Once everyone have settled down with their respected partner, the teacher continued:

“And to avoid pairs copying of each other’s work. I’ve assigned a different text for each of you.”

Some turned over to their friends and pretended to trace a tear falling down their faces, signalling how screwed they were.

“One of you can come up and grab the assignment sheet for the two of you.”

“I’ll go get it.”, Sana stood up and went over to the teacher’s table.

She came back with a folder with both their names on it and the name of the text.

“Ink, by Alice Broadway.”, Tzuyu read.

“Have you read that book?”, Sana asked.

“Yeah I have. It was on our reading list at the start of the year.”, Sana groaned and put her head on the table at that.

“We had a reading list?”, Sana muttered while her face is still squished against the table.

“Yeah we did.”

“Um…”, Tzuyu chose her words carefully as to not sound judgemental: “You don’t seem like a book person. Why did you pick Lit?”

“Are you saying that I’m dumb?”, Sana looked up at Tzuyu, pouting.

, she did get offended: “No…Um…I mean.”

Sana suddenly changed her serious expression and giggled.

“I was just messing with you.”, Sana got back up and looked at Tzuyu with a more relaxed expression.

“Oh… hahah…”, Tzuyu realised she just got pranked.

“Momo and I picked Lit because we had an extra slot for a subject and Mina wanted to do Lit so we just joined her.”, Sana said as she pointed at her two friends.

Tzuyu presumed Mina was Politely Laughing since she was reading the assignment criteria carefully while her partner was staring at her.

They spent the rest of that period working on the assignment. Tzuyu compiled quotes from the book while Sana started reading the book off a PDF Tzuyu shared with her. She was more half reading, half texting and mostly sighing at the assignment.

When the bell rang for period two, some people packed their bags to go to their next class while some had theirs in the same room.

“Are you free to work on the assignment after school?”, Tzuyu asked.

“Um…”, Sana was about to answer when a message popped up on her phone.

May 🍋
Wanna hang out after school?

“Probably not today, sorry.”, Sana answered while replying to the text.

“It’s OK, you’ve already made other plan beforehand.”, Sana looked at her phone and back at Tzuyu, feeling guilty.

“I’m so sorry. I promise that I will finish reading the book by the end of this week.”, Sana said as she grabbed her bag. She was about to leave when she turned around and said:

“Oh wait, we should text each other when we’re free so we can organise a meet up time.”

Sana handed her phone to Tzuyu and Tzuyu gave Sana hers.

They typed in their contacts.

“Does she put emoji in everyone’s names?”, Tzuyu thought to herself as she looked at Sana’s very colourful contacts list.

“Here, I added in mine.”, Tzuyu handed Sana back her phone.

“OK, just a sec”, Sana contemplated as her finger hovered over the screen. She decided to type something and returned Tzuyu’s phone.

Tzuyu looked down at her new contact and raised her eyebrow.

Sana 🐶

Tzuyu decided to add in ‘Minatozaki’ just to keep it uniform with the rest of her contacts but she kept the puppy. Tzuyu glanced over at Sana and saw that she had also changed Tzuyu’s name

Chou Tzuyu 👁️‍🗨️

“Why the eye in the speech bubble?”, Tzuyu asked.

“Oh, it’s because you seem to be very observant and you say what you see.” Sana took a look at the book’s PDF on Tzuyu’s laptop, notes and citation crammed in between the paragraphs.

“And I gave Mina a magnifying glass so I didn’t want to give you two the same emoji.”, Sana shrugged and Tzuyu chucked at her explanation.

“Oh OK then.”

Sana left to go to her next class while Tzuyu stayed behind.

“Am I that blunt?”, Tzuyu thought back at her comment before.
 

A/N: I highly recommend reading ‘Ink’ by Alice Broadway. It’s actually one of my source of inspiration for this story.