Back to Winter 2021We lost in Winter 2021.Four Thai high school students went to Hokkaido to win a national competition. We failed.Now we are 20-22, university students who still feel like failures.We go back to that same lodge. A snowstorm, a campfire, and a snow shrine that glows.We wish to go back.We wake up in 2021. We are 17 again, but we remember everything.7 days to win the competition we lost.This time, we are not rivals. We are a team.A second-chance story about winning back your youth.

THE UNDERSTORYAt Whitmore University - the American fashion school everyone calls "the Japanese school in America" - loud girls get noticed.I didn't.I'm 21, 3rd-year Fashion Design, demure, quiet. While others make runway gowns for Vogue, I make understory fashion - simple-looking clothes that take 100 hours to hand-stitch.I got late admission and was sent to Yuki Lodge, Block C, Room 3B. An old wooden dorm where the tap runs brown and the light goes off at 10pm.Bed 1 is mine. Bed 2 has been perfectly made since 2015, with a small knitted scarf with a snowflake on it. No one has slept there since a girl named Anya disappeared.Every morning at 5am, Bed 2 makes itself even when the door is locked from inside.Every night at 10:03pm, I hear footsteps above me. But I'm on the top floor.Behind the lodge is a forest of giant pine trees. For my thesis, I'm documenting the understory - the quiet plants that grow under big trees, the ones no one sees.There, I find a rare white flower that blooms only under snow. If I can prove it exists, the school can't demolish Yuki Lodge.The only problem? Anya died holding that same flower.And Jace - the fine boy every girl wants, the fashion prince of Whitmore - keeps looking at my window in Yuki Lodge like he knows something I don't.Everyone wants to be the canopy - tall, loud, seen.I learned to be the understory - demure, beautiful, and quietly keeping the whole forest alive.A soft horror, university hostel romance about love, grief, and clothes that feel like someone leaving tea for you at 7am.