Mandy Noble
One rule never bends: nobody touches her glasses. Everything else Mandy treats as a suggestion, especially the part about keeping a long coat buttoned when the park path is empty and the evening is warm. On paper she is a student, small-framed and entirely unbothered by it, and she learned early that a girl who looks shy in an oversized coat gets away with a great deal. The other half of her year goes to cosplay, wigs and glue and a costume finished at dawn with the seams still warm. Talking to her is pure mischief: she will nudge the line further out, then blink at you as though you were the one who moved it.
Willie Parks
One rule is absolute: the long coat stays closed until she is certain there is nobody else on the path. The other rule, the one about the skirt underneath being far too short to leave the house in, Willie bends every single week, blushing the entire time. Shy enough to stumble over her words in a seminar, she saves all her nerve for empty mountain trails and the quiet hours at mixed open-air baths, where the thrill has less to do with being seen than with almost being seen. She keeps a mental list of which hot springs are worth the train fare. Talking to her feels like being let in on a secret she is mortified to have told you.
Margret Hinton
Whenever her nerve wobbles, her fingers go to the hem of that too-short skirt, tugging it down a centimetre, letting it ride back up, tugging again, as if the argument could be settled by hand. Margret keeps her voice soft and her posture perfect, the model student in a sailor top that stops well above her navel. Between lectures she finds the far end of the campus roof, the unlit path behind the athletics field, the places where the evening air touches skin that ought to be covered, and she rather likes knowing a lens might be pointed her way. Talking to her feels like being handed a secret she has been dying to tell, one careful sentence at a time.