The dawn, made of golden rose, set ablaze that room which was once icy, pure dreamlike blue linen of a boy already lost within himself. The daybreak brought him back, finally awake; dreams upon dreams, perfidious, the various beams of light cracked and split apart into even more pieces. In that exact book, but the truth still had neither its day nor its turn.

  He walked around the room, marking and rearranging the order of his dream, picked up the complete uniform, uniform; his grandfather, upright, what was he doing laughing in that dream? He had always had a furrowed brow and a contained laugh when expressed. Coffee was the aroma igniting the house; it was almost ready.

  The stairs of shame lacerated the raw tenderness of Mihai; he laughed and sang, danced and took the hand of a beautiful stranger. But he never got over his wife. Nothing in that dream was credible; but the letter also hadn't been read, and his death was imagined. How could he continue asserting, reading him through the old lenses?

  Sorina Moldoveanu was the light of Mihai's life; not even in a dream could it be considered that he had gotten over her. But the ball, the exchange of steps, glances, confident laughter with the other woman—the allegations seemed real. Mihai coordinated that redemption with precision.

  Breakfast done, he launched himself towards the driver; another school day awaited him. His gaze, however, did not deceive; the tear split in half. Mihai ran through the hall, crossing people, stories, truths; yet, with the garden lurking by the porch, Sorina shone and called to him.

  She was untouchable, worse than glass or a muse from an admired painting, for she was no longer there, and Mihai cried; the flowers grew with the watering and completely surrounded him. Kael's group was without that ray of sunshine at the moment he found them. In mad and eloquent rudeness, they greeted him quickly and commented, chatted even faster.

  The austere foreigner, full of the cunning of silence, didn't need to accompany them anyway; he knew well what they nicknamed him, even though Kael still invited him and wanted Lucian's presence in places. However, it wouldn't be Miguel's good reputation that would raise the morale of others regarding the pedantic weirdo of the class.

  These were few days of many additional implicit observations; they were completely abrupt. He remembered well the good reciprocal farewell he had managed to achieve, so why did they suddenly change their behavior?

  The roots pulled him into the grave of his beloved—not yet a corpse, however, a complete vegetable in mourning. He hadn't coped well in recent years; his expression wavered at the slightest problem. His wife was dead. That curse of silence and seriousness plagued him day and night.

  If it was due to grief that he decided to depart, he didn't know, but that his dream was scrupulous regarding the theory; very much so, indeed it was. He was heading to the classroom when he came across Kael carrying too many papers, laughing too much, with too many people.

  Nevertheless, his gaze was as intuitive as his charm, for these were mutual, direct, eye for an eye, and a laugh accompanied by an expression full of something indiscernible. Miguel bid a brief farewell to the others and headed firmly towards Lucian, who trembled in full determination, without a trace of the slightest hesitation.

  "Good morning, Lucian," he greeted him briefly, handing over one of the papers. "This is your official class schedule. If you have any questions, ask me, but now, I have to deliver these others here," he added, waving them in the air, holding the set of papers firmly.

  "Good morning, Miguel," followed by an erratic sigh. Kael was moving away quickly, stopping people along the way and handing out the schedules. He hadn't heard his reciprocal greeting, for sure. If they were still friends, Kael was an idiot.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  If everyone around him criticized and observed him through modern and foreign lenses, and Kael didn't, something was wrong with him. Or he was condescending; that could be. Despite being genuine, his effort was continuous. He needed to cease these thoughts; class was about to start.

  His schedule, by Lucian's spontaneous will and coincidence, was full of moments when he would be with his guide. The MBD class was the same; as for the MEDs, for the most part, they were also on the same day of the week and time. Not all the same extracurricular tasks, but almost the same extracurricular tasks as Kael.

  Excluding some he couldn't do because they were outside of school, but the ones that were, they were together. The first classes passed quickly. Studying the language alone was difficult, and following the classes even more so, but he did his best. Not that he was alone in this process; although the teachers tried to include him at the beginning, at that moment it wasn't quite that anymore.

  Because of Miguel, there was no exclusion, but there was no inclusion either. The little he managed to answer made the class and their friends on the other side of the room think of him as pedantic, rude. There was no exception except for the one beside him. During the break, he couldn't stand the falseness of the behavior shaped by his presence in that group and left for a refuge. The library.

  He was trapped in fiction, stayed until the end of the break. According to his schedule, he only had one MED for that Monday, and it would be in the last period, from 2:50 PM to 3:50 PM. Since it was 12:40 PM, he had enough time to continue reading from where he left off. He wandered through the bookcases and their shelves with various sections in search of the book he had read that day—well, started.

  A short time later, amidst sneezes against the dust among the older books and ecstasy while savoring the espresso coffee offered by the dear coffee machine of an even dearer librarian; he found the book. Pride and Prejudice had its gifts well printed in its name, literally; gold details on the cover, reflecting the faint, warm light of that enormous room.

  Besides these details, he was full of pride and she of prejudice, even on a thin, quite redundant threshold, of her possible prejudice and his pride. He was extremely focused when the confession during the rain took shape and the time for the next MED resonated through the environment, full of footsteps and laughter in the corridors.

  He didn't know exactly where it was, but the sequences of letters and numbers on the doors helped enough; not needing to continue, a hand, with a texture now memorized, gently touched his shoulder, as if an angel fell from heaven to guide him or had even been sent for this purpose.

  "Hi, Lucian," followed briefly by a look in the subtext of something he had understood, "I'll take you to the classroom. We have this class together, right?"

  "How do you know?"

  "A little bird told me," amidst a wink and a fervently fast walk, they arrived at the room.

  The Literature Club was a spacious area, like a mini library. Not that it was small, but comparing it at that stage of the game with the library of that place would be like playing with colored pick-up sticks and knocking them all down.

  A teacher administered that club together with some high school seniors, strongly supported by the librarian—he needed to find out her name, out of respect. Lúcia was forming a circle with the people arriving and asking for their favorite books and literary genres that belonged to their respective hearts.

  The circle was brief, full of life; however, Kael was indecisive and assertive at the same time—not even this time could he put him in a box. He didn't choose just one book as a favorite, but opted to choose by genre and literary context. He was completely eloquent in that environment, mastering it as well as any other.

  At the end of the circle, Professor Lúcia went to the board to make some notes and announce a project. The Literature Fair. Miguel seemed in full happiness, contained—which wasn't his usual style—he already knew what the project was. A great collector of information.

  "Prof., Lucian is in my group," she hadn't said anything yet, but he had already presented his decision. Whoever wanted to be in Kael's group needed to be with Lucian too.

  Lucian felt the tension building in that space, despite the lightness of that ray of sunshine that lurked around them; the crossed thorns within himself made that ray be just a beam. And so it was done: a group that Kael usually participated in for other projects of this style accepted Lucian, even though he was averse.