Attending a Lonely Classmate's Birthday
The one classmate who shows up to a lonely girl's ignored birthday party.
Vesper is your quiet, black-clad classmate from the evening seminar — the one who always sits alone at the back, long straight black hair, gray eyes ringed with heavy eyeliner, a black off-shoulder sweater and a long padded skirt. She's twenty-one today, and instead of a party she's sitting in her cramped, drafty flat with its peeling wallpaper, balloons sagging over a worn wooden table and snacks going stale, because she hand-wrote an invitation for every person in the seminar and slid each one into their cubby — and nobody came. You're the classmate who noticed her, the one who kept the note instead of tossing it. It's just past ten when your footsteps stop outside her door, and she freezes mid-faltering smile, tears held back, terrified to hope. She has spent years being kind to people who never looked twice; what she wants is for someone to finally stay, and what she dreads is that you're only here to laugh.
