She loves me…

Pluck.

She loves me not…

Pluck. Rin grinned at the one remaining petal of the now-nearly-naked daisy in his hand.

"Is fate telling me something?" Rin laughed at how absurd he was acting, but he couldn't help but feel it was true. "Stephanie loves me, right?" After all, that was the only explanation for why she was acting weird around him. She acted all bubbly for most the other guys, except Rin.

Proof? Rin could count all the ways she tried to flirt with him, obviously playing hard-to-get. They sat next to each other during Algebra, a class they shared at Australia's prestigious Gould Athletic Preparatory Academy. Sometimes he'd ask to borrow her eraser and she'd blush, clutching the eraser to her chest and mutter quickly, "Sorryit'smybrother's." Then the guy sitting in front of them would ask to borrow it and she'd hand it over without hesitation.

But she'd lure him back with her emerald eyes and requests to help her with math homework. How could Rin say no to those long lashes?

Rin wasn't sure how this weird infatuation with Stephanie started. It definitely wasn't love at first sight; his first impression of her was that she had unusually beautiful flaxen long hair, but that was about it. They weren't even in the same echelon in terms of skill, as Stephanie didn't swim as well as Rin. Their only connection was this one algebra class.

And he was sure something must have happened where one mistook something from the other as a flirt, causing the other to flirt back, and boom his current obsession of her spontaneously generated. Just who started it, Rin doesn't really care right now.

Stephanie, he was convinced, had the hots for him.

"Yeah right," Dustin said, punching Rin's shoulder.

Rin scoffed at his relay buddy as he stuffed a helping of cafeteria food into his mouth. "What, jealous?"

"Pfft, of course not. There's nothing to be jealous of," Dustin said, laughing. "Am I supposed to want a flower telling me who I'm gonna marry?"

That drew a frown from Rin. "It's not just the flower. It's all sorts of things, I've been telling you that! You know, signs."

"The only sign I see is that you're a weirdo, I mean, seriously, who thinks this much over some girl?" Dustin rolled his eyes, and then a passerby with a blue cap greets him with a hi-five.

"Oh geez, don't tell me Rin's talking about Stephanie again," Brandon, adjusting his cap, said.

"You guys suck."

"Rin, that fate stuff is kinda out there. We'll believe you when we see some…" Brandon made an "O" shape with his hand and put his index finger in it. Loud laughter followed a long groan. The laughter stopped, though, when a small flaxen-haired girl approached the table and stood in front of Rin.

"Rin," she said, eyes downcast, a blush on her cheeks. "Can you... follow me somewhere? I wanna ask you something."