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Mei woke up the next morning feeling extremely sick. Her throat was killing her, for obvious reasons, and she had a killer headache. When she tried to get up to go shower, she had to sit back down from the vertigo she got from standing up.

Eventually, she successfully got in the shower and when she was done, she decided it would be a big sweater day. She had zero energy to put on anything too fashionable.

"Mei, honey, you're going to be late if you stay in here any longer." Her mom called through the bedroom door.

"Okay," she replied. "I'll be out soon."

Her voice was strained, meaning Minghao must've had a tight enough grip to mess with her vocal cords or something along those lines. Mei walked out of her room after diligently covering the bruise on her neck, then went downstairs to the kitchen.

"Good morning, Mei." Her dad beamed.

"Morning." She mumbled in response, a slight voice crack.

Her mom tilted her head. "Did you lose your voice?"

Her father crossed his arms. "Was that bruise really makeup?"

"Yeah," Mei lied straight through her teeth with a slight chuckle. "I think it was just really bad timing for my vocal chords to give out."

Mei was hesitant to walk inside. She didn't want Minghao knowing he hurt her, physically, anyways. With a little push from herself, she got out of her car and headed towards the entrance, where Kino and Renjun were waiting, luckily. When they spotted the girl, worry immediately clouded their eyes.

"Mei, you're so pale." Kino pointed out, making Renjun put a hand to her forehead.

Renjun pouted. "And you're burning up."

Mei shook her head. "I'm fine."

Both of them raised an eyebrow at her. "Did you lose your voice?" Kino asked.

"Unfortunately," she choked out. "Thanks to Minghao."

The day was quiet, meaning Mei hadn't seen Minghao or Jaehwa all day. Her worry of seeing him melted a bit as she walked to Kino's locker at lunch.

"How are you feeling?" He asked, putting some hair behind the girls shoulder.

She sighed, but smiled nonetheless. "Not great."

"How are you still so bright and bubbly even when you're sick?"

"I don't want to give Minghao the pleasure of seeing me upset because of him."

He patted her head. "Your ambition is something else."

The two went to the cafeteria, arm in arm, and when she walked in, everyone's eyes were on her once again. She wasn't sure if the attention was due to the fact that she was with Kino, or because of the fact that Minghao nearly strangled her made its way around the school. She sat down at her table and shortly after, Renjun came in and sat down with the two of his friends.

"Hi, Kino," he said. "Hey, Mei."

The older girl smiled in response and continued on with her lunch, and before lunch ended, she started hearing a bunch of loud squeals.

She turned around and saw Minghao walking towards Jaehwa. Mei made eye contact and he smirked at her, so she just smiled at him, hoping that the gesture would throw him off. It did for a couple of seconds, but he ignored it and sat down.

Mei thought it was weird that he was in the cafeteria. Usually, kids were separated from everyone else if they got in serious trouble, and he did after a teacher caught him on the cameras. Did he do something to get out of his punishment?

"I'll be right back." She told the boys, getting up from the table.

She left the cafeteria with a mission and hunted down the room of the teacher that caught Minghao. She knocked on the classroom door and a woman, maybe in her early twenties, opened the door.

"Hi, how can I help you?" She asked.

"I was just coming to see if Mr. Baek was here," Mei replied. "But I guess he's not."

"He didn't call in or give any warning this morning," the woman told her. "Hopefully he's okay."

Mei nodded in agreement. "Oh okay, thank you. Have a nice day."

"You, too."

Mei walked back to the cafeteria and sat down with the boys again. "Is everything alright?" Renjun asked.

She nodded. "Yeah. Something weird crossed my mind and I had to go check on it."

The boys didn't push her to tell them what was on her mind, which she was thankful for.

The fact that Minghao wasn't in detention or something and the teacher that caught him was gone, was odd to say the least. Mei felt like she needed to do research, find something to answer a question that had been on her mind ever since Minghao pushed her up against the lockers.

All Mei could remember when she pulled out her laptop was the inhuman speed Minghao had, not to mention the strength, so she went to her search engine.

She looked up what it meant if someone had speed like that and started looking. What she found was odd, but she would need more information to prove what she was thinking, so she closed her laptop and called it a night on the research.

Mei told herself she was overthinking, that there was no way he could be anything other than human.

But her gut feeling and her brain were telling her two different things.

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