It started with a bag of chips and a machine that didn't care.

The vending machine hummed in the hallway, oblivious to the growing frustration of the boy standing in front of it. He hit the button again. Nothing. The chips—barbecue-flavored, his favorite—hung just barely from the spiral arm. Taunting.

He sighed. Shifted his weight. Squinted at the machine like it owed him something.

Behind him, someone said quietly, "You need to hit it just above the coin slot. Right side."

He turned. A girl with messy, soft dark waves and big wire-rimmed glasses stood a few feet away, holding a worn notebook to her chest. Her eyes were sharp, curious, and not especially apologetic for her unsolicited advice.

"Trust me," she added after a moment. "I've been observing its behavior for three days."

He raised an eyebrow. "You've been... observing the vending machine?"

She shrugged. "Patterns are easier to predict than people."

He looked at her for a long second. Then turned back to the machine and gave it a light nudge where she'd said.

Thunk. The chips dropped.

She smiled—just barely.

"I'm Calen," he said, holding the chips but not quite opening them yet.

"Elie."

They didn't shake hands.

The next morning, Elie woke up a bit groggy from her little adventure the night before. It was already past curfew when she got back to their house—not because she'd been out partying all night, but because she'd been observing the stars.

Her gaze landed on the bedside table, where an empty potato chip wrapper sat. She suddenly remembered the guy she had met at the vending machine.

He looked about the same age as her, and there was something oddly familiar about him. She shrugged and stood up to begin her morning routine.

"7:30 AM," she muttered under her breath.

She only had 30 minutes left before class started. Hurriedly, she grabbed an oversized hoodie from her closet—almost twice the size—and dashed to the kitchen.

Silence greeted her, as usual, but it didn't bother her.

As if it were muscle memory, she quickly grabbed a piece of toast and some jam, stuffed them into a ziplock plastic bag, and ran to the garage. She hopped on her bike and sped off toward school.

Luckily, it was only a 10-minute ride away. However, it always took her around 20 minutes to get there—she usually stopped by a nearby park to eat her toast. Her interests varied, though, so sometimes she got sidetracked by something else entirely.

"Late again, Miss Soren," said the lady guard standing by the gate.

She raised an eyebrow and glanced at her wristwatch. "I still have five minutes before class starts."

The guard sighed, as if used to this daily routine. "Just go—and try not to be late next time."

She offered a half-smile and rode her bike through the gates.

As always, she ran through the quiet hallways and slipped into the classroom like nothing had happened. Their adviser was already at the whiteboard, writing something down.

"Late again, Elie?" Jem whispered beside her.

"Yeah." She already heard that phrase twice this morning.

Classes passed by smoothly, as if nothing had happened. After lunch, Elie slipped into the library, heading straight to her favorite spot.

To her surprise, the guy she'd met last night was already there, sitting beside her usual seat and tinkering with something.

Then it clicked—why he looked so familiar. He was a classmate. The same guy she always seemed to run into in the quietest corners of campus. His presence had never really bothered her; in fact, she'd grown oddly comfortable with it.

"Hey," she said.

The boy glanced up and replied with a simple, "Hey."

"Is this seat taken?"

"It's always been yours."

Elie sat beside him and pulled out a worn-out sketchbook and a mechanical pencil from her bag.

"Pray, do tell—are you always in this spot?" she asked, curious.

He shot a quick glance at her, then back at the small radio he'd been tinkering with. "Yeah."

"How come I never noticed you?"

"Well, you're always busy with your own little world, I guess," he said without looking back.

They didn't plan to become friends. It just happened.

They kept running into each other—in the library's quietest corner, in the workshop near the back where the fluorescent lights buzzed like mosquitoes —each place slowly became theirs without either of them claiming it out loud. Neither of them talked much at first. But somehow, it never felt awkward.

Elie would sit, legs curled beneath her, sketching bizarre ideas in her notebook: a clock that told you how long you'd been overthinking. A pair of glasses that blocked out human faces but highlighted books.

Calen would be nearby, tinkering with old speakers or taking apart broken radios for the fun of it. He was all muscle memory and precision, calm in a way Elie found oddly soothing.

It was as if they naturally gravitated toward each other's presence.

A mutual classmate once half-joked during lunch. "If you're gonna find Reed, just look for Soren. He's probably two steps behind her."

Everyone laughed, including Elie—though she pretended to roll her eyes. Calen didn't even respond. He just glanced in her direction with a ghost of a smile, as if to say, Well, they're not wrong.

One afternoon, the sun slanted low through the workshop windows, casting warm streaks of gold across their scattered notes and half-finished circuits. Elie sat cross-legged on the floor, a page of tangled equations balanced on her knee, her pencil tapping against her chin in quiet thought.

She looked up, eyes distant.
"Do you ever think about how strange it is that we exist at all? Like—statistically, we shouldn't even be here."

Calen didn't look up. His brows were furrowed in concentration as he soldered a wire to a small circuit board, the faint scent of metal and heated plastic hanging between them.
"All the time," he said.

She blinked. "Really?"

"Yeah. It's weird," he murmured, adjusting the angle of his hands, "but also kinda nice."

Elie watched him for a moment longer, stunned not by the answer but by how easily it had come. No hesitation. No laughter at the randomness of her thought. Just quiet agreement—like he had already been there, in that corner of the universe, waiting for her to speak it aloud.

She'd never had anyone who so easily accepted and agreed to her spontaneous ideas—who didn't treat her thoughts like puzzles to be solved or jokes to be dismissed. But somehow, Calen just understood.

And just like that, a thread tightened between them—subtle, invisible, but unmistakably there. A connection quietly forming in the space where words usually fail.

Not loud. 

Not obvious.

But certain.