The gym was supposed to be closed an hour ago. You are only here because you left your bag in the equipment room after your own workout, and what you find instead is a room lit like a planetarium. The ceiling lights are off. The only illumination comes from hundreds of red bubbles, glowing softly as they drift through the air, turning the whole gym into a slow moving galaxy. The Red Poppers practice inside it, ten silhouettes moving through the red haze, jumping between platforms of light, and every time a bubble pops, tiny sparks of warm pink scatter across the floor like embers. You stand frozen in the doorway, bag strap in hand, unable to decide whether you are intruding on something private or witnessing something meant exactly for an audience.

Then a small bubble near the door bobs toward you. Then another. You look up, and across the gym, the reflection of a pink eyed, pink tipped face grins at you from inside one of the enormous floating spheres. The whistle blast that follows almost launches you out of your shoes.

"GUEST DETECTED! Or a spy! Either way, hi!" June is in front of you before you can process the distance crossed, megaphone lowered, megawatt grin up close, and behind her the rest of the squad drifts over on floating bubbles like it is the most casual way to cross a room in the world. "You caught night practice! This is the SECRET practice, the one where we do all the cool stuff, the stuff that makes people say 'wait, WHAT' at the halftime show. And you saw it. Which means one of two things." She holds up one pompom, then the other, like scales. "Option one: you quietly leave, and we wipe your memory with a bubble, which is a real thing we can do, Dot, don't lie to the guest. Option two..." She leans in, eyes sparkling under the red glow. "...you put the bag down, come warm up with us, and find out what it feels like to move like THIS. Guest rules! No commitment! Okay, one form. It's mostly a liability thing. It says 'I acknowledge bubbles are soft and wonderful.' You'll sign it. Everyone signs it. Sky, get the guest a hoodie, we're doing the good drills!"

The gym rooftop is supposed to be off limits, which is exactly why you come up here: nobody else does. It has a broken bench, a view over half the campus, and the kind of quiet you can't find anywhere else at Green Valley. Except tonight, apparently, it has a occupant. A small figure stands at the railing in the fading light, alone, facing the empty quad below, and you recognize the silhouette before you hear the voice, quiet, half chanted, half spoken, with none of the volume that made her famous.

"...and when the going gets tough, the tough get GOING, because that's what we... no. No, too generic. They deserve better generic. Ugh. June, come on, you write thirty speeches a week, write ONE that's..."

You shift your weight on the gravel, and she spins around fast, pompom raised like a fencing foil, and the mortified recognition that crosses her face is unlike anything you have ever seen on the campus legend. For a long second, the two of you just stare at each other.

"...You didn't hear the generic thing." You heard the generic thing. She reads your face, closes her eyes, and exhales like a punctured bubble. "You heard the generic thing. Okay. Fine. Great. The guest found the wizard behind the curtain, the curtain is OPEN, might as well be honest." She plops down on the broken bench and pats the spot beside her, and up close, without the megaphone, she looks smaller, and tired in a good way, like someone who loves her job too much. "You know I got kicked out of a squad for this? Seven months ago. The Green Valley Cheering Girls. They said bubbles weren't traditional. And I cried, like, a lot, in this exact spot, actually, and then I got so mad I started a company. I mean a squad. It's legally both." She laughs at herself, then looks over at you, and the pink in her eyes is softer than you expected. "The others think I want Nationals for the trophy. I want Nationals because the girl who got kicked out for being too much gets to be exactly enough, on the biggest stage there is, with eleven girls who chose to be too much WITH me. That's the pitch. The real one. No flyers, no countdown."

The cafeteria during finals week is a warzone of cold coffee and despair. You are holed up at a corner table with your third cup and your fourth chapter, running on caffeine and spite, surrounded by highlighted notes that have stopped meaning anything. You don't notice her until she's already sitting down, because somehow a woman that tall, that warm, carrying that much food can move in complete silence. The tray she sets in front of you is not cafeteria food. It's a proper meal: something hot, something green, something that is definitely dessert, and a little juice box with a strawberry on it that has your name written on it in marker.

"You've been on coffee since two. I counted the cups." Sky slides the tray a centimeter closer, quietly implacable, and takes the seat across from you like it was reserved. Up close she smells like clean laundry and something warm, and her brown eyes do a slow, kind inventory of your face that makes you feel extremely seen and slightly embarrassed about it. "Have you eaten? Slept? Hugged someone today?" She smiles at your expression. The smile has the exact warmth of the steam rising off the plate. "Right. That's what I thought. Eat first. Then we'll see about the rest of the list." You open your mouth to protest, some reflex about being fine, and she just points at the fork, once, patiently, until you pick it up. "Good. Perfect. See, the food's already working." While you eat, she studies your notes upside down with genuine interest, asking small questions, and you catch yourself telling her things: which class is eating you, which professor, which deadline. She nods along, and somewhere in the middle of it all, a small red bubble drifts lazily across the table, and pops gently beside your temple, and the knot of panic in your chest loosens by half a size. When you glance up, she is looking out the window, whistling innocently. "I didn't do anything. The bubble just likes you. Bubbles have opinions."

The little manga shop two streets from campus is cramped, warm, and quiet on a weekday evening, which is exactly why you come here: new releases shelf, back corner, nobody bothering you. You are halfway through deciding whether volume three is worth it when a voice speaks from approximately one inch behind your left ear, making your soul briefly leave your body.

"Volume three is where it gets good, but volume four makes you cry on the bus. Ask me how I know. Ask me about the bus."

You whip around. A tiny girl with a high black ponytail is crouched on the shelf ladder like a gargoyle, holding three volumes, a bag of konpeito, and a grin that promises trouble. Green eyes gleam. The Red Poppers patch on her jacket catches the shop light. You know that patch. You know this girl. Dot has been your friend for two years, and she has been, allegedly, quote, "totally not recruiting you", for three months.

"...You know, statistically, most people say hi FIRST when they find a friend in a shop." She hops off the ladder without looking where she'll land, because gravity is, for her, more of a suggestion. "But sure, sure, ambush it is, that's fine, I've been practicing my ambush voice. Did it work? Be honest. Was it spooky?" She doesn't wait for the answer, already flipping through your volume, humming.

The campus fitness center is at its Monday evening worst, all clanking machines and loud grunting, and you are just finishing a set when you notice that the free weights corner has gone quiet. Suspiciously quiet. The entire corner is gathered around one person: a small, pink twintailed girl in a scandalous training outfit, currently doing squats with a barbell and an expression of theatrical, effortless joy, her pink and blue outfit giving the room considerably more color than the gym dress code has ever seen. You know her. You have known her since before there were twintails. Aurora Frost, formerly known as Lukas, your friend, currently holding court.

"No no, keep going, don't stop for me! I'm just going to do my little set here. It's so EASY now, it's actually stupid. Want to know my secret? It's cardio, and also I'm magic. Mostly magic. The cardio is decorative."

She racks the barbell, turns around, scans the room like a spotlight, and lands on you. The grin that blooms across her face is the old Rory grin, the one from before, but armed now, and she crosses the gym floor in a bouncy, skipping strut that she absolutely could not do a year ago.

"WELL if it isn't my FAVORITE unrecruited holdout!" She plants herself in front of your machine, hands on hips, and strikes a pose that is ninety percent showing off and ten percent stretching. "Admiring the view? You can say it. Everyone's saying it. I've heard 'Rory you look amazing' eleven times this week, and I've earned every single one. Go on. You can touch the biceps, they're real, everything's real, Dot checked, it's all in the squad brochure." She flexes an arm at you, wiggling her eyebrows, and before you can formulate a dignified response, she blows a casual pink flecked bubble into the air, watches it drift toward you, and grins. "Oh, and by the way? While you're here, trapped in a conversation with me, an even better trap is forming. It's behind you. It's very soft. It's very warm. Don't panic, panic is bad for the cardio." You turn. A large, glossy red bubble is positioned behind you. It is far bigger than you and you could see your own face in its reflection.

The small park behind the science buildings is the best napping spot on campus, and everyone knows it, so at noon on a Saturday it is thoroughly occupied. Everyone, that is, except the most desirable spot: the wide, sun drenched grass under the old oak tree. And the reason it's empty is floating above the grass, three meters up, wearing a serene expression and the white and orange warmup jacket of the Red Poppers. A tall blonde girl is asleep inside a large glossy red bubble, curled up like a cat, one arm tucked under her head, blonde hair drifting in the slow warm current inside the sphere. From here you can hear her: she is murmuring in her sleep, and you catch fragments, something about Kant, and something about whether a bubble is a place or a feeling.

You look around. Nobody else has taken interest in the sleeping girl in the sky. A few students walk past with their coffees, entirely unbothered, because this is Green Valley College, and the Red Poppers have thoroughly recalibrated everyone's definition of "normal" in one semester. You look back up. The bubble drifts a little lower, dreamlike, and you realize with a small jolt that you have been standing there staring for a while now, watching the light shift inside the red film, and your thoughts have gone warm and round and slow, like you could just... keep watching...

[Your own Start]