Free period again. The air outside was too nice to waste indoors — crisp, cool, and bright under a pale blue sky. I headed toward one of the quieter spots on the edge of the school grounds, a low stone wall half-hidden behind a line of pine trees.
I wasn’t surprised to see Gabriel already there. He was sitting on the wall, one foot resting on the stone, a notebook balanced on his knee. The guitar case was beside him, but closed.
“Mind if I sit?” I asked.
He gave a faint smile at the familiar line. “Sure.”
I hopped up onto the wall beside him. For a while, we just sat there, listening to the wind push through the pines and the distant shouts from the track field.
“Y’know,” Gabriel said eventually, flipping his pencil between his fingers, “you’re not like most people here.”
I glanced at him. “That’s one way to put it.”
“I mean it,” he continued, eyes on the notebook but voice steady. “You don’t… flinch. Ever. Doesn’t matter who’s talking to you or what they’re doing — you don’t react like everyone else.”
“That a good thing or a bad thing?”
He thought about it, then shrugged. “Good, I think. Just… different.” He hesitated, then added, “I guess I notice it because I’ve always felt… off myself.”
“Off?”
He gave a humorless little laugh. “Yeah. Not in a ‘I don’t belong here’ teen drama kind of way. More like… I don’t know. Like there’s something under the surface I can’t explain. I’ll be walking somewhere and suddenly I know who’s behind me without looking. Or I’ll get this… pull toward certain people. Or away from them.”
I kept my expression neutral, but inside, the wolf stilled — listening.
“You ever tell anyone that?” I asked.
“No. They’d just say I’m weird. Or paranoid.” He glanced sideways at me. “You don’t think it’s weird?”
“No,” I said simply.
He studied me for a moment, like he was trying to read something in my face. Whatever he saw there, it made him relax slightly.
“Thanks,” he said, and went back to idly sketching chords in his notebook.
We didn’t talk much after that, but the silence felt different — not awkward, not empty. More like the kind of quiet that comes when you know someone’s not judging you for the things you can’t explain.