“Dude, you keep on sighing.” Nora sighs again, looking away from her computer screen and faces her classmate. “Like, we barely scratched the surface of the topic yet and you look like you’re ready to ditch school.”

Harold was his name. A dude that strongly smells like deodorant and cologne. His hair was pushed to the back, greatly contained by the amount of hair gel that made it shiny. He was cool, despite the overuse of hygiene products and his abundance of mint paper.

Nora reclines on the backseat of her office chair, her legs spread apart. Despite the concentration she had enforced herself with, Lily’s word lingers in her head. It echoes, bouncing on the corners of her mind until Nora ultimately decided to ditch work to do something.

Which was, yeah, sighing.

“Nah, it’s not about school – just life, that’s all,” she admits and puts her computer on sleep mode. Her work won’t be solved even by staring so she’d rather looked at her own reflection, which was greatly emphasized by the dark bags under her eyes.

“Oh, love life then?” Nora didn’t confirm nor deny. “Nothing new, lots of our classmates are trying to get a partner. Maybe friends with benefits. Just to get out of the basement dwelling stereotype.”

“Is it really that bad?” Harold shrugs.

“Depends if you look the part but, other than that, people just want to go to plow town. Problem is if there are any people who are willing to plow them down.” Nora groans. Her dilemma clearly summarized through a corny rhyme and, honestly, it sounds good.

She gave Harold a high-five and her classmate reciprocate enthusiastically.

The bell rings and the two clean up their work in the computer room. She carries her laptop case, tightening her grip around the handle as she slings her bag on her shoulders. They exit the room, complaining yet again of the fluorescent lights flickering and the ramp narrowed by the cardboard boxes stacked on it. Harold even counts the cobwebs he sees in the ceiling.

Yeah, they were literally basement dwellers.

As they reached the ground floor. Nora sees her; waving.

“Nora!” Lily calls out to her with a smile. She was in the lounge area near the array of printers stationed against the wall. The ladies handling the machines were sitting next to it, displaying their candies and snacks for anyone to buy.

“She’s your girlfriend?” Nora almost chokes on the question.

“Um, no?” Even then her answer ends up dubious.

“She looks at you like you’re hers though.”

“She’s my best friends so she’s probably happy to see me,” Nora explains and that was the truth. Lily always has a smile on her face, whether it’d be a wide grin or a soft and small one. Her best friend can’t seem to stop smiling.

Nora thinks Lily’s cute.

“Hm, sure, Harold replies, sounding unconvinced by her words. “Welp, I have to leave now. I got another class to attend and the professor’s is strict with attendance.” He leaves afterward, only replying back with a wave as Nora shouts her goodbye to her classmate.

Lily approaches her, sipping her millk tea with a straw. Even with something in her mouth, Lily presents a smile on her face. The soft kind, Nora observes, and shrugs off the assumptions from Harold. They were friends, nothing more nor less. Besides, it’s not like she is Lily’s type.

Somehow, the idea hurts. Either her ego gets easily wounded these days or something else, who knows.

“He’s really tall,” Lily says.

“He said his mom makes him take Cherriferm until he was eighteen,” Nora explains, “said it’d be twenty-one if it wasn’t his dad intervening the situation.”

“Oh, that’s rough.” Nora chuckles, noting the sympathy on Lily’s face.

Nora wraps an around her best friend’s shoulders. She observes the compliancy Lily has on the action, even leaning further to touch their cheeks together. Lily smiles from the moment, accompanied by a sigh that resigns her emotions concerning Harold seconds ago.

It’s weird, Nora thinks, her nonchalance withdrawn to welcome a complicated thought in her head. All the while sniffing the perfume Lily always wears and wonders if it had always smelled divine.