French Fries - Part 2

One morning, I woke up to find that none of my friends were available to play, so I went to the local internet café. As soon as I logged into my Facebook account, I noticed a new friend request. The profile name was "Batata Frita", which is Portuguese for "French Fries", and the picture was of a girl, but only from the neck down. She was wearing a red plaid shirt, and you could see her long hair falling over her shoulders. Even though I didn't know her, I was intrigued and decided to accept the request. A few minutes later, she sent me a message saying hello. I replied, and we quickly fell into conversation.

I don't remember much about the beginning of our chat, but I recall asking her age and, to my surprise, she was almost the same age as me. We ended up talking about school and our plans for the future, and I realized that she was a very smart person. At one point, she mentioned that she wanted to study astronomy when she was older, and I was stunned because that's what I wanted to do, too! We immediately started talking about that, and the conversation continued until my time at the internet café ran out.

For the rest of that day, all I could think about was that mysterious girl. For the first time ever, I had found someone with the same interests as me. The next day, I went back to the internet café and talked to her for two hours, and I did the same every day after that. I found myself looking forward to talking to this random girl I had never even met. Finally, after many conversations, I decided to ask for her name. When I did, however, she got confused. She thought I already knew who she was because of the shirt she was wearing in her profile picture.

I opened her profile picture once again, and after staring at it for a moment, I finally figured it out: there was a girl in my school with a shirt just like that! Her name was Giovanna, and that's who I had been talking to all along. I had never spoken to her at school; she always sat in the corner of the classroom and never really talked to anyone. As she was the quietest kid in my class, nobody ever noticed her—not even me. But now that I had gotten to know her better, I could finally see what I was missing. For me, she went from being the quiet girl in the corner to being the most interesting person in school.