Chapter 1
While everyone holds a special fondness for a particular season—as seasons gently alter our moods, passions, and longings—I have believed since childhood that each season weaves a distinct, unrepeatable tale that defies comparison.
It is a singular story, written across the span of merely three months.
"I must pass this exam,"
her lips trembled in a whisper. She had no strength left to utter the words as she gazed at the study notes. Sleeplessness, despair, and grief were nothing—mere trifles compared to the silent torment she was putting herself through.
What interrupted her breakdown at that moment was the sound of the doorbell—successive, irritating rings that forced her to rise sluggishly, her legs trembling from prolonged sitting, and drag herself toward the door.
The moment it opened, she found herself face-to-face with a heavy-set man in his fifties, wearing bizarre attire: frayed denim shorts and a shirt whose buttons were nearly bursting across his large belly.
He blew a puff of cigarette smoke indifferently, then asked,
'Is this Mrs. Carroll's house?'
She blinked, dazed and uncomprehending of who this man was or what connection he had to her mother, before nodding quietly and managing a hoarse voice:
'Yes, it is. Is there a problem?'
With utter indifference, he shoved past her and rudely stepped inside.
She tried to block him, but he pushed her roughly, storming into the house and rummaging through the rooms, closets, and belongings.
She took tentative, fear-shaking steps toward him, trying to scream, but her voice came out weak:
'What is this? How dare you break into the house like this? I'm calling the police—get out right now!'
The man shot her an annoyed, mocking look.
'Go ahead, call the police. Maybe then they'll help me search for and drag your damned mother off to prison.'
Stunned, she stammered,
'How dare you... Get out of here right now, or I'll scream!'
He glared at her with eyes flashing with malice, prompting her to scream at the top of her lungs.
Panicked, he lunged forward, trying to run after her and silence her before the neighbors gathered.
But as her screams persisted, people began to crowd around in bewilderment, forcing him to bolt out the door, shoving anyone who got in his way.
An elderly woman in her mid-sixties hurried over, her face lined with wrinkles, dressed in simple, worn clothes.
This was Mrs. Karen, who, for some reason, had looked after her since childhood.
She approached anxiously, checking on her and noticing the pallor of her skin from exhausting herself with work and study, the scratches left by her nervous nail-biting against her stress, and her chapped lips.
'Did that person hurt you? Who was he, and why did you open the door for him?'
Looking up at her, exhausted by the pain in her body, she replied,
'I don't know. He was looking for something in the house that my mother must have taken...'
The old woman furrowed her brow in disapproval.
'And what could your mother possibly take from that lunatic?'
'I don't know,'
she said faintly, tears dampening her face, as the woman pulled her into an embrace and gently patted her back.
The heavy weight of Mrs. Karen’s embrace felt like the only anchor holding her from drifting entirely into the dark abyss of her own exhaustion.
For a long, silent moment, she allowed herself to lean into that frail yet steady frame, letting the quiet warmth of the old woman’s hand patting her back soothe the violent trembling in her limbs.
The street outside had quieted down after the neighbors dispersed, leaving behind only the distant, hollow echo of a stray car engine fading into the dusk.
"Come inside, child,"
Mrs. Karen murmured softly, her voice carrying the weathered, gentle cadence of someone who had witnessed too many storms in this neighborhood.
"You cannot stay standing in the open doorway, and your hands are ice-cold."
With reluctant, leaden steps, she let herself be guided back into the small, dimly lit living room.
The air still carried the stale, acrid scent of the stranger’s cheap cigarette smoke, lingering like a foul ghost over the battered furniture.
She sank onto the edge of the worn sofa, her eyes drifting unconsciously toward the study notes and past-paper booklets scattered haphazardly across the coffee table.
The sight of them—the neat annotations in purple ink, the highlighted definitions of cellular membranes and chemical equations—sent a fresh, sharp spike of panic through her chest.
The exam.
The thought felt absurd now, almost grotesque.
How could she possibly care about secondary school qualifications, or grades, or academic tracks, when a strange, brutish man had just broken into her home, shouting threats about her mother and a prison sentence? Yet, the conditioning ran deep; the relentless voice in her head whispered that failing to study was a sin far greater than any external disaster.
Her fingers instinctively rose to scratch at the raw, irritated skin along her forearm—a nervous habit that had carved tiny, angry red lines into her flesh over the past few weeks of isolation.
"Stop that," Mrs. Karen gently scolded, reaching out to pull the girl's hand away with surprising firmness. She knelt beside the sofa, looking up into her face with dark, piercing eyes that missed nothing. "Destroying your own skin will not bring your mother back, nor will it chase away the ghosts haunting this house. Look at me. How long has it been since you last slept properly, or ate a real meal?"
She swallowed hard, her throat burning and dry.
"I... I slept for three hours yesterday. Or was it the day before? I lose track, Mrs. Karen. The revision schedule is too tight. If I fall behind, I’ll never catch up, and if I don't catch up, then—"
She stopped, biting her chapped lower lip until it threatened to bleed.
She couldn't voice the terrifying dread of what failure meant, because acknowledging it aloud would make it real.
Mrs. Karen let out a heavy sigh, a sound filled with profound sorrow and a hint of bitter anger.
"Always running, always punishing yourself for a world that expects too much from a sixteen-year-old child. Your mother was a careless woman, God rest her chaotic soul—or God help her, wherever she has managed to hide this time—but she should never have left you alone to carry the weight of this rotting house."
"She didn't mean to leave,"
the girl whispered defensively, though even to her own ears, the words sounded hollow and unconvincing.
"She said she had to settle a debt. She said she would be back before the first autumn rains."
"And did she mention which year's autumn?"
the old woman muttered dryly, rising with a soft groan of aching joints to fetch a glass of water from the small kitchen counter.
The mention of autumn brought a sharp, poignant ache to the girl's chest.
She remembered how she used to love the changing seasons, believing from a very young age that every three months held a unique, unrepeatable story.
But this year, the seasons had lost their magic.
Autumn had arrived not as a golden poem or a peaceful transition, but as a relentless predator, bringing with it unread textbooks, crushing anxiety, and now, strange, menacing men banging on the front door looking for stolen loot.
Mrs. Karen returned, handing her the glass of water.
"Drink it all. No arguments."
She obeyed quietly, the cool liquid easing the raw tightness in her throat.
As she set the empty glass down, her gaze drifted back to the hallway where the stranger had shoved his way in.
Something caught her eye near the shoe rack—a small, dark leather notebook that must have slipped from the man’s oversized, frayed shorts pocket during his frantic scuffle and retreat.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She exchanged a quick, apprehensive glance with Mrs. Karen, who had also noticed the object lying quietly on the floorboards.
"Don't touch it,"
the old woman warned, her eyes narrowing with sudden caution. "People like that do not drop things by accident. Whatever is inside those pages, it is connected to whatever your mother took from him."
But curiosity, born of pure desperation and a desperate need to find a way out of this nightmare, proved stronger than fear.
Ignoring Mrs. Karen’s outstretched hand, the girl slipped off the sofa, crept across the room on trembling legs, and knelt beside the leather notebook.
Her fingers brushed its cold, worn cover.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, she flipped it open.
The fluorescent lights of the secondary school classroom hummed with a sterile, unrelenting buzz that matched the frantic rhythm of her thoughts.
The morning after the intrusion felt like a surreal fever dream, but the physical reality of it—the raw scratch marks on her forearms, the lingering tightness in her chest, and the heavy leather notebook hidden safely at the bottom of her school bag reminded her that the nightmare was entirely real.
Yet, here she sat, forcing her eyes to stay fixed on the whiteboard at the front of the auditorium-style classroom, desperately trying to anchor herself in the structured logic of Cambridge IGCSE advanced chemistry.
The equilibrium constant.
The words danced across her notebook pages in neat, frantic purple ink.
If she could just understand the stoichiometry, if she could just calculate the molar concentration correctly, the chaos of her personal life might somehow become manageable.
It was a pathetic, desperate defense mechanism—submerging herself so deeply in academic formulas that the rest of the world ceased to exist.
Her hair was tied back in a messy, careless bun, strands slipping loose around her pale, exhausted face.
Her school uniform, though clean, lacked the meticulous tailoring and ironed crispness of the other girls in her grade.
She didn't care.
Appearance was a luxury of time and energy she simply did not possess.
While her classmates spent their evenings scrolling on phones, gossiping, or curating their social lives, she spent hers wrestling with organic reaction mechanisms, translating Latin grammar, and wondering if her mother was safe, locked away, or running from more violent thugs.
A soft shuffle at the front of the classroom interrupted the droning voice of Mr. Harrison, the chemistry teacher.
"Settling in, everyone,"
Mr. Harrison announced, tapping his dry-erase marker against the desk to capture the room's wandering attention.
"We have a new transfer student joining us today. I expect you all to extend the usual courtesy. Julian, come on in and introduce yourself."
The classroom chatter died down instantly. All eyes drifted toward the doorway as a young man stepped into the room.
He was striking, undeniably so—tall, with sharp, aristocratic features, jet-black hair that fell slightly over dark, brooding eyes, and a posture that radiated an effortless, natural elegance.
Yet, there was an unmistakable aura of gloom clinging to him like a second skin.
He didn't smile; his expression was distant, clouded by a heavy, quiet melancholy that seemed entirely out of place in a bright morning classroom.
He carried his leather satchel loosely over one shoulder, looking less like an eager new student and more like a melancholy wanderer who had wandered into the wrong dimension.
Murmurs rippled softly through the desks, especially among the girls in the front rows, who immediately began whispering and straightening their blazers.
Julian just gave a brief, dismissive nod when Mr.
Harrison gestured to an empty desk two rows away from hers.
He didn't bother speaking, sliding into the seat with quiet indifference, casting his gaze out the tall arched window toward the grey courtyard outside.
For a fraction of a second, her eyes met his.
There was no spark of recognition, no flirtatious glance or teenage curiosity—just a shared, heavy emptiness.
Two ghosts inhabiting the same room, trapped behind invisible walls of private misery.
Then, quickly looking away, she forced her gaze back down to her chemistry notes, tuning out the surrounding whispers and diving straight back into her concentration.
For the next two hours, she lost herself entirely to the lessons.
While the teachers spoke, her mind absorbed every single detail with clinical precision.
She listened with an intense, laser-like focus, scribbling annotations, drawing cellular diagrams in biology, and balancing complex equations in chemistry.
To her, the teachers were lifelines—beacons of absolute truth in a world built on deception and chaos.
In their classes, things made sense; if you followed the rules, you got the right answer.
There was no ambiguity, no sudden men banging on doors, no missing mothers.
When the bell finally rang, signaling the start of the midday lunch break, the classroom erupted into a flurry of motion.
Students packed their bags, laughing and grouping together to head toward the cafeteria or the sunny courtyard benches.
She remained seated at her desk, waiting for the crowd to thin out so she could pack her things in peace.
She reached into her bag to pull out her packed sandwich—a dry piece of bread her tired hands had assembled that morning—hoping to eat quickly and use the remaining time to review her Latin noun declensions.
But before she could even unwrap the plastic, a shadow fell heavily over her desk.
She looked up to find three girls standing directly in front of her.
At the center was Chloe, the unofficial queen bee of the secondary school grade—flawlessly styled, surrounded by her usual entourage of mocking sycophants, and wearing an expression of pure, unadulterated cruelty.
"Look at this, girls,"
Chloe drawled loudly, her voice dripping with artificial sweetness and venom.
"Does anyone else smell something stale? Oh, wait... it's just her."
The girls flanking Chloe giggled maliciously.
"Honestly, it's embarrassing to share a classroom with someone who looks like a literal zombie,"
another girl chimed in, eyeing her chapped lips, pale skin, and the messy, unkempt bun with open disgust.
"Do you even own a mirror, or a hairbrush? Or are you too busy digging through the trash like your mother supposedly does?"
A hot spike of humiliation and anger flared in her chest, but she swallowed it down hard, keeping her jaw clenched tight. She knew from bitter experience that reacting only fueled their fire.
She kept her eyes fixed downward, refusing to give them the satisfaction of tears.
"Leave me alone, Chloe,"
she muttered, her voice trembling slightly.
"Oh, listen to her, she talks back!"
Chloe sneered, stepping closer into her personal space.
"You think because you sit there pretending to be a genius with your little purple ink notes that you actually belong here? You're a mess. Your clothes are pathetic, your life is a joke, and everyone knows your family is falling apart."
Before she could pull back or defend herself, Chloe reached out with a sudden, mocking swiftness.
With a disgusted grimace, Chloe pulled a piece of sticky, chewed pink bubblegum right out of her own mouth.
With a vicious smirk, Chloe pressed the wet, sticky wad of gum directly into the loose strands of hair at the crown of her head, twisting it in firmly so it tangled inextricably into her locks.
She gasped, lifting her hands defensively, but before she could stop her, Chloe brought her hand down in a sharp, humiliating slap against the top of her head—not hard enough to leave a serious bruise, but hard enough to send her head jerking downward in pure degradation.
"There. Now your outer appearance finally matches your inner trash," Chloe laughed cruelly, turning on her heel with a flick of her hair.
"Come on, girls. Let's get out of here before the stench rubs off on us."
The group strolled away down the aisle, laughing loudly, leaving behind an echoing silence in the emptying classroom.
Sitting frozen at her desk, a wave of hot, suffocating humiliation washed over her. Her eyes burned with unshed tears of rage and absolute helplessness.
She reached up with trembling fingers, touching the thick, gummy mess glued securely to her hair.
It was repulsive, sticky, and completely embedded in the strands.
Panic, sharp and frantic, replaced her sadness. She couldn't walk through the hallways like this.
Everyone would stare, everyone would laugh.
Desperately, she yanked her school bag onto her lap and unzipped it, searching frantically inside for something—anything—to cut the ruined section of hair off.
She dug through her pencil case, flipping past highlighters, rulers, and revision cards, praying to find a pair of small scissors she sometimes used for art projects.
Her fingers searched every corner, every pocket, every fold of the fabric.Nothing.
There were no scissors in her bag.
Just textbooks, past papers, the dark leather notebook she had found the night before, and a broken pen
Her breath hitched in her throat as she kept rummaging frantically, the rough plastic of her pencil case scraping against her fingertips.
But then, a soft, slow sound cut through the heavy silence of the empty classroom—the deliberate, rhythmic chewing of gum.
She froze.
Slowly, lifting her tear-swollen eyes from the depths of her school bag, she looked across the aisle.
Julian hadn't left with the others.
He was still sitting at his desk two rows away, tilted back in his chair with an air of complete detachment.
His dark, brooding eyes weren't looking at the whiteboard, nor were they fixed on the messy doorway where Chloe and her friends had vanished. Instead, his gaze was locked entirely on her—cold, observant, and unnervingly calm.
He watched her struggles with an unbothered, almost clinical curiosity, as if observing a strange specimen trapped behind glass.
For a long, agonizing moment, neither of them moved. The hum of the fluorescent lights seemed to amplify, filling the suffocating quiet between them.
Then, slowly shifting the gum in his cheek, he broke the silence.
His voice was low, flat, and stripped of any conventional empathy or mockery:
"Are you a masochist?"
The question hung in the air, sharp and absurdly blunt, striking her with the force of a physical blow.
Before she could process the audacity—or find a single word to defend herself against the cruelty of his indifference—he stood up.
Slinging his leather satchel casually over one shoulder, he turned his back on her without another word and walked slowly out of the classroom, leaving her alone with the sticky pink wad in her hair and an echo of a question that felt far too heavy to bear.
A bitter, suffocating wave of rage surged through her veins, instantly eclipsing the humiliation.
Her hands trembled—not from weakness this time, but from a fierce, burning fury.
She yanked her school bag back onto her lap, shoved her notebooks inside with reckless haste, and unzipped the front pocket to pull out a dark, oversized hoodie.
With sharp, jerky movements, she slipped her arms into the sleeves, pulled the hood deep over her head to securely hide the sticky pink mess tangled in her hair, and ripped her glasses off her face, wiping away the hot, silent tears streaming down her cheeks.
Staring at the empty doorway where the arrogant boy had just vanished, she muttered fiercely beneath her breath, her voice choked with tears and venom:
"Your mother’s the masochist, you bastard."
