"Are you okay?" A soft voice snapped Jidenna's attention to the present, tearing him away from his reverie of the past.
He followed the voice and, to his shock, found out that it was his ever-quiet seatmate.
Jidenna narrowed his eyes in scrutiny, but she continued gazing up at him with those wide, innocent eyes.
Jidenna sized her up without answering her question. Inwardly, he wondered if there was a darker motive.
But deciding it would be rude to keep quiet to a person's concern, he bit out, "I'm fine."
It was once asked what the most common lie adults make was, and unsurprisingly, the words "I'm fine" won first place without any harsh competition.
Those words can be used even when the person saying them feels the opposite, and that was exactly how Jidenna felt right now.
Even though he clenched his fist and bristled at the bricks thrown at him by Cheng Yuan, coated as advice.
