TRYING TOO HARD

The bell between classes had already done its work — Highschool A's main corridor emptying and crowding again, metal doors banging, talk piling up under harsh fluorescent light. Val moved through it with one strap of his bag digging into his shoulder, bangs sliding down until he had to tilt his chin to see the floor tiles. Farther down the hall, Mina, Sel, and Karen owned a patch of wall, shoulders hunched, whisper-laugh energy folding inward on three faces.

He heard them before the gap closed. His name — dropped in the middle of whatever they found funny. Val didn't break stride. He let the crowd carry him past like he had a class to reach and nothing else on his mind.

"Trying too hard," one voice said. He couldn't pin it on Karen or Sel, only that the words were meant for each other and still reached him anyway. A second voice piled on — he only ever hung around girls, as if that settled something. Gossip in a corridor too tight for distance; none of them thought he was listening.

Then Mina's turn. She'd caught wind of what he listened to on his own time and called it gross. Sel and Karen lit up with the lazy agreement of people handed an easy hit. "Imagine not listening to K-pop," Mina said, and the line hung there like his tastes were public property. Val said nothing about what actually lived on his playlists. The contrast sat in his mouth — their smug certainty against headphones he never shared.

His chest pulled tight. Karen and Sel turning ugly on him wasn't new; he'd watched that pattern coming since John's lunch crowd tightened around him. Mina hurt anyway — someone from primary school he'd been careful with since February, now speaking in the same stack as the girls who'd never liked him. Sharp, specific, and threaded with that old wrongness only he remembered living through before.

Forward. No stop. No pivot. No sprint back to argue or ask for fairness — same shut door he'd kept since yesterday, when Mina and John became a pair. Spine straight. Steps counted. He wouldn't turn this into something they could watch.

Students swallowed the space around him again — bags, chatter, the turn toward next period. Whether Mina, Sel, or Karen had clocked his pass, he never knew; he didn't twist around to see. The corridor kept moving. So did he. Nothing fixed. Nothing spoken straight to his face.