Puppy

Suddenly, her phone vibrated again.

Hesta thought Eucali had something else to say. When she lit up the screen, she saw that the sender was "Ksenia."

At that instant, Hesta distinctly felt a spasm of pain. She stared at Ksenia's name on the screen. It was like a spell, capable of drawing all her attention no matter the time or place.

After a long while, she opened the message and saw:

"Are you free tomorrow afternoon? Want to come play chess at the Drama Club? At the theater you came to last time."

Hesta bent over the table and lightly knocked her forehead against it several times, as if that could free her from the inexplicable bitterness of the moment.

Amid that fine, electric-current-like pain was an even thinner thread woven through it, throbbing like a pulse and brimming with surging happiness.

On the other end, Ksenia waited with her phone in hand. She had long noticed that Hesta was not the sort of person to put her phone on silent. Whenever Hesta received a message before, she would immediately take out her device to check it.

But more than twenty minutes had passed since the message was sent, and Hesta still had not replied. What was going on?

Maybe her phone was not with her right now?

Or perhaps she was doing something that made replying inconvenient...

Ksenia turned over in bed, considering every possibility before rejecting them one by one. She randomly opened various apps, then quickly closed every last one of them.

Forget it. Sleep.

She put her phone beneath her pillow, thinking that perhaps good news always came just when she was about to give up.

Yet after closing her eyes for a while, she pulled out her phone to check again—still no reply.

Maybe Hesta