Crunchyroll and Crushes
1206 Words
Sam Williams knew three things for sure.
One: Wi-Fi was humanity’s greatest invention.
Two: Leanne Lewis would never be on time.
And three: He was entirely, hopelessly, painfully in love with her.
He sat two seats behind her in trig, watching her twirl a pink pen between her fingers with the finesse of a kunoichi assassin. Her head was tilted slightly, her long lashes fanned out in deep concentration—or what looked like concentration, anyway. But Sam knew that expression. She was gone. Mentally miles away. Most likely mid-battle with a fictional villain or mid-kiss with her pixelated soulmate.
He sighed.
Leanne had no idea. About any of it. Not the way he purposely took the long route home to walk by her locker. Not how he changed electives last year just to share chemistry class. Not how he’d built an entire mod on his Switch to insert her anime OC into Dream Date Dungeon just so he could take her on fictional ramen dates.
She was the tornado. He was the tree she didn’t notice she always spun around.
Sam wasn’t bad-looking. Medium height, soft brown curls he kept slightly messy, and glasses that made him look a little too much like every “childhood friend” character who got rejected by the lead girl halfway through season one. He wore layered hoodies and carried a digital watch he coded himself to buzz every time Leanne posted on her anime blog.
Today, she was extra unreachable.
Ms. Barnett, their math teacher, had droned on for exactly twenty-five minutes about sin, cosine, and the “real-life application of angles.” Sam had managed to track Leanne’s descent into her own imagination by the slow tilt of her head and the half-lidded sparkle in her eyes. She was scribbling something in her notebook—not notes, unless Xs and swoony hearts now qualified as academic shorthand.
“Leanne?” Ms. Barnett’s voice cut through the air.
No response.
“Leanne Lewis.”
Still nothing.
The class snickered. Sam winced.
“Ms. Lewis!” Ms. Barnett barked.
Leanne jerked upright, blinking like she’d been ripped from another dimension. “Yes! I—uh—twelve episodes!” she shouted.
Silence.
The entire class broke into laughter. Vanessa groaned and facepalmed. Sam bit his lip, not unkindly.
Ms. Barnett pinched the bridge of her nose. “Miss Lewis, please enlighten us. What’s the cosine of 45 degrees?”
Leanne paused, then slowly raised her pink pen like it was a sword. “Does it... have character development?”
More laughter. Vanessa smacked her forehead harder.
Ms. Barnett exhaled the way one does when they reconsider every life choice that led them to teaching. “See me after class.”
Leanne sunk in her seat. Sam glanced at her, offering a soft smile. She met his eyes and grinned sheepishly, whispering, “Worth it.”
Sam smiled back. She didn’t notice the way his cheeks flushed. Again.
---
Gym class was worse.
They were halfway through volleyball drills, which Leanne interpreted as “mild torture disguised as sports.” Her idea of cardio was sprinting through the house to catch a Crunchyroll livestream. The sun beat down on the blacktop, and Coach Hall’s whistle cut the air like a guillotine.
Leanne was positioned on the edge of the court, swaying side to side as if the volleyball court was a grassy hill and she was a fantasy heroine in a soft breeze. Her knees were bent, her arms… somewhere, but definitely not in a receiving position. Her mind?
Light-years away.
In her head, she was no longer Leanne Lewis, high school anime freak with P.E. trauma.
She was Lady Leandra, dragon princess of the Fire Bloom Isles, exiled from her realm after refusing to marry the cruel Ice Duke. She wore a gown made of enchanted moonlight and wielded a sword forged from her own heartbreak. Before her stood Kael, the cold, mysterious assassin with haunted eyes and a tragic past—just the way she liked them.
“Lady Leandra,” Kael rasped, “I was hired to kill you… but I find myself unable to raise my blade.”
Her heart thundered. “Why not?”
He stepped closer, the wind tousling his obsidian hair. “Because somewhere between the shadows and the silence, you made me believe in love again.”
She gasped. His lips neared hers.
And then—
WHAM!
A white blur collided with her face.
Pain bloomed behind her eyes. Leanne stumbled backward and collapsed onto the court, arms flailing like a startled anime extra. The volleyball rolled to a stop beside her as laughter echoed from the sidelines.
“HEADSHOT!” someone yelled.
Vanessa ran over, panting. “Leanne! Leanne, oh my gosh—are you okay?”
Leanne sat up, dazed. “Did Kael… betray me?”
Vanessa groaned. “No, girl. Kael did not betray you. A volleyball betrayed you. Reality betrayed you.”
Leanne blinked up at her. “That felt personal.”
“Because it was!” Vanessa huffed. “You were off in dreamland again! This is why people think you’re weird.”
Leanne pouted, rubbing her temple. “If being weird means I get to kiss shadow assassins, I accept my fate.”
Vanessa rolled her eyes. “That’s not even a real sentence.”
Sam jogged over from the bleachers, holding a cold water bottle and a towel. “Hey, I saw it happen. That was, like, a critical hit.”
He handed her the bottle. She took it gratefully and pressed it to her forehead.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “Minor brain damage. I think I unlocked another love triangle in my head, though, so bonus.”
Vanessa snatched the towel and helped mop the sweat off Leanne’s forehead. “You’ve got to stop spacing out like this. Honestly. You’re not the main character.”
Leanne looked up at her. “Not with that attitude.”
“Girl.”
Sam smiled, sitting down beside her. “To be fair, you do have strong protagonist energy.”
Leanne beamed. “Thank you, Sam. At least someone gets it.”
Vanessa gave him a look. “Don’t encourage her.”
Sam just shrugged.
Of course he got it. He got all of it. The way her eyes lit up when she talked about season finales. How she cried when background characters got their own episode arcs. How she fell in love so completely with every fantasy world that reality never stood a chance.
Leanne wasn’t just watching anime.
She was made of it.
As the rest of the class rotated drills, Leanne sat on the sideline, sipping water and sketching on the back of her math notes. She doodled Kael with dramatically windblown hair and captioned it “My assassin boyfriend who never lies (except for plot reasons).”
Sam watched her from the corner of his eye, biting the inside of his cheek.
He could code a game. He could solve complex equations. He could even build a weather balloon from scrap parts.
But he had no idea how to tell the girl of his dreams that he was already hers.
- Writer
