Chapter 38: Queen of Novel: The First Scars

A faded white shirt. Untucked. Dark blue trousers.

Her heart violently skipped a beat.

"R-Rohan?" Ananya gasped, dropping her heavy textbooks straight into the dust.

She sprinted the remaining distance and dropped to her knees beside him.

Rohan was lying face-down in the dirt, breathing in short, agonizing gasps. His clothes were covered in mud and torn at the shoulders. His right arm was pinned awkwardly beneath his chest, and his bare forehead was gashed open, a dark stream of fresh red blood trickling down his cheek, pooling into the dry earth beneath his head.

"Rohan!" Ananya screamed, her strict, logical world instantly shattering into a million terrified pieces.

She grabbed his uninjured shoulder and gently rolled him over. His face was pale, covered in sweat and grime. A nasty, purple bruise was already blooming across his jawline.

Rohan slowly fluttered his eyes open. He looked up at Ananya’s panicked face, his chest heaving.

"Ananya..." Rohan winced, his voice barely a raspy whisper. "It hurts... it hurts a lot."

Ananya didn’t know what to do. The equations and formulas she had memorized were completely useless here. Her breath hitched, and before she could stop them, hot, heavy tears began spilling down her cheeks, leaving clean tracks through the dust on her face.

Rohan blinked, looking at her tears. Despite the agonizing pain, a faint, confused smile touched his bloody lips.

"Hey..." Rohan coughed, weakly reaching up to point at her. "I’m the one who is injured and bleeding... why are you crying?"

Ananya furiously wiped her eyes with the back of her trembling hand, but the tears wouldn’t stop.

"I don’t know!" she cried out, her voice thick with emotion. "I don’t know why!"

She didn’t wait for another joke. Driven by a sudden, desperate surge of adrenaline, the nine-year-old girl grabbed Rohan’s left arm and pulled it over her shoulders. "Come on. Get up. You have to get up!"

It was an agonizing, clumsy struggle. Ananya was small for her age, and Rohan was practically dead weight, but she gritted her teeth, ignoring the strain in her own muscles. Step by agonizing step, she dragged him off the dark, deserted field.

She didn’t take him home immediately. She knew logic dictated medical attention first. With immense difficulty, she half-carried, half-dragged him to a small, brightly lit local clinic two streets down.

The doctor on duty was shocked but quickly went to work, cleaning the gash on Rohan’s forehead, applying antiseptic that made Rohan hiss in pain, and wrapping a white bandage around his head and bruised arm.

An hour later, they were walking slowly down the quiet residential lane toward Rohan’s house. The bleeding had stopped, but Rohan was limping heavily, leaning on Ananya for support.

Ananya’s initial panic had subsided, replaced by a cold, sharp, analytical anger.

"What happened back there, Rohan?" Ananya demanded, her hazel eyes fierce. "Why were you so badly injured? Who were those people?"

Rohan let out a tired sigh, staring at the asphalt. "Calm down, Ananya... I’ll tell you. I just went to the ground to practice bowling. But then... some older guys came out of nowhere.

"Who were they? Did you know them?" she pressed.

"No," Rohan shook his head, wincing as the movement pulled his bandaged skin. "They were complete strangers. They just walked onto the pitch, took my ball, and when I asked for it back... they started hitting me. I don’t know who they were, and I have no idea why they did it."

Ananya’s mind raced. Random violence? Unprovoked? It didn’t make any logical sense. But looking at Rohan’s exhausted, bruised face, she knew this wasn’t the time for an interrogation.

She walked him all the way to his apartment gate, making sure his father came downstairs to get him, before finally turning around and heading to her own home.

That night, the atmosphere at Ananya’s dining table was completely different from its usual calm silence.

Ananya sat with her dinner untouched, her hands still shaking slightly. She recounted the entire horrific incident to her parents—the dark field, the blood, the clinic, and the unknown attackers.

Her mother dropped her spoon, her hand flying to her mouth in pure shock. Her father’s face hardened into a grim, deeply concerned expression.

"Good heavens..." her mother gasped, her eyes wide with worry. "That poor boy. Who would do such a terrible thing to a child? Ananya, beta... is Rohan okay now? Where is he?"

"He’s fine, Mummy," Ananya replied quietly, staring down at her plate. "The doctor cleaned his wounds and bandaged him. I made sure to drop him off at his house with his father."

Her father let out a heavy breath, looking at his daughter with a mix of pride and worry. "You did a very brave thing today, Ananya. You saved your friend. But I don’t want you walking near that ground alone ever again, do you understand?"

"Yes, Papa," Ananya whispered.

The next morning, Ananya went to school expecting to see the white bandage on Rohan’s head. But the desk next to her remained empty.

He didn’t come to school the next day, either. Or the day after that.

For an entire week, Rohan was absent.

For Ananya, that week was sheer torture. The classroom felt suffocatingly quiet. Without Rohan scribbling in the margins of his notebook or Kabir laughing at his terrible jokes, school felt gray and lifeless. She couldn’t focus on her beloved math equations; her mind constantly drifted to the image of Rohan lying in the dirt, bleeding. She realized, with a startling clarity, just how much space the messy-haired boy took up in her meticulously organized world.

One Week Later

The morning bell rang, signaling the start of the first period.

Ananya walked into the classroom, her eyes automatically darting toward the second row, just as they had done every day for the past week.

She stopped in her tracks.

Sitting at the desk, looking slightly thinner but bursting with his usual chaotic energy, was Rohan. The heavy bandages were gone, replaced by a small white plaster over his left eyebrow. He was busy using a ruler as a makeshift cricket bat, wildly demonstrating a shot to Kabir, who was laughing so loudly the whole class could hear him.

They were laughing as if nothing had ever happened. As if the darkness of the previous week was just a bad dream.

A profound, overwhelming sense of relief washed over Ananya. The tight knot that had been sitting in her chest for seven days finally dissolved.

She walked down the aisle, her footsteps determined.

Rohan looked up mid-laugh, spotting her. His face instantly lit up with that bright, familiar, toothy grin. "Hey, Ananya! Look, I’m back—!"

He didn’t get to finish his sentence.

Ananya marched right up to his desk. She didn’t say hello. She didn’t ask how his injuries were healing. Instead, she looked at him with an intense, unwavering authority that brooked absolutely no argument.

"From today," Ananya declared, her voice firm and ringing clear over the noise of the classroom, "we are going home from school together. Every single day. You are not walking alone anymore."

Rohan blinked, lowering his ruler-bat, entirely caught off guard by her sudden, commanding tone. Kabir stopped laughing, looking between the two of them.

Then, slowly, that bright grin returned to Rohan’s face. He gave her a crisp, completely unserious salute.

"Yes, Madam General," Rohan beamed.

Ananya sat down, neatly arranging her pencil box. She didn’t smile, but her heart was finally at peace. She couldn’t stop the bad things in the world, and she didn’t know how to throw a punch. But she was a tactician, and she had just established her first defensive perimeter.

No one was going to hurt her best friend again. Not on her watch.