"Kuki, that's crazy. Even by your standards."
"What? I'm just saying they'd make a cute couple is all!"
Wally raised an eyebrow at his girlfriend before, reluctantly - painfully - deciding to humor her and at least look at the targets of her gossip.
On the left side of the lunchroom: Abigail Lincoln, the most popular girl outside of the seniors and possibly cooler than all of them combined. She was athletic, a student leader, and every action she took was smooth as ice.
On the right side of the lunchroom: some huge nerd with a pair of aviator goggles.
"Wow! Now that I look at um, I think you might be onto… absolutely nothing."
"Awwwwwww!" Kuki groaned childishly (but also very, very adorably, Wally thought to himself. Her boundless enthusiasm was part of her charm, after all.) "Come onnnnnn!"
"She's probably never been within 10 feet of that dork! She probably doesn't even know his name!" He pointed at Kuki and gave her a dramatically perplexed look. "…Do you even know his name?"
"Nope! He just started here this morning!"
Wally just stared at Kuki for a moment, dumbfounded. This was getting more and more ridiculous every time the sophomore opened her mouth. She didn't seem to notice and continued to ramble. "Oh! But I think one of the girls said one of the boys said he used to live around here as a kid but had moved away for a while? …That or he moved here from Mars and only speaks Latin. It was one or the other."
"I don't care if he's from Pluto! What makes you so sure that the most popular girl in the 10th grade and some dweeb you've never even talked to are 'totally lovely perfectful' for each other?!"
Kuki blinked at Wally's outburst, but it wasn't because of how flustered he was getting (she was used to how seriously he took everything; it was a trait they had in common and she found it rather endearing); it was because she wasn't sure how to respond.
She looked over at the targets of their debate. They'd both finished their lunch and threw their trash away, completely unaware of the other's presence, before heading down opposite halls to class. Even after they'd left, she kept staring into space, trying to reach for something in her mind. What was it? Why did those two bother her so much?
Wally was growing a little concerned at Kuki's silence. Her expression was uncomfortably solemn and her featured were creased like she was trying to remember something. "Uh… Kuki? Earth to Kuki!"
"…I just... I just know they should be together, okay?" Her response lacked the playful fury their debate had held up until a few seconds ago. It almost sounded sad, and Wally wasn't sure how to respond. Should he, like, hug her or something?
Most of the time, Kuki was pretty easy to read. She was an energetic teenage girl, a hopeless romantic, a lover of all things cute, and more often than not in her own little world. Wally had spent months of their freshman year watching Kuki from a distance and trying to impress her, but she never seemed to notice. Then, his friends pressured him into asking her to homecoming. When she said yes gleefully, he thought maybe she had noticed all those times he'd offered to carry her books and tripped over himself after all. Except she hadn't; he found out soon after that she had said "yes" to the date without a clue who he was aside from his name.
When he asked her why, she'd given him a strange look and said "I knew we'd be good together" much like she was saying about their classmates now.
Most of the time Kuki was pretty easy to read, but sometimes she seemed like she had a sixth sense. A very, very specific sixth sense that applied only to them and apparently two of their fellow sophomores. He might have asked her if she was some sort of psychic, but her perplexed expression every time the matter came up made it clear that his guess was as good as hers.
"Uh…okay, if you say so, Kuki. You… wanna walk to geometry together?"
"Okay!" she responded, leaping from the table, tossing her trash into the nearby bin and all but dragging Wally behind her as if nothing strange had been discussed moments before.
As they headed to class, Wally told himself that he'd let her win the debate because it was dumb. After all, the other option – that he also felt deep down that two of his classmates who had never met were destined to be together – was just too nuts.