Exams had a strange way of changing people. For a few weeks, the entire world seemed to shrink down until nothing else mattered. Attendance records, grueling practical labs, and overdue assignments all vanished from our minds, replaced entirely by the sheer panic of the next paper.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

Just like that, months of stress, sleepless nights, and endless lectures disappeared into a quiet stack of graded answer sheets and signatures. When the final bell rang in the afternoon, signifying the end of the last paper, the heavy doors of the examination hall swung open. Students poured out into the corridors looking relieved, exhausted, or thoroughly defeated.

I was somewhere in the middle, quietly packing my pens into my bag, feeling a hollow sort of relief.

“Freedom!” Sam announced the very second we stepped past the campus gates, throwing his arms out dramatically as if he had just escaped a maximum-security prison.

Jason adjusted his backpack, looking at Sam with his typical dry expression. “It’s a one-month semester break, Sam. Calm down.”

“Exactly. A whole month.”

“That’s not real freedom. That’s just a temporary intermission before the next round of academic torture.”

“It is real freedom to me,” Sam insisted, already pulling out his phone to check his game lobbies. “Don’t ruin this for me, Jase.”

For the first time in months, none of us had anywhere to be. There were no early morning lectures to calculate skipping probabilities for, no late-night code submissions to finish, and no practical journals waiting for a professor’s signature. The ride home felt significantly lighter than usual. The harsh winter chill had finally started to fade, and the roads were packed with students heading back to their neighborhoods, their faces free of exam stress.

When I got home, I fell right back into my old, comfortable vacation routine. I played video games until my eyes blurred, watched mindless videos, and wasted hours doing absolutely nothing. Then I woke up the next day and repeated the exact same process.

For the first few days, it felt incredible. It was exactly what I had been craving during those stressful study nights.

But then, the boredom arrived. It didn’t come all at once; it crept in slowly, quietly, without any warning.

Without the rigid structure of a college schedule, the days started blending together into a gray haze. Morning seamlessly became afternoon, afternoon quietly bled into night, and then the exact same cycle repeated itself the next day. An empty space in an overthinker’s mind is a dangerous thing. Without formulas or code to analyze, my brain began searching for other things to process.

One quiet evening, while sitting in the dark and waiting for a multiplayer game lobby to find a match, a random thought appeared in my head. I wondered what everyone from our class was doing with their break.

The thought was harmless, disappearing almost immediately. But then, a much more specific one followed right behind it.

I wonder what Ava is doing right now.

For some reason, I pictured her sitting by the classroom window, absentmindedly spinning that silver pen through her fingers. The image appeared so naturally that it bothered me.

I stared blankly at the glowing reflection of my own face on the monitor, entirely frozen.

Then I let out a sharp, self-deprecating laugh. *Where on earth did that come from?* I hadn’t seen her in over a week. I was miles away from campus, sitting in my own room, so why was she suddenly occupying my thoughts?

The game loading chime rang, the match started, and I forced the thought out of my head.

A few days later, though, it happened again. I was mindlessly scrolling through video feeds late at night when I suddenly remembered a brief comment she had made during a practical session weeks ago. It wasn’t an important conversation—just a quick, casual remark she had made to her lab partner about a broken keyboard. I couldn’t even remember the context of why my brain had dug it out of the archives. Only that it had.

The more these little mental slips happened, the stranger it felt.

When college was open, at least my overthinking mind had a logical excuse. I saw her every day, so naturally, I noticed her. There was a reason. Now, there was no reason at all. There was no silver pen catching the morning sunlight by the window row, no soft laugh cutting through a boring theory lecture, and no shared classroom space. Yet, somehow, I was thinking about her more than I had when we were sitting in the same room.

*This makes absolutely no sense,* I thought, tossing my phone onto the bed in frustration. *I’m completely losing it.*

Later that week, Jason called me. We spent a good half-hour talking practically about our expected exam results, upcoming mini-projects for the next semester, and everything we were supposed to be studying during the break but weren’t.

Halfway through the conversation, Jason paused, his voice dropping into a casual tone. “Do you think the three of us will actually attend college regularly next semester? Like, right from week one?”

I laughed over the receiver. “No way. Not a chance.”

“Good,” Jason said, a visible trace of amusement in his voice. “I was starting to get worried about you.”

“Worried? Why?”

“You’ve been showing up way too much lately, Ethan. For a second there at the end of the term, I thought you had been replaced by a clone who actually cares about a perfect attendance record.”

I rolled my eyes, glad he couldn’t see my face turning a familiar shade of red through the phone. “I was just trying to avoid a year-down, Jase.”

Even through the speaker, I could hear his low, knowing chuckle before we hung up.

After the call ended, I lay flat on my back, staring up at the shadows dancing across my ceiling fan. The room was completely silent. There were no incoming notifications, no urgent assignment deadlines, and no alarms set for the morning. Nothing.

And in that quiet emptiness, my mind drifted right back to the exact same person again.

It wasn’t because of anything she had done, and it wasn’t because of anything she had said. It was just because.

That was the part I couldn’t understand, the part that defied all my attempts at rational logic. Outside of sharing a classroom, we were strangers. We weren’t friends; we weren’t even acquaintances. Yet, somehow, she kept appearing in my thoughts when there was absolutely no earthly reason for her to be there.

The next morning, I woke up and forcefully pushed the thoughts aside. Classes would start again in a couple of weeks. Life would go back to its hectic, normal routine, and the three of us would be arguing about skipping lectures again. Whatever this weird mental glitch was, it would probably disappear on its own once the real world kicked back in.

At least, that’s what I told myself.

The problem was that I was starting to notice a pattern. Every time I tried to ignore it, it came back. Every time I tried to explain it away, it stopped making sense. And once your mind notices a pattern, pretending it isn’t there becomes almost impossible.