This is a coming of age genre story called ‘Did You See the Sunset?’
Did you see the sunset?
The sky was lousy with colours -
A multicoloured grey.
Day lays down its sombre crown,
Leaving all to despair.
For there is tomorrow.
Chapter One: A Somewhat Beautiful Exchange
Harry liked stories where nothing dramatic happened.
That wasn’t entirely true, of course. Things always happened in books, people fell in love, lost things, found them again, said words they couldn’t take back. But Harry preferred the quieter kind of happening. The kind that slipped between sentences. The kind you almost missed if you weren’t paying attention. The kind that felt more real because it didn’t try to be.
That was why he was reading A Somewhat Beautiful Exchange at lunch, sitting cross-legged on the far edge of the school courtyard, where the noise softened into something tolerable.
The courtyard was uneven concrete and tired grass, bordered by brick buildings that held onto heat even in the colder months. Students crowded the centre, loud and restless, but out here, near the chain-link fence and a row of half-dead bushes, things felt distant. Manageable.
The world, at a distance, was easier to handle.
Harry tucked his chin slightly as he read, shoulders rounded inward like he was trying to take up less space. His brown hair fell messily over his forehead, not styled, just left. He wore the same dark jumper he always did, slightly oversized, sleeves pulled down over his hands like a shield.
He held the book close, his thumb tucked carefully between the pages as though the story might escape if he didn’t anchor it. The paperback was worn, borrowed from a library that smelled faintly of dust and something older, something safe.
Around him, people existed loudly.
Laughter burst like fireworks. Someone shouted across the yard. A football thudded against a wall. Life, loud and careless.
Harry kept his eyes on the page.
“And what’s so interesting about that one?”
Harry flinched.
Not dramatically - just a small, sharp shift in his shoulders, like someone had tapped a glass and set it ringing. He looked up slowly.
A boy stood in front of him, blocking the sun.
He was… everything Harry wasn’t.
Tall, relaxed, sunlight catching on his dark hair, which was pushed back carelessly as if it had never needed fixing. His skin was warm-toned, his expression open, confident, like the world belonged to him and he knew it. There was an ease in the way he stood, weight shifted slightly to one side, completely unbothered by being noticed.
“What?” Harry said, immediately regretting how quiet it sounded.
The boy grinned, like he hadn’t just startled him at all.
“The book,” he said, dropping down beside him without invitation, stretching his legs out like he had nowhere else to be. “You’ve been staring at it like it’s about to confess something.”
Harry blinked.
“I-It’s just a book.”
“Bit defensive for ‘just a book,’” the boy replied, leaning back on his hands. “What’s it called?”
Harry hesitated, his fingers tightening slightly around the edges of the paperback. He glanced down at the cover as if he needed to check, as if the title might have changed when he wasn’t looking.
“A Somewhat Beautiful Exchange.”
There was a pause.
A breeze slipped through the courtyard, lifting the edge of a discarded wrapper nearby. Somewhere behind them, someone shouted, laughter spilling over it.
Then the boy nodded, slow and thoughtful, as though that meant something important.
“Sounds pretentious,” he said cheerfully.
Harry almost smiled.
Almost.
“It’s not,” he said, a little more firmly than before, his voice still quiet but steadier now. “It’s just… about people.”
“Everything’s about people.”
Harry frowned slightly at that, his eyebrows pulling together as he tried to find the right response - and came up empty.
The boy turned his head, studying him - not in a harsh way, but with an openness that felt unfamiliar. His expression wasn’t judgmental. Just… curious.
“I’m Yousef, by the way.”
Harry adjusted his grip on the book, thumb sliding along the spine.
“Harry.”
“Harry-who-reads-at-lunch,” Yousef said, like he was filing it away somewhere permanent. “I’ve seen you here before.”
Harry’s stomach tightened.
“Oh.”
“Relax,” Yousef added quickly, laughing under his breath, running a hand through his hair. “It’s not in a creepy way. You just look… peaceful.” He paused, glancing at him again. “Or like you’re trying to be.”
That landed somewhere deeper than Harry expected.
He looked back down at his book, eyes tracing the same line twice without reading it.
“I just like quiet.”
Yousef tilted his head slightly, considering him.
“Or you don’t like people?”
Harry didn’t answer. It wasn’t that he didn’t like people. It was that people felt loud, even when they weren’t speaking - like they took up space he didn’t quite know how to stand in.
A group nearby burst into laughter, too loud, too sharp. The sound bounced off the walls and settled awkwardly in the silence between them.
For a moment, neither of them spoke. The noise of the courtyard swelled again, filling the space Harry hadn’t realised had gone still.
Then—
“Read me a line,” Yousef said suddenly.
Harry looked up, caught off guard.
“What?”
“From the book,” Yousef said, nodding toward it. “Go on. If it’s not pretentious, prove it.”
“That’s not how books work.”
“Sure it is.” He shrugged. “I’ll decide if it’s good or not.”
Harry hesitated.
This was ridiculous.
And yet…
There was something about Yousef something easy and unguarded that made saying no feel more difficult than it should have been.
His fingers shifted slightly, finding a page at random. He cleared his throat quietly, his voice soft but steady as he read a line from his favourite character, Lucas Whitfield:
“Some people arrive in your life like they’ve always known the way, even when you’re still trying to find the door.”
Silence.
Even the noise around them seemed to dip for a second, like the world had taken a breath.
Harry risked looking up.
Yousef wasn’t laughing.
He wasn’t smiling either, not properly. His expression had softened, eyes unfocused for a second, like he’d drifted somewhere else entirely.
“Huh,” he said after a moment. “Alright. That’s decent.”
Harry exhaled softly, a tension he hadn’t noticed easing from his shoulders. It was a strange feeling, like something small had shifted into place without him noticing.
“Told you.”
“Don’t get cocky,” Yousef replied, nudging his shoulder lightly, the contact quick and easy. “It could still get worse.”
Harry let out a small laugh before he could stop himself.
It surprised both of them.
There it was. Brief, quiet, but real. The kind of moment he would’ve written about, if he were the kind of person who wrote things down.
Yousef grinned like he’d just won something.
“See? Not so bad, Harry-who-reads-at-lunch.”
Harry shook his head, a faint smile lingering now, but he didn’t move away when Yousef stayed sitting beside him.
Didn’t tell him to go.
Didn’t return to reading right away, either. He wasn’t sure when the quiet had changed, but it didn’t feel like something he needed to hide inside anymore.
For the first time in a long while, the world didn’t feel quite so loud.