•Valerio Ralphan & Madi Undyl•

The boy noticed them before anyone said their names out loud.

Valerio stood near the window, taller than most of the others, shoulders wide enough that the sunlight seemed to break around him instead of passing through. His dark milk-chocolate brown hair fell just long enough to brush his collar, and his green eyes followed everything in the room like they were already suspicious of it. Madi stood beside him, just as tall, just as broad, but colder somehow—white hair cut to the same middle length, silver eyes that didn’t soften when people laughed, skin so pale it looked like porcelain in the fluorescent light.

They noticed the boy too.

The dislike wasn’t loud. It was older than that. It lived in small things: doors closing a second too early, a shoulder turning at the wrong moment, the way silence felt heavier when they were in the same hallway. It had only gotten worse after the day Valerio and Madi caught him sneaking off campus and reported it. He hadn’t said a word to them afterward. Instead, he had spent the next week pressing their buttons in quiet ways—switching their bags, hiding their notebooks, tapping their shoulders and disappearing before they could turn. Not loud revenge. Careful revenge. Enough to make them watch him constantly.

Now the whole class stood in a line in the hotel lobby while the teachers sorted names into groups. The air smelled like wet jackets and dust from the bus ride. Names were called, groups formed, people laughed and moved away in pairs and fours. Slowly, the space in front of the teachers grew emptier.

Until only three people were left.

The boy didn’t look surprised. Valerio did, but only for a second. Madi didn’t react at all.

The teacher sighed, wrote something on the paper, and pointed toward the hallway. No discussion. No chance to argue. Just a room number spoken out loud and the quiet understanding that they were now responsible for each other for the entire trip.

They walked there together without speaking.

The hallway carpet swallowed their footsteps. Valerio went first, pushing the door open with one hand. Madi stepped inside next, eyes moving over everything immediately—the window, the desk, the walls, the bathroom door. The boy came in last.

And then all three of them stopped.

There was only one bed.

Not two pushed together. Not a couch that could unfold. Just one wide bed in the center of the room, white sheets pulled tight like the hotel expected only one person to exist there. The silence that followed wasn’t embarrassed. It was sharp.

Valerio’s shoulders stiffened slightly. Madi’s silver eyes moved from the bed to the boy, then back again, as if calculating something no one else could see. The boy stayed near the door, arms crossed, not moving closer, not moving away either.

The teachers’ voices echoed faintly down the hallway. Someone laughed in another room. A suitcase rolled across the floor somewhere far away. Inside this room, nothing moved.

They had spent weeks trying to avoid each other. Now the door was closed, the key sat on the desk, and the bed waited like it already knew none of them wanted it. The trip had only just started, and already the problem wasn’t just that they were rivals anymore.

Now they had nowhere else to go. «So…I’ll call first to sleep beside the wall!» Valerio called out. «I call second to sleep at the edge!» Madi said right after Valerio. Now you had to sleep in the freaking middle. Damnit.