondly. "How is Luke? I don't go home that often but I heard..."

My drink bottle was full, and I hefted it with me as I went to my room. The sounds of Jamie's resumed video game, Riley and Sophie's conversation and Viv's YouTube vlogs—which she listened to without earphones—faded to silence. I closed my bedroom door with a sigh.

Home, sweet home.

Sophie and the Jays were great. I loved hanging out with them, when I felt like hanging out. It's just that the mood struck me less and less as my degree approached its endpoint. I poured a small stream of water from my drink bottle onto Rudy, the cactus that sat on my desk.

I had a Histology lab report to write tonight, but before I dove into that, I pulled out my phone. Thanks to Riley mentioning Quen's full name at dinner, I could easily search social media. A quick Instagram perusal proved that he didn't have a profile, or at least not one based on his name. I searched Riley's follower list. Then Sophie's follower list.

Nothing.

Part of me was relieved that he didn't have an Instagram. Maybe he had no idea how famous I was. He had mentioned nothing about my platform. I liked it that way. He was relaxed and genuine around me, and I didn't want the way he thought of me to change. Finding out that I was famous made people wary, overly-friendly or uncomfortably invasive.

But he had a Facebook. His profile picture was two years old, depicting him smiling on the Great Wall of China. If the picture was that old, would he even be active on the account anymore? Would he think I was too eager? Would that turn him off? I could always make it seem like he had popped up in my suggested friends—that is, if he even used social media enough to see it in his notifications.

Either way, I sent him a request, squashing down the flutter in my stomach. There was no need to get so worked up. Quen was just a new friend.

Clearing my brain of all thoughts, I flipped my phone over on my desk and started my study music playlist of movie soundtracks.

Cell structures overtook my mind.