Ananya was seventeen when she first saw Aarav.
She wasn't the kind of girl who got distracted in school — always tucked into books, doodling logic puzzles in the corners of her notebooks, and sitting in the second-last bench where she could vanish into invisibility. Her world was small: her mom, her younger brother, the library, and sometimes, the sky.
Then he came.
New kid. Tall, quiet, the kind of boy who didn't try to impress. He joined mid-year, wore a hoodie even in the hot Lucknow summer, and had this old Canon camera always slung over his shoulder. Nobody knew where he came from exactly — rumors flew fast, but he didn't say much.
Ananya first talked to him when the computer lab's Wi-Fi crashed, and she, panicked, didn't know how to save her final project.
"Ctrl + S," he whispered from behind her, not even looking at the screen. "Then copy it to your pen drive. You'll lose it otherwise."
She turned, startled. "You saw it?"
He shrugged. "I see things."
