“Bloody hell!” The young boy turned to face Ayumi, this time meeting her eyes. “Could you please be quiet for a moment?”

“Geez, fine… I was just trying to be nice.”

The dark-blue-eyed teenager rolled his eyes and then made a sneering face. Black nails and smudged eyeliner gave him a strange appearance.

“Someone must’ve beaten the shit out of him.” Ayumi thought, unwilling to say it out loud, though she really felt it. “Just to make sure, y’know?”

The young boy sighed deeply, turning to the blonde with the red ribbon, looking a little regretful.

“I know I’m pretty,” he said, a smile marking his face. “But if you want to keep looking…” He turned around, trying to joke, which only made Ayumi angrier.

“I’d rather gouge my eyes out than stare at you for another minute,” she snapped, her voice rising in pitch with indignation as she screamed out her stress. “What’s your problem?”

Before Ayumi could continue, the squeaking of rubber soles against the floor interrupted her, echoing through the hallways. The source of the noise: a dark-skinned boy with curly hair, stumbling over his own feet and stopping in despair before reaching the pair.

"Arf, arf... A-Ah... I... Hi?" The boy, approximately 1.65 m tall, took a deep breath, confusedly staring at Ayumi, who waved back at the boy.

"H-hey..." The two boys began talking as if they had been friends for years.

"Derick, seriously! Mother Superior is coming." He said hurriedly, as he pulled the taller, black-haired boy's arm.

"H-hey, ow! But I didn't do anything this time, Marcus!" Derick said, as he tried to get away from the other boy.

Ayumi just watched the two argue like a lady watching a prime time soap opera. She hadn’t been this entertained since she saw children from the younger grades summoning Hanako‑san* in Japan.

The argument grew louder as the girl slowly stood and walked away in the opposite direction. “Err… it seems you two clearly have something to work out, and I’d never get between best friends…”

Before the girl could turn to leave, she bumped into something, fabric... The pair of crows that were disturbing Ayumi suddenly stopped screaming.

"There's someone behind... me, right?" She looked at the boys, who were now hugging each other in fright.

"Y-yes!" they answered in unison.

She sighed deeply, despite the anxious palpitations in her chest from the scare the woman had given her, she tried to remain calm.

“Come on, Ayumi! Hang in there, you’ve got nothing to do with this.” She thought, distracted, as the Mother Superior quickly wrote things down in her notebook.

The three of them were in the wrinkled-faced woman's office. Ayumi shrank back in her chair, unable to get a warning or she would lose her scholarship, staring at the paper they'd given her with trembling hands.

“D-damn… what did I do?” Derick muttered, burying his face between his knees.

Ayumi and Marcus stared at the taller boy in disbelief. Because of the “aspiring bad boy”, they were forced to spend an hour getting ahead of the classwork.

She sighed deeply, another one of those annoying palpitations that afflicted the girl when she seemed to be growing more and more anxious. She looked at the ceiling, at some dark spots that were now running like ink.

Ayumi was startled once more, though the spots eventually disappeared.

The tension was dispelled when one of Derick’s paper ball, God knows why it kept bothering her, hit Ayumi in the back of the head, even though only the three of us were staying in the classroom after hours. The girl sprawled lazily on the table, Marcus’s snoring the only thing serving as background music.

Ayumi felt a shiver run down her spine, every time she tried to distract herself, the paranoia surrounding that strange ink on the ceiling seemed to intensify, or perhaps it was just the same anxiety symptoms that had been following her. The girl grimaced, a look of disgust crossing her face; certainly, it was not something she wanted to experience again.

She tried to think of something funny, maybe something that would distract her, or she reflected on the times she’d shared with her father, just to keep herself calm.