Autumn 2020 arrived unusually quietly. Masks covered most of everyone’s faces, muffling the bustle of Class 1, Grade 10.
The pandemic split campus life into fragments: online classes, COVID tests, and a partly sealed-off athletic field... But the basketball boy’s spark didn’t fade beneath his cast. Instead, with every glance exchanged over their masks, his feelings quietly took a turn. She helped him copy notes; he taught her to shoot nothing but net. The doodles on his cast grew more numerous, like the feelings they were secretly nurturing, growing wild in those extraordinary times.
Some encounters, it turned out, were fate’s way of using the ache of a broken bone and the distance of a mask to gently place the most ardent of heartbeats in front of two people.
