"Can you tell me about your relationship with Daniel? "
That question had left Angela more disoriented than she ever could have imagined. Her mind whirled, replaying every interaction, every conversation they'd shared. All their exchanges up until the moment he confessed to her.
What was Angela's relationship with Daniel? She couldn't comprehensively say.
Their interactions were barely existent. The most exchanges they had were those brief polite greetings.
The nature of their relationship... perhaps they were friends? No, Angela somehow felt they hadn't gotten to that extent yet.
Perhaps that was why the woman had worded the question the way she did?
Angela found herself thinking back.
Daniel had always been... odd. The boy who was always looked down on or ignored by almost everyone in the classroom.
He was strange, to say the least. From the moment she first saw him during the welcome orientation into Schulerin's Academy, he had rubbed off as the kind of person she would prefer to not associate herself with.
And it wasn't even the way students who knew him from their middle school days ostracized him and talked down on him—it was the very way he carried himself. There was this gloom and darkness around him that put Angela off.
Perhaps her mother would say something like, "he has negative karma following him."
Then she found out about his condition: Prosopagnosia. Angela probably would never have even learned that such a condition existed if he didn't have it.
Apparently, the gloom and darkness she felt from him, and the ostracism he experienced, were not his fault. They weren't related to some negative karma following him. He just had an incurable cognitive disorder.
Angela had felt pity for the boy.
He did have that goofy, grey-white-haired boy named Ethan with him sometimes, but most of the time, he was alone.
Was it in her place to do something about that though? Not really.
Although she had felt pity and curiosity toward him, he was just another classmate, and his lack of presence made him very easy to forget once she wasn't looking his way.
"It's hard to take your eyes off of him."
Angela flinched at the words that cut through her thoughts, bringing her to the present. It wasn't just how the words seemed perfectly timed, as if the speaker had read her thoughts and accurately countered them, but how the words themselves felt like an accusation.
She turned to Maxinha, seated beside her. Her lips parted to reply, but the chestnut-complexioned girl in Schulerin's gym uniform—a large white t-shirt over black bloomers that strained against her full figure—spoke again;
"It's weird, you know? He isn't much different, except his looks. He still acts the same as he used to, quiet and all... but now there's... something about him that makes him impossible to ignore."
Angela, who was dressed similarly, slowly closed her mouth, digesting her friend's words.
The two girls were seated on the field. The summer sun was high in the sky, pelting the academy grounds with its unforgiving rays. Around them were other students dressed in similar gym clothes, stretching or jogging in preparation for their physical training.
Maxinha's eyes were fixed forward, focused on the group of boys from their class standing on the racetracks around the football field.
Among them, Daniel stood out, his lean and fit figure hugged closely by the gym uniform, and his handsome face moving quickly between the people around him as he struggled to keep up with the conversations thrown his way.
"Hey..." Maxinha said. "What is he like? You know, as a person?"
Angela frowned, her lips pressing together at the question. Seeing her expression, Maxinha panicked a bit.
"A–ah! Sorry, that's a weird thing to ask..." she said, waving her hands. "It's just... you were kinda close-ish before the whole..."
Close. The word stuck to Angela's mind, reminding her yet again of her meeting with the psychiatrist the previous day. For whatever reason, the woman had based their first session around asking about her relationships—specifically with Daniel.
"No. We weren't close," Angela said flatly.
She had spoken up against her brother for him once, just that once. From then, they had sort of known each other?
Their first interactions had been genuine apologies for her brother's actions, and honest inquiries about Daniel's well-being.
She had not been actively seeking to be friends with him; she just sort of felt... obligated to act friendly to him.
"R–right..." Maxinha muttered with a strange look on her face. "But... you know, perhaps he thought differently? He did confess to you."
Angela felt a rise in inner frustration at her friend's words. She turned sharply to the girl, her lips parting to voice her irritation. "Can you not—"
Maxinha raised her arms. "Relax, Angie," she said calmly. "I'm not trying to upset you. I'm just trying to figure stuff out."
"Figure what out?" Angela shot back, her voice still laced with irritation.
"You've been out of it since the accident," Maxinha said pointedly. "And I know you went to see him at the hospital."
Angela stiffened.
Maxinha's lips curled up into a wry smile. "Well, I wasn't exactly sure... but you just confirmed it. Why? "
Silence settled between them as Angela's blue eyes met the girl's, trembling slightly. Then she turned away, unable to keep up the eye contact.
Incidentally, her gaze settled on the boys on the field again. Their gym class instructor was splitting them into groups of five according to their heights. They were cheering and speaking loudly as they watched a group blast off from the starting line, their feet blurring into movement as they raced along the tracks.
Angela's eyes briefly settled on Daniel's figure, then she quickly pulled away, trying to look somewhere else—anywhere that wasn't him.
"I didn't go to visit him," she muttered, her voice low and trembling. "I went to the hospital with my dad."
"Oh..." Maxinha voiced skeptically. "And... why did you go to the hospital?"
"Because I was sick!" Angela suddenly flared. "Because I've been sick since the accident!"
Her outburst attracted the attention of students nearby. Angela shrank, realizing what she'd done. "S–sorry..."
"I–it's— it's fine," Maxinha stuttered, still reeling from the outburst, her words pouring from her lips quickly. "That was... uh... I didn't know. Sorry. I should be the one apologizing. Sorry."
Angela lowered her head, remaining silent.
She lied. She hadn't gone to the hospital with her father that day. She hadn't been sick or anything—her night terrors hadn't gotten severe yet. She had gone there on her own that day. To see him.
She wasn't exactly sure why herself.
They weren't close, just like she said. So why did she feel guilty about rejecting him? Why did she feel responsible for what happened to him?
"Ah..." Angela voiced out as realization dawned on her.
This is what the psychiatrist was trying to tell her. The woman was asking if she believed her nightmares were a way of telling herself that his falling out of the bus had been because she rejected him.
"L–let's go find Sonia," Maxinha suddenly said, already rising from her spot.
Angela hesitated, then nodded, rising to join her friend. However, an uproar pulled their attention back to the boys. There, Daniel was awkwardly lowering himself to a crouching position under the supervision of the teacher.
The other boys kept laughing until Daniel got the stance right, and then their teacher finally stepped away, raising his hand.
"Hey, let's go," Maxinha said, tugging her shirt.
"Y–yeah..." Angela said but lingered, her eyes on Daniel's figure as he and the other four he was with prepared to set off.
Then, just as she was about to turn away, they sprang into action, and Angela froze, her jaw dropping in disbelief.