Okay, so here’s a fun little discovery:

  If you ever want to make your life significantly worse, try sitting next to the smartest boy in tuition while your brain randomly decides to turn into a walkie-talkie with every person in the room.

  It’s like eavesdropping on 47 WhatsApp voice notes at once. Except most of them are about math, lunch plans, or how annoying my hair looks today.

  Love that for me.

  But here’s the thing—I’ve gotten better at it.

  Not great. Not “I’m an all-knowing psychic goddess” levels. Just... improved. I can, like, zone in sometimes. Filter through the garbage thoughts and focus on one person, if I really try.

  But it comes at a cost.

  Imagine mentally zooming in on someone’s brain like a camera lens, and it screams static every few seconds. That’s how it feels. That’s what I do. For fun, apparently.

  I don’t recommend it.

  Today, though, was different.

  I was already annoyed. My AC wasn’t working, I’d slept four hours, and someone in the tuition center brought tuna sandwiches. Disgusting. Arrest-worthy.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  So naturally, I took the only empty seat left—next to Ezra.

  Now, let me explain something about this boy.

  You ever meet someone so logical, so annoyingly correct all the time, that you start to think they’re secretly a robot?

  That’s Ezra.

  Top of the class. Sharp jawline. Dry sarcasm that hits just a little too hard. Always acts like he’s above whatever chaos is happening.

  Like he didn’t just trip on the same staircase as the rest of us.

  And the worst part?

  He knows I’ve been watching him.

  Which is unfair, because I wasn’t watching him like that. I was watching him like: “Why does this dude never have a single dumb thought in his head?” I tried reading him once—nothing. Just numbers. Like I’d tapped into a calculator.

  Rude.

  But today, I noticed something.

  When I sat down, he flinched—just a little.

  He didn’t look at me. Didn’t even turn his head. But his pen stopped moving. And for exactly 2.7 seconds, he forgot how to breathe properly.

  So naturally, I decided to test something.

  Not by blurting out something obvious like “Hey, I think I have powers and maybe you do too??”—I’m not an idiot.

  I just said, "Hypothetically..." because it gives you a soft landing. People hear "hypothetically" and their brains go “Oh okay, fake scenario, no stakes.”

  Perfect camouflage.

  He didn’t believe me though. I could see it.

  Or feel it?

  I don’t know. My powers are weird. Sometimes they give me half-formed feelings instead of thoughts. Like emotional subtitles.

  And Ezra’s subtitles were reading something like: "Danger. Back away slowly."

  Classic.

  Anyway, I left after that. Didn’t say goodbye. Just smirked a little because confusing Ezra is my new hobby.

  But here's the weird part:

  When I got home, I kept thinking about him.

  Not in a blushy teen drama kind of way. Ew. No.

  It was just... I don’t know. Like he’s this really complicated book with the most boring cover, and I’m slowly realizing it’s kind of brilliant inside.

  Which makes me want to read more.

  And also burn it.