Sweet Romance12 min read
Pear Blossoms, Forum Fire, and the Boy Who Came Back
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"I landed at Kawasaki University today. The gate was so grand that for a second I thought I had walked into someone else's dream."
"I told you, Lea, don't stare like that," Kiley said as she skipped down from a low, elegant car, curls bouncing. "This place is ours now."
"I know," I answered, because the truth was I had barely slept last night thinking of this morning, of classes, of the pear trees behind the track, and of the small, stubborn promise my father had made about me becoming a reporter. I folded my fingers into mine and slid my backpack strap higher.
"Lea," Kiley called, pressing a light, noisy kiss against my cheek. "Come on, new student of journalism, lead the lost."
"I don't know the map," I said.
"Then follow the pretty stalker in the white dress," a soft voice said.
I turned. A tall, angular-faced boy handed me a folded script as if it were a business card. He had the kind of face that looked like it had been carved from stone and then set beneath a calm sky. A second boy — gentler, rounder, with a child's face — stood beside him.
"I didn't mean to interrupt," I said, cheeks going warm. "I—we're trying to find the registration office."
"You're in luck," the stone-faced one said. "You came this way. I can show you."
"Thank you," I said before I even knew why I trusted him. He smiled the smallest smile and said, "I'm Nicolas," and then added, "I'm in screenwriting."
"Lea Fisher," I answered, and the word left my mouth quicker than it had any right to. "Journalism."
"Journalism," he repeated, and there was something in the way he said it that made the word sit perfectly between us, like a tiny, private secret.
Kiley, breathless, tugged my sleeve. "Go, I'll catch up," she wheezed. "Find the station and call me."
"Alright," I promised, though the campus map in my head dissolved into a ribbon of pear-scented air and a memory of his eyes.
When Nicolas walked me to the registration building, he pointed like a guide and then simply said, "You're welcome," and walked off. I felt the world tilt. I kept the tilt until Kiley returned, where we went to the student dining hall and to the class board, where the universe dealt me news: Journalism One. Kiley flashed her too-happy grin. "Performance Two," she announced. "We can gossip corridor-to-corridor."
"I'll be next door," I said. "That helps."
"Of course it helps." She pushed me toward the food with affection. "Eating helps everything."
We ate beneath the weak spring sun while pear scent threaded the cafeteria. Kiley ate as if she had been starving for a week; I ate slow, comfortable, and watched students watching us. Someone took a picture. Someone else whispered, and the whisper became a public sound that traveled.
"You're pretty," a girl named Anna said when she reached out to take my hand later in class. "I'm Anna Conti. It's so nice to meet you."
"Hi, Anna." I smiled, because smiling was what you were supposed to do when everyone else smiled, and the classroom gave space to new faces and new rumors.
Not everyone smiled. Outside the performance building, a group gathered around a tall girl with waves of gold hair named Bianca Lucas. She was the kind of beautiful that had been polished by compliments—calm, perfect, practiced. The words dropped from some girls like tiny knives.
"She looks like she just got off a truck," one said, low enough to sting.
"Don't be mean," another tried. "Maybe she's new. Not everything has to be sharp."
Kiley bristled first. "Who are you calling a truck?!" she snapped. "Be mean to me, not my friend."
"You're loud," Bianca said, the smile like glass. "Attention suits you."
Kiley shot back a caustic line and the room hummed. I moved between the two, because that was the only thing that felt possible then — to be the bridge, a holder for other people's heat.
When Nicolas arrived, the tension shifted. He looked at us all like he had looked at me that first time — blank and slightly amused. "Do you need directions?" he asked Bianca, like we were a map and not a moment.
"You know her?" Bianca asked him, eyes picking at him as if he were a choice between fine china and glass.
"No," Nicolas said. "I don't think so."
Bianca's face fell. You could see the private calculation unravel. She had expected him to be her admirer, and instead the story bent toward me. Someone started a whispering campaign. A campus forum bloomed a post with my picture: #JournalismNewbie Lea Fisher#. Another one: #NicolasAndLea look good together#. The forum made everything louder, and rumors settled like dust.
"Ignore them," Nicolas told me when he and Franz — the gentler boy — walked us back through the oval of trees. He had always been quieter than his eyes promised. "It'll blow over."
"It won't," Franz said, sounding amused. "People love a story, and they're bored."
"So am I," I said softly, and Nicolas looked at me. I wished then that I had the cleverness to say something better than that.
Day by day, the campus turned into an arena. Photos floated online, words spread. Someone on the forum dug up rumors—petty lies that tried to stitch a life around me. It hurt, but there were other things that hurt more: the ache left by my father's absence. Ernest Rasmussen, Dad, had gone to report on an earthquake long ago and never returned. He had told me once, "Make people know the truth. Make them listen." I carried his voice like a small flag.
"Your mother is Arabella Sasaki?" someone asked once, when my name was everywhere.
"Yes," I admitted, as if that were anything to hide. My mother, Arabella, had been a famous designer who had stepped back from the world. She stood behind me in the principal's office like a force-field.
"What does this mean?" the principal asked when Arabella, Kiley's father Gavin Carson, and Audrey Gomez — a glossy, sharp founder of a company — filled the office like three storms.
"It means you will find who did this," Arabella said. "You will make them answer."
"Expel anyone who slanders a student," Gavin said, voice like a gavel, and the principal, small in front of the reputations in the room, stood and promised, "We will investigate."
The forum continued, and one cruel thread tried to carve a background of shame where none existed. Someone claimed my family had rural roots; someone else accused Kiley and me of using Nicolas for clout. Kiley's cheeks went a light sad. I swallowed. I told myself we were stronger than gossip.
Then the school found the account. The principal called a meeting. Students and parents crowded into the auditorium because the rumor had become a show, and for a miserable hour the school allowed it to be so.
"Who made these posts?" asked the principal into the hush. "Who thought it would be okay to fabricate someone's life?"
Ethel Keller stood up with a paper-thin smile. The auditorium watched as she shuffled forward. She had been seen in a few threads of cruelty, her fingers quick on the keyboard. She was a girl who had been tempted by rewards—money for a seemingly harmless post, a whisper that fame could be bought.
"Was this you, Ethel?" Arabella said quietly, and the room leaned in.
"It wasn't me," Ethel said at first. Her voice was small, then defensive. "I—I didn't post those. I only shared—"
"Why did your phone show activity at the forum at that time?" the principal asked, and the principal's voice was sharp, but I noticed his hands were shaking. He had not expected the firestorm to be this hot.
Ethel tried to backtrack. "Someone else—someone told me to—"
"Who told you?" Kiley demanded from the front row. "Tell us the truth."
"I—I don't remember," Ethel croaked, clutching the podium like it would give her a spine. A girl behind Ethel murmured and held up her own phone showing messages: a crude offer, a name. The auditorium was alive with murmurs. Someone began to record with their phone.
"Stop!" Arabella's voice was steel. "If you did this for money, then you will be judged in public for what you did. If you are covering up for someone, then you will take the blame."
The story broke. It isn't that Ethel was the mastermind; she was the misguided pawn. She had taken money and followed instructions. When the microphones were held to her face she crumpled like tissue.
It was the longest punishment I had ever watched. The dean called it "a necessary disciplinary hearing," but the auditorium had become a court. Parents leaned forward. Students recorded. Ethel's mask of composure fell in three acts.
"First, denial," a teacher said later. "Then confusion. Then the fall."
"She—" Ethel started again, voice shaking. "I didn't mean to hurt her. It was just—"
"Who did you accept money from?" Arabella asked. "Name it."
Ethel's eyes darted like a bird. "Bianca—" she whispered at last. "Bianca told me. She said it would be small, and that it would make her look better, and that she'd... she'd help."
The name landed on the auditorium like a stone. Bianca's face did not change at first, but then the cold smile cracked. She stood. "I did not," she said, voice brittle. "I would never—"
"You're saying you didn't," Gavin said, eyes like knives. "You manipulated a fellow student and paid her to slander another. Do you know what that is, Bianca? Do you understand how poisonous that is?"
"It wasn't me!" Bianca cried, the exact same pattern, but more practiced. "I didn't post anything."
Someone in the back stood and uploaded a screenshot: a thread of messages between Bianca and Ethel from the week before — here's the money transfer, here's the instruction, here's the push. The auditorium hissed. Phones lit up, fingers typed. The footage was already being sent to the school page.
Then the worst part for the guilty unfolded.
"Bring the girl forward who posted," Arabella demanded.
Ethel stood on weak knees and walked to the stage. She was pale, lips trembling, hands clamped to her bag strap until the knuckles whitened. The principal read the school's code aloud, and with each sentence Ethel's shaking grew worse.
"You violated campus policy. You slandered a fellow student. You accepted money to hurt another. You will be expelled," the principal said. The formal words turned into a physical thing. The room felt colder. A thousand eyes pressed down like a tide.
"Please," Ethel begged at first. "I didn't know—I didn't know what would happen. I was stupid—"
"Stupid isn't a defense," someone said. "You watched someone get hurt and you helped."
Phones focused; people recorded. The auditorium transformed into a stage set for humiliation because humans are grotesquely eager to watch the maker of a problem be made small. Ethel's lips trembled. She dropped to her knees when the principal announced the punishment, and for a moment everyone in the room felt a real, human agony.
"Ethel Keller—" the principal said, and the name echoed. "You are expelled, effective immediately. You are banned from campus events. We will cooperate with any legal inquiries. There will be no reinstatement."
She began to crawl toward the exit like someone dragging a life behind her. A cluster of students murmured "shame," and a few children clapped, which sounded more like they were applauding the verdict than salvation. Someone shouted, "Say you're sorry!" and Ethel looked up with a face hollowed by fear and shame.
"Please!" she cried. "I'll do anything! Please don't send me away. Please—" She reached out, hands shaking, like a child begging for a lost toy.
"No," Arabella said, voice flat. "People who hurt others for gain have to feel the consequences. Maybe then they'll learn."
Ethel sobbed. Her posture shifted: at first a haughty girl, then denial, then bargaining, then collapse. "Please—" she repeated. "I didn't think—please—"
A mother in the crowd wept. A father scowled. Someone filmed, another uploaded. The hall filled with the low sound of recorded lament and indignation. Ethel's pleading faltered into silence, and when she left the auditorium she did not go cleanly. The campus forum filled with videos; comments streamed like rain. Some people cheered. Most, including those who had loved to push and splinter, watched in the stunned quiet that follows a rupture.
When it was finally over, the principal announced a final statement: "We do not condone slander. We will protect our students."
Later, when the cameras left and the journalists gathered, Arabella took me aside and said, "Truth has a weight. Keep it with you, Lea. Do not let lies make you smaller."
"Will she be okay?" I asked.
Arabella looked away. "Maybe. She will have to live with what she did."
Public punishment is ugly and absolute and not perfect justice, but that day it will be remembered that slander has a consequence. Ethel's fall was more than a personal collapse; it was a public lesson. The posts that called us names disappeared when the perpetrators were found. For a while the forum calmed. But being freed from rumor does not erase the memory of being watched.
After that, my life on campus turned into a different kind of attention. People who had been small in spirit became larger and kinder. I made a decision then: I'd be a reporter for those who needed someone to say their name right.
My mother returned to work. "Ocean Heart" — the necklace she designed — appeared in a video that night. "For my daughter," she said on camera. "Because the world sometimes forgets that people are human."
"Who are you?" a stranger asked when they saw me later, and I said, "Lea." They smiled, and that was a relief.
"I see things," Nicolas once told me as we walked beneath the pear trees. "Not always the things you expect. Sometimes I see a rumor folded into someone else's laugh."
He left for overseas study months later to learn film. He said he would return. Before he did, he pressed a small gift into my palm under the pear tree — a bracelet with a tiny pear blossom.
"Wait for me," he said, and I heard it as both demand and promise.
"Okay," I said. "I will."
While he was away, the campus kept moving. I sang at the school's celebration, wearing a dress Nicolas had arranged for me to wear. Franz filmed me. Kiley cheered until her voice broke. People chanted my name from the seats, and the video went up where he could see it. I did not know him yet in a way that made me brave, but I sang with all my gravity.
When new students came — Greyson Watkins among them — pictures pinned us together and stirred jealousy. But I tried to keep my life ordinary: work, practice, manuscripts, the small rituals that made me steady. I learned to write pieces that mattered. I grew careless with sleep and careful with truth.
A year later, Nicolas returned. He stepped through my door like a person who had traveled a long distance and found the map he wanted. He came back soft and rough, like a film that had been developed. He said, "Lea," and I could hear the months in the shape of the name.
"You came back," I said.
He shrugged. "I had to see if you still fit the way I remember."
"You always had a home," I told him, and our laughter was a contract.
We lived together for a while, under the same roof of a small apartment between the studios and the company where I worked. "You can't bring everyone home," I scolded half-serious when he took off his jacket.
"Why not?" he asked. "You live here."
"Because there are rules." I was trying to be firmer than I felt.
"Name them," he said, like a dare.
"One: cook once a day. Two: no random guests in the bedroom. Three: no public displays that embarrass me."
"Two is impossible," he said, but his voice was smiling.
"Then don't hold me down without asking," I said, and his face went serious enough to make me laugh.
We fell into a rhythm of meals and script notes and small fights that ended in the kitchen. He would do the dishes, clumsy and proud; I would tell him off, and his eyes would say what his voice didn't. We used words like anchors. He called me "small pear," and I called him "Nico." He loved to quote lines from old films and then look at me as if waiting to see whether I still recognized the pattern.
One night, in a cramped studio apartment that smelled of lemon and old books, he turned to me and said, "Lea, I'm going to be honest. I don't want to go anywhere without you."
"Then don't," I said. It was not a bold speech; it was breath. His hands held mine, and I was surprised by the steadiness.
"I'll be around," he whispered. "I won't leave this time."
We worked. I went to the newsroom; he worked on a script called The God Who Loves. The city grew and grew around us, but the pear tree route remained mine, and sometimes he walked with me under it and we shared the silence like a commodity. People, online and off, made their guesses. We kept having to explain ourselves. But inside our small orbit, the world shrank to two people who quietly made each other brave.
When the chips fell — when Bianca's envy crested and when she tried to pull another trick — the school saw a repeat of what had happened before. Only this time, the net of evidence was sharper and the consequences even clearer. Students who once cheered for cruelty learned to be startled at what cruelty did to them.
The woman who took my name, who attacked me online, who used others' weakness like currency, received her public reckoning. I watched, and I felt terrible and right all at once. No one deserves a collapse, but no one deserves to make a habit of hurting others either.
"You did well," Arabella said to me once, after everything settled. "You kept the truth."
"I didn't know how," I said.
"You held it like a person," she said.
"Is that how I will be?" I asked.
"You already are," she replied.
Nicolas and I kept walking forward. "Wait for me," he'd promised before he left, but he never asked me to stand like a statue waiting for him. He came back when he finally had to — when work bent toward the home he wanted. He came back like wind to a tree, like a soft hand that makes the branches shiver and the pear blossoms fall.
"You belong to me now," he said once, and I felt the world tilt again — this time toward something that felt like a home.
"I belong to myself," I answered, and leaned into his chest.
"Then belong to me too," he said, and I did.
Even now, when the campus forum hums like a distant insect, when someone posts a cruel lie, when the world bristles, I go to the pear trees and pick the fallen petals.
"I'm here," I say to the air, to the memory of my father, to the small trunk that always remembers my weight.
Nicolas squeezes my hand. "I know," he answers.
When trouble comes, our choices are sharp. When the world is loud, we must say what is true. I will always hold words like they matter — because one light can be enough to stop a rumor from swallowing a life.
And if someone tries to hurt the ones I love, I will not be quiet. I will stand, I will speak, I will make the school auditorium watch. I will make the cameras point; I will make the truth look them in the eye.
"You are my anchor," Nicolas says sometimes, and I respond, "You are my story."
We step under the pear blooms and watch the petals fall, and for a long while, that is all we need.
The End
— Thank you for reading —