At first, Shawn was thrilled to discover Tina's Dreamcast stream.
After all, in that dream, she was in love with him.
But once the initial excitement faded, he realized he couldn't conclude she had feelings for him based on a single dream.
After all, dreams could be unreliable. What if she woke up and decided it had been a nightmare?
Shawn clung to this pessimistic thought as he checked the Dreamcast platform every day for Tina's streams.
Her dreams were quite varied—from childhood adventures in open fields to murder mysteries on cruise ships—and they won her a dedicated following.
Naturally, teenage love stories remained a recurring theme in Tina's dreams.
Each time Shawn noticed her having one of those dreams, his heart raced with anxiety.
After all these years, she must have met men better than him, right? Then surely other men would appear in her dreams, and he would be devastated.
He pressed on through the worry and curiosity, only to discover that every single one of Tina's teenage love stories was about him.
At seventeen, Tina first laid eyes on Shawn in the school corridor.
It was raining that day. The hallway was slippery. Tina was carrying a stack of workbooks downstairs to the teacher's office when her foot slipped. Startled, she dropped the books.
At the same moment, a boy's worried voice rang out behind her: "Watch out!"
By then Tina had already steadied herself and grabbed the handrail, but the boy apparently thought she was falling and lunged to catch her—only to tumble down the stairs himself.
A loud series of thuds echoed through the stairwell. Tina gripped the handrail tighter as she watched, horrified, as the chubby boy tumbled down.
Then she watched in disbelief as he picked himself up like nothing had happened, gave her a goofy grin, and said, "Oops, you dropped your books—let me help pick them up."
Before she could respond, he was already gathering the scattered workbooks, as if the fall had never occurred.
Tina wanted to ask if he was hurt, but he was so earnestly collecting her papers that she swallowed the question, left only with a lingering thought: So fat people really don't feel pain when they fall down stairs?
Watching this, Shawn couldn't help but laugh at his own pathetic display.
He'd thought he was pulling off a heroic rescue, only to make a total fool of himself instead.
Sure, he was heavy, but he wasn't made of rubber. It had hurt—a lot. But his pride wouldn't let him show it, so he'd forced himself up, brushed himself off, and pretended everything was fine.
Then he'd looked up and seen the girl's terrified but impossibly beautiful eyes, and the only thing that came out of his mouth was "Oops, oops," before quickly bending down to pick up her scattered workbooks.
He'd felt like such a pig. How could he have stared straight into a goddess's eyes like that?
One rainy day during their second year, during chemistry lab, Tina's partner knocked over a glass bottle of chemicals and pinned all the blame on her.
She was scolded by the teacher until she was in tears, left alone to redo the experiment in the empty lab.
A knock came at the door. She turned and saw Shawn standing there, peering in nervously. "Tina, I'm the one responsible for locking up the chemistry lab. Are you... are you done with your experiment?"
Tina looked at the mess of glassware and the blank recording sheet in front of her, shook her head, and then, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all, let the tears she'd been holding back finally fall. She quickly reached up to wipe them away.
"Wait!" The boy rushed in and asked urgently, "Did you wash your hands?"