Constraint

Chapter 6 - Michael

After a long time of waiting and hoping and praying, our friend is finally back!

My babe Nicole is back to her cheerful self again. She now attends her classes as usual, but she has a lot of requirements to catch up on, so she doesn't have a lot of free time. Meanwhile, Charles is acting normal like before. He and I are hanging out more, doing some bro stuff together.

For the last month, Diana has been recovering from her. . . traumatizing experience. Whenever we visit her in the hospital, we would see her staring at space for a while before she would notice us and cry in joy because she missed us. She would always ask if she was still in a nightmare, like the first time we saw her, and we would always say no and we would comfort her and cheer her up.

To be honest, even before Diana disappeared, I wasn't that close to her when we were hanging out together. The only reason why I was a part of her friends' circle in the first place was that when I told Charles, who already became friends with Diana and Nicole, that I had a crush on Nicole, he forced me to hang out with them so I could get closer to her.

My only goal at that time was to get Nicole to notice me, but when I saw how fun were Nicole, Diana, and Charles together, I knew I wanted to be with them too.

And because of the constant visiting to the hospital to check on Diana, our bond together as friends became even stronger. We did everything we could to make her feel better: we told each other jokes, we ate meals together, and more. Slowly enough, she got better and better until she was ready to get discharged and go back to class.

That day was the happiest for the four of us. We knew that everything's going to be fine for our gang. No more worries.

* * *

"Class dismissed." The professor said as soon as the bell rang to signal the end of class.

Charles and I, along with the rest of the students, stood up from our seats and began filing out of the room. While waiting for the others to go out first, I looked at the whiteboard where the professor was writing complicated formulas and problems on it.

"Man, tell me again why are we taking Physics?" I asked Charles out of the blue. "Because I don't know how I'm gonna use those stupid formulas in real life. I mean, when would I ever look for the average acceleration of something?"

Charles glanced at me. "When you want to know the acceleration of a moving object, like a car, for example?"

I groaned. "That's not the point!"

He shrugged. "Well, you're going to have to pass the course if you ever want to graduate."

We finally walked out of the room and headed towards the cafeteria for lunch. The cafeteria was packed with people so Charles and I both rushed to the long line of people to take our orders before the best food goes out of stock. A while later, we looked around for a vacant table to sit and we saw Nicole sitting at a table by herself. She was looking a bit. . . lonely?

We both went to her, and she looked up as soon as we were near.

"Hey, guys." She smiled, but not quite reaching her eyes.

"Hi, Nicole," Charles said, then sat on an empty chair.

"Yow, babe. What's up?" I went to the closest chair near her.

"Fine," she replied while fiddling with her food. "Diana's busy catching up with stuff so she won't eat lunch with us."

It's been more than a week since Diana got out of the hospital, and she's doing great so far. She was catching up with the classes she missed, and she was also trying to spend as much time with us too as possible, though Nicole, Charles, and I would insist that she finish her pending works first so she could hang out with us later.