Sweet Romance11 min read
Late New Year, New Seats
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I woke to the sun warming my face, soft and wrong. I should have been in a hospital, or under gray clouds, remembering the last bright, loud crash. Instead I was on my old bed, my stuffed bear—torn years ago—still at my pillow. My mouth tasted like sleep, not antiseptic. I hugged the bear like a proof.
"Get up, Ami, you're going to be late," my mother called from the kitchen. The voice floated in like an ordinary day.
I sat up so fast my head hit the headboard. "What—? I'm—" My brain tried to tie time to place. "I graduated. I was—"
"You were?" Mom's voice came nearer. "Don't dilly-dally."
I pressed my palms to my eyes and remembered, in a quick flash, that impossible crash, the pain, the rain, the last thought of a van and somebody's headlights. The memory and the kitchen voice tangled. I realized, with a strange hollow laugh, I had come back. I had been given one more year of high school. I had a second chance and a headache.
I dressed in the old uniform like someone slipping into a costume that fit me oddly small. I was twenty-four inside, but the mirror showed a different body: round face, soft cheeks, a teenager's shape. My therapist had told me to face the things that hurt me. "Face what makes you small," she'd said. I thought then—and still think—no. No thanks.
I had other plans. I had failed at science before. I had lost years because I picked the wrong class to stay comfortable. This time I would fix that. I would switch to humanities. I would learn the things I loved. I would not bleed years away.
On the college courtyard flowerbed where I sat for a long time, thinking of a hundred ways to avoid pain, a sudden clumsy leap ended with me kneeling in front of a boy.
He stood with his hands in his pockets and an amused half-smile. I recognized him from two days ago. He had the sort of quiet that could be loud—sharp features, a stillness that people leaned into like a telling silence.
"Is this a proposal or a scam?" he asked, the corner of his mouth twitching.
"Uh…" I flushed red hot. I had meant something like 'late New Year,' a stupid charm. What came out was, "I wanted to—um—give you a late New Year bow."
He looked at me for two seconds, then laughed a soft, bright laugh. "Late New Year, got it. Well, goodbye."
I stood, heart banging like I had run a mile, and fled like a ridiculous cartoon. Later, away from the window and the boys, I felt the heat on my ears cool into anger at fate. Thank you, fate. Really.
The next day at class I met him again. He was my new deskmate. He dropped his books in a precise stack and pointed to the empty table.
"I was here first," he said as if the words were an intriguing fact rather than a claim.
"But the teacher said it's empty." I said.
He arched an eyebrow. "I usually keep my books on that spot. Move yours."
I felt both brave and ridiculous. "I will move them, then. Thanks."
He shrugged and walked away. Later that day he waved his hand and let me sit. He had that small kindness that made me want to hide and then be unreasonably grateful.
"What's your name?" I heard someone ask.
"I am Ami Erickson," I said before panic stole my voice. I expected nothing and got a friendly, "Hi, Ami. I'm Cael Barry," from the boy behind me, a loud, laughing presence. Another voice said, "He’s Roman Curry." That second voice was low and steady.
Roman Curry. My heart did weird things when I heard it. Not because a boy said his name, just because names are stories.
Roman wasn't loud. He wasn't cruel. He was quiet like a room with the lights dimmed: you notice him more because the world around him is bright and chattery. He sat with his head lowered and his notebook tidy. He did not call attention to himself but the teachers did. The teachers watched him like they watched the weather on a dark day—careful and constant.
A week later, my first-time bravery showed its teeth. I went to ask the year deputy about transferring. The physics teacher from my old class, who in my old life had the coldest stare, was there. I almost ran, but then I heard the voice that could be patient.
"Come to my office," he said after listening. "Why? Because you asked. But only once. If you think you'll switch back and forth, we can't keep changing seats forever."
"Yes, please," I said, like a child trading in a toy.
The deputy signed me to Roman’s class. I breathed. In my other life, I had wasted three years in the wrong lane. Now I could steer myself into something I'd wanted.
On the bus back, I realized something odd: Roman lived in my building. We rode the same elevator. I had never stood in an elevator that felt like a place of possibilities—then he smiled a small, reserved smile I couldn't parse.
"Do you always live here?" I asked.
"I lived at the dorm last year," Roman said. "Now I'm here. On the same floor. The sunny side, opposite corner."
"You're my downstairs neighbor," I said.
"Apparently."
He carried himself like someone who had decided to be exactly as he needed to be. He kept his privacy. Yet one morning he wasn't in class; I found him sitting by the building's entrance looking pale and small.
"Are you okay?" I asked, shamefaced because the question felt invasive.
"Low blood sugar," he said. "Thanks for the soy milk."
"You should eat properly. You should sleep," I said like I had tips. I didn't want to let him get badly sick. He accepted my offered food without a fuss and later sent a small "Thanks" with an emoji. For the first time in a long time, someone had accepted my nonsense and answered kindly.
He was good at math. He was quiet in a way that did not mean empty. He had this habit: he would solve a problem with a few, almost lazy strokes and then put his pen down. I wrote like a worker bee. He wrote like a sculptor. Once he explained a tricky question to me in a low voice, close enough that my cheeks warmed.
"You're supposed to look at the trap in the later condition," he said, tapping a line. "They hide steps there."
"Thank you," I whispered.
"You're welcome," he said—and then, later, "Don't think your errors are all of you."
What did he even mean? I thought of my therapist, who told me to face the things that made me smaller. Roman said to stop being defined by a number on a paper.
The school had its hierarchy. Roman was the quiet center. People clustered around him not because he sought them, but because the school needed its own axis. That made some people annoyed, and a boy named Roberto Watson used that annoyance like a hammer. Roberto was loud and bitter. He threw mean words around like punches—cheap and ugly. He picked on people, and the worst part: sometimes others laughed.
One afternoon, in a narrow street off campus where we sometimes ate when we "escaped," Roberto sneered at Roman and his friends. The air hardened.
"You think you're so special, Roman," Roberto spat. "Always the teacher's pet, the cookie, the little prince. Bet you still can't fight."
Roman's face was a flat surface and then, in the middle of the flatness, a small motion. He stood. He did not shout. That made Roberto move faster.
"I don't want trouble," Roman said.
"I like trouble," Roberto said. He pushed Roman. Two of his bigger friends joined in, and the laughter swelled. Roman's friends—Cael Barry and Gage Kennedy—took a step forward. A scuffle began.
I remember the sound in the room changing, the way a radio gets tuned. The old rules slipped. Roman moved like a boxer who had learned the cadence of danger: one clean blow, a pivot, a hand catching an elbow. It wasn't vicious. It was precise. They shoved him first; he eased them into arrogance and then undid them with skill. One of them tripped and hit the pavement. The little restaurant grew still.
"Who messes with my friend?" Cael shouted, and Roberto lunged at him. For a moment I feared blood, but the crowd of students split and screamed; some filmed with their phones.
The real turn came when an older man in a black jacket—Omar Dean, a known local—saw the boys and decided to make it worse. "Hey! You fight like children. This town's lost its spine," he said, and stepped in with bigger hands and a meaner mouth. He was the one who used fear as a tool.
Roman looked at Omar as if evaluating weather. Calmly, he said, "Leave them alone."
Omar smiled like a cockroach. "You think you can tell me what to do?" He reached out and shoved Roman hard. The shove was public.
I remember the exact smell then—stale oil and frying garlic from the kitchen, and the metallic tang that came with adrenaline. People around us murmured. A woman at a table moved her chair back until it scraped. Someone's phone clicked on.
"Stop," I said, small and useless.
Roberto tried to laugh and then tripped over the truth: he had pushed someone who had friends ready to stand. Cael and Gage surged, and Omar tried to slam a fist, but Roman, with something slow and terrible, stepped in and moved like someone with a deep, private training.
It ended quickly. Omar was down, dust and shame on his jacket, his eyes wild and human for a moment. Roberto's friends fled. A few students clapped nervously. A quiet spread. The owner took the damaged table away.
I thought the story was over.
Then Omar came back with four more men—bigger, meaner, and more public.
They took over the small restaurant entrance and tried to make the day darker. They wanted a spectacle. They wanted Roman to feel small in front of everyone. They wanted to make the quiet boy bow.
People took phones out. Some filmed. The bright city light turned sharp. I stood behind Roman, my hands clenched.
Omar snarled. "You're nothing."
Roman looked up, very slow. For the first time I saw his face open like a book I could read. He stepped forward and spoke into a space that suddenly felt like an open field.
"Look around," he said softly. "These are kids from our school. Many of them you probably teach. You want us to be invisible? You want to make people afraid? Do you think that gives you power?"
Omar laughed and spat on the sidewalk. "We'll see about power."
Then the crowd did something I did not expect—teachers came. Mr. Arturo Nielsen—our literature teacher, who taught with a voice like warm milk—and Mr. Oliver Kaiser—our year deputy—walking in from the street like people called by the bell of wrong. They had seen the commotion and came. Their voice cut through the noise.
"Enough," Mr. Nielsen said. He was not shouting; he simply closed his hand and put it on his chest, the same movement he used when reading aloud. "This is a school, not a prize fight. You will not intimidate our students."
Omar's crew started to laugh at the teachers. "Or what?" one of them taunted. "You'll call the cops? They'll laugh, too."
Another teacher, Dean Conway, stepped in with a firm voice. "We will call the police if you do not leave now. You're scaring our students and causing a public disturbance."
For a moment, the men held their ground. Then Mr. Roman—suddenly the center of a storm—pointed not at Omar but at the CCTV cameras that watched the street. The owner of the shop had, in his panic, switched the camera angle to face the street.
"Everybody's watching," Roman said, calm and plain. "You can try to silence us, but your faces are public now. The students here will speak to the authorities, and the recordings will be clear."
Omar laughed and tried to make a last joke, but a group of the fathers of several students had gathered at the edge—men who knew the law and knew embarrassment. They walked to the front and, without violence, surrounded Omar's crew. Their presence alone looked like a court. The older men in suits began to demand identification and to make a small crowd show the shoes of the men at fault.
You could watch the inches slip. Omar's face registered a real change: the little grin faded into disbelief, a look of "this isn't going how I expected." His eyes moved—fast, small panic bubbles rising. He tried denial. "We didn't—"
"We saw you shove my son," an older man said plainly. "And young men of this neighborhood don't get to make our kids afraid."
Omar's crew, now reduced to self-defensive mutters, tried to bargain. "We can talk it out." Their voices went thinner.
Roman didn't shout. He breathed and then pointed to Roberto. "And him." Roberto, who had started the trouble, now saw all the faces that had watched him be a bully. The teachers read faces: some turned their backs; a few filmed for evidence.
What happened next was a slow public correction. Roberto tried to stance up proud, but the owner of the shop—who had followed the moral arc of a village—came forward, grabbed Roberto's collar, and said, "You don't come here and frighten my customers." Then, in a larger voice that got everyone to look, he called the names of the men with him. "Enough," he said. "We don't allow that here."
Roberto blinked. He had been bold behind a pack, but now he was alone in the light. He tried anger, denial, tears, shame—each one other than victory. The crowd recorded everything. People in the street pointed and whispered. A woman clicked her tongue, and someone took a long photo. The few older men in the crew who had a sense of survival slunk away. Omar was left fumbling for words, then for excuses. He called out to people to remember him as a man who had once been powerful. No one listened.
The punishment wasn't a show of physical humiliation. It was something worse for these men: it was being seen for what they were and having every neighbor already decide not to take the side of intimidation. In front of the whole block, the men who liked to use fear began to shrink. Parents recorded and posted the videos. Teachers told the students to keep the footage. Someone posted it to the local group, and it spread two blocks in an hour. By evening, simply walking home became a problem for Omar; people looked at him like a story they had read and did not believe.
Roberto felt it hardest. The kid who hurled mean words had his face flipped into a portrait of tastelessness—on camera, in stories, in the long gossip circle. Men who had admired his bravado now looked at him with thin, sudden pity. He tried to reconcile with students but found their faces blank. He tried to go to school the next day and found out many people had already blocked him on social media and told the administrators they were tired of his games. He tried to explain to a group of students in the courtyard and saw their faces twist with disgust. He even went to apologize to Roman, hands open like a dog asking forgiveness. Roman listened, then said, "You hurt people for power. We won't let that be okay."
Roberto's failure was slow and textbook: the people he could harm withdrew. His allies stopped returning texts. His parents looked at him differently. The older men he leaned on now said he had acted foolishly. Pride burned and then turned to loneliness.
I watched it all and felt a strange warmth. Watching a bully get taken down was not an act of revenge; it was the small justice of a community that refused to let fear rule. Teachers set a boundary. Neighbors enforced common decency. Roman stood calm in the center, which made me feel braver than I thought possible.
After that day things changed. Class felt different. Roman and I sat in a slow orbit. He explained math quietly. He asked me once—very casually—if I liked certain authors. I said yes, and he suggested a book. He laughed at my nickname and confessed that he had a cat named Warm. I told him that name made sense.
Sometimes he would let a smile slip—the small, private smile he had on the first day—and I would think, with a tiny rush, that this second life had been worth whatever it took to come back.
We learned together slow steps. I asked more questions, his patience steady. I asked him once why he pushed back against the men.
"Because someone had to," he said. "And because our silence felt like consent."
"Did you ever want to be loud?" I asked.
"Not loud," he said, considering. "Just clear."
When finals came, I didn't get the perfect grades. I wasn't that person. But I found something else: a small net of people who paid attention, teachers who recognized effort, and a boy who helped me stop thinking of my errors as the entire story of me. I learned you could study a subject and also study yourself. The therapists' advice about facing your fear began to feel less like a punishment and more like steps at the edge of a pool—hard at first, then wakable.
One afternoon, months from the first stumble, I stood at the flowerbed again by the tech building. Roman was next to me, hands in his pockets, looking younger than his age and older at the same time.
"You remember the first day?" I asked.
"You fell and introduced me to the concept of a late New Year." He smiled.
"I was so mortified."
"You were brave," he replied.
I blinked as if the word was a small coin. "Brave?"
"Yes. It took courage to fall and stay up."
I laughed, because it was true. I had always been afraid of looking foolish. Yet here we were—both of us, slightly better, slightly taller than before.
When we walked away from the school gate, cameras and gossip and mean words still existed, but they were smaller. People who would have never noticed me once knew my name and, sometimes, said "hi." I felt a happiness that was soft, not the loud shout of triumph, but the quiet contentment of a person who had learned to take the next step.
One tiny thing I kept and told myself: my phone nickname, "trying on summer dresses," which I had made as a joke to myself, remained silly and private. Roman texted a single cat emoji and then the word "Warm" which reminded me that small comforts can be steady.
We both kept learning. I kept going to therapy, not out of shame, but because I had new reasons to be brave. He kept studying because someone had told his story's last line. We walked together sometimes when our schedules allowed. The sunlight on the courtyard felt kinder now.
And whenever a boy with furious friends tried to make himself bigger, someone somewhere remembered the shop, the teachers, and the neighbors who would not let fear win. Justice did not always look violent. Sometimes it just looked like people seeing clearly and refusing to let the mean rules hold.
The End
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