I woke up with my eyes dry, desperately wishing the alarm on my phone wasn’t the time it said. That I still had a few more hours to sleep. I fumbled for it on my nightstand, dropping it to the floor as the super annoying alarm song and vibration kept going. I had a dream I was talking to someone, and their voice came out in the same sound, the vibration entered my dream, making me so mad. I finally got the alarm off and sighed.

A while had passed after I first met Stella.

My morning routine that summer echoed that this was not the most fun time of my life. Just about every morning I’d get up, realize I only got a few hours of sleep because my roommate Sare was up all night gaming loudly. I’d have a crisis about how little sleep I got and how bad it is for me with all the doctor stuff I had to do on little sleep, then groggily drag myself out of bed, get dressed, showered and whatever else needed to get cleaned up.

Sare would be sleeping, because she worked second shifts and got to sleep in. I’d get coffee brewed and eat my breakfast way too late. I did all of this loudly in a passive aggressive attempt to hurt Sare's sleep like she did to mine, but she was a heavy sleeper so my pettiness was pointless and ineffective. Then I'd leave for work way too late and desperately make it to the clinic in time so my coworkers didn’t think I was a complete mess. The plus side to Cani doctor work is that so many people moved around so I only had to try to not be a disaster for three months, then the next summer when I was back at the clinic it was mostly fresh faces.

After work, I’d get back home and crash and try to enjoy the few hours of quiet I had before Sare got home. I was sitting on my couch, scrolling my phone. I had a really dumb idea to try and search for Stella on social media. I didn’t want to like stalk her or anything. I remembered how pretty she was out of nowhere, so I figured I should reward myself after my crappy busy day.

I had added people on sites after talking to them less than I did Stella, but something held me back from just adding her when I found her account on Friendliest. I wasn’t thinking about it too hard, just looking through her profile pictures. She had her privacy settings on pretty strong, so I wasn’t gonna be a super creepy about it.  Though I guess going to someone’s account that I spoke to once and staring at their pictures was kind of base level creepy, I guess. Her pictures were really cute, a lot more girlie-girl than anything I could ever take. There was one of her that she must’ve taken in fall where she was on a farm or something in a dance pose with a pumpkin with the caption “Yeah, I’m pretty quirky” that made me all warm and gooey from the mix of attempted dorkiness and her attractiveness. I got guilty about what I was up to and scrolled back to her most recent picture, which was her standing on a small stage. The caption mentioned a performance coming up.

Frustratingly, the picture didn’t have any further information than that. But her performing had me curious. Is she in a local theater group? Or a larger one? I think she’s from Litus Empirica, right? So maybe it’s a big acting deal?

Perhaps stupidly, I kept digging to see if I could find out where Stella performed. I found a few of her other socials, but those proved fruitless. Eventually, I just searched “Stella Faleur theater” like a dumbass and found a more public page of a Litus Empirica group. They seemed legit, and when I compared the stage on their pictures to the one Stella posted, and they looked pretty much identical as far as my untrained for theater eyes could tell. Finally, after a lot of scrolling I saw a picture of Stella on the acting page, a picture of her dressing like a zombie or something from a recent play. She pulled off the zombie look, not gonna lie. I looked at the group’s upcoming plays, and they had a few over the summer, including some that weekend. There were a few different shows they were running, so it was a crap shoot if I could see Stella at any of them. And I didn’t have the courage nor the lack of common sense to just out of the blue add her and message her asking which one was her play.

So naturally I did the even smarter thing and just took a gamble.

I realize this sounds a bit stalker-y that I actually freaking went to this. But I did legitimately want to see her perform. And I could look at her without her seeing me. OK, that sounds way too stalker-y. I wasn’t stalking her! I was just curious, alright?

At the first play I saw at the Fallen Field Theater…Stella wasn’t there. I went with my gut to think about one that sounded like the one she’d be in and guessed wrong. But I considered it a recon mission to make myself feel better about the ticket price. Despite living in a suburb of the big city, I didn’t go to LE much. My clinic was kind of within LE, but technically in a suburb. I was either too busy or too tired to make the trek. The old brick building felt like it had a lot of history to it, as did this specific theater group. There were pictures framed all around the entranceway, going all the way back to black and white ones. A plaque claimed the building had been around over a hundred years, which was nifty. The stage area itself wasn’t huge, which had me concerned about getting spotted. I sat in the back in case Stella was there and looked out into the crowd and saw me and freaked out or something, but again, she wasn’t at the first one. My time was spent enjoying the play and also chastising myself mentally for being such a creepy individual to try and see her perform like this.

Not one to take a defeat and just give up (and again: not a full defeat, it was a recon mission), I went again the next week. This time, the only seat I could get was on the far right towards the middle. The lights went out, and the play started. And for a while I thought I might have to bend my brain to convince myself I’d gotten a second recon mission as I didn’t see her again. It didn’t hit me until halfway through that she was in this one, and my heart genuinely fluttered realizing it was her. She was playing a major character too, so I pretty much felt like a dipshit for not noticing earlier, especially when I looked at the program and saw her name listed in the cast. In my defense, I had only seen her in person once (I’m trying to not sound like a stalker here) and in this play, she had a brown-haired wig on and was speaking in a heavy accent that sounded pretty authentic to me but my science is in Cani studies not languages so I might just have been biased. I was kind of worried she’d be a crap actor and I’d get really embarrassed, but she was incredible. She had a magnetic stage presence, and my eyes were glued to her especially once I realized it was her. I don’t have a super hard time getting invested in live entertainment, but I couldn’t remember ever actually crying like I did when her character hit rock bottom with her addictions. When the play ended and the cast was bowing, I thought for a second Stella looked my way. I might have just been being optimistic (or pessimistic I suppose as I didn’t really want her to notice me because again, felt creepy) that she’d even notice me.

I gave a glance of a moment of a thought to staying after to see her and maybe ask her to sign the program, but again I was just feeling creepy for going to this extent to see someone I barely knew. But I had a great time seeing her again.

I didn’t see Stella for the rest of that summer after watching her in the play, as I got very busy with the new year of school approaching rapidly, and all the new Cani coming in for their first fang appointment at work. I was also busy helping some students relocate from the real grim Cani schools that were fortunately getting shut down, the ones that kept Cani who got their fangs early away from modern society. A few were adopted by some wealthy families who were busy with their rich family crap, so I smartly offered to use my free time to help drive them around and help out as much as I could. It was exhausting but rewarding work. One of them was adopted by the Kilander family, so I felt like I’d get in trouble if I didn’t help them out. The one adopted by the Kilanders was named Oka Ohri, a pure soul who really didn’t deserve the Tesata Elementary treatment (I mean, no one did but especially not her). I had a lot of history with one of the Kilanders, but more pressingly they had a lot to do with Rising Shards, so in addition to helping a good kid start to catch up on society, I hoped I’d look good for my bosses. Before I knew it, it was time to get back to my main squeeze: teaching at Rising Shards.