Are You Guys Dating?

It was one of the first days of Senior year. Most mornings, we had announcements in the school Commons. Being a normal day, the usual round of announcements were made.   I was sitting in the near corner of the room with my group of friends, joking and chuckling with each other. Students stood up and made announcements. Sports teams had practices, clubs had meetings, all of that random nonsense.  Then our Principal stood up and said:
"Everybody, we have an exchange student this year. Her name is... and correct me if I mispronounce this: Tong Mah-cheng?"
From the far side of the room, a chinese girl stood up and took a step forward.
"It's pronounced 'Tang Mei-xing'"
"Tong Meh-sing?"
"um... close enough"

In my economics class that day, she sat next to me. We exchanged pleasantries, but I had to stop myself from sneaking glances at her all class.

Later in that day, I saw her in the library working on her class schedule. I sat down with her and explained how our school's schedule worked. And then we talked. And kept talking.

And then for the next few months, we kept hanging out with each other, seeing each other in class, eating lunch together.  We were texting each other so much, my mom upgraded my cell phone plan to unlimited monthly texts.

She invited me to her birthday in November. As a birthday present, I bought her tickets to the winter dance.

It was around mid-November when my friends started asking me "Are you guys dating?"

The first few times I heard that, I replied "No, of course not. We're just friends." But after a while, I realized that we might be. After all, I did have feelings for Mei.  Feelings that, because of the incident with Hannah, I kept well hidden. Remembering what happened with Hannah, I didn't dare make the first move.

But after a couple weeks of the "Are you guys dating?" question, I began to reply "If we are six weeks from now, then this is when we probably started, but it's hard to tell."  And so it continued like that until Christmas break.  Over Christmas break, our texts dwindled down to nothing for some reason. Towards the end of break, I got a call from Mei.
"Hello?"
"JACK! I'm so angry at you!"