The Locker

I got to my locker early Tuesday morning, still half asleep, balancing my bag on one shoulder while I fumbled with the combination. When the door finally swung open, something taped to the inside caught my eye before I'd even set my bag down.

A photo. Printed out, crumpled slightly at the edges like it had been folded in a hurry.

It was me and Carlton, from the study session the week before, taken from some angle across the classroom that made it look far more intimate than it had actually been, our heads bent close together over the same page. Someone had drawn a crude heart around us in red marker. Underneath, in handwriting I didn't recognize, someone had written scholarship girl reaching a little high, don't you think?

My stomach dropped so hard I had to grip the edge of the locker door to steady myself.

I stood there staring at it, my mind blank, before I even thought to check the hallway. Half of me expected whoever did this to still be watching, waiting to see my reaction. But it was just the usual morning crowd, nobody paying me any particular attention, everyone moving through their routines like nothing unusual had happened at all.

I yanked the photo down and shoved it into my bag before anyone else could see it, my face burning with something closer to fear than embarrassment. Whoever had done this had known exactly which locker was mine.

I found George at breakfast twenty minutes later, and the second I slid the folded paper across the table, his expression shifted from confusion to something sharper.

"Who would even do this," he said, low, glancing around the dining hall like the culprit might be sitting somewhere among the crowd. "This is harassment, Jenna. You need to report it."

"Report it to who? I don't know who did it."

"Doesn't matter. The school needs to know." He was already reaching for his phone.

"Not yet." I put my hand over his. "Let me figure out what this actually is first."

But I already had a guess forming, one I wasn't ready to say out loud because saying it would make it real. I thought about Freya's face through the classroom door window, the sarcastic edge in her voice in the hallway after. Must be nice, having such an engaging partner.

I didn't have proof. Just a hunch and a folded photo with cruel handwriting scrawled underneath it.

The rest of that day passed in a strange, hyperaware blur. I found myself scanning faces in every hallway, wondering if the person who'd written that note was somewhere close by, watching to see if I'd cracked under it. By the time English class rolled around, I'd almost managed to convince myself I was overreacting, that it was some one-off cruelty from someone with too much time and a printer, nothing that would happen again.

Then I opened my notebook and found a second note folded inside the front cover.

Watch yourself. Some things aren't yours to take.

Same handwriting. Same red pen.

I sat frozen at my desk, notebook open in front of me, my pulse loud enough that I could hear it in my own ears. Carlton slid into the seat beside me a moment later, still pulling out his own materials, and it took him a second to notice I hadn't moved.

"You okay?" he asked.

I didn't answer right away, mostly because I hadn't decided yet whether to show him. Showing him meant admitting how rattled I actually was. It also meant possibly confirming, out loud, exactly who I suspected was behind it, and pointing a finger at his girlfriend felt like a landmine I wasn't ready to step on.

"Jenna."

"It's nothing," I said, closing the notebook.

He didn't buy it, I could tell, his eyes lingering on me a second too long before Mrs. Alvarez started class. But he let it go, at least for the moment, and I spent the next forty minutes barely absorbing a word of the lesson, the folded note sitting like a stone in my bag.

By lunch, I'd decided to tell George everything, the second note included, and his reaction was immediate and furious.

"That's it. We're telling someone. A teacher, the front office, I don't care who." He was already standing, tray half abandoned. "This isn't a joke anymore, if it ever was one."

"George, wait—"

"No, I'm serious. Someone is targeting you, Jenna. That's not something you just sit on."

I followed him to the front office more out of momentum than actual certainty, my stomach twisting with every step. Mrs. Renner, the administrative assistant, took one look at the two crumpled notes and her expression went carefully neutral in the way adults' faces did when they were trying not to alarm you further.

"I'll pass this along to Principal Hayes," she said. "In the meantime, if anything else happens, anything at all, you come straight here. Don't wait."

It should have felt like relief, having it out in the open, official, someone else now aware of what was happening. Instead it just made everything feel heavier, more real, like naming it out loud had given it a kind of permanence it hadn't quite had before.

Word travels fast at a school that size, and by the end of the day I could feel it, the way people's eyes lingered on me a beat too long in the hallway, the way conversations dipped slightly quieter when I walked past certain groups. Nobody said anything directly. But I could feel the shape of the rumor moving through the school anyway, gathering details it didn't actually have, filling in blanks with whatever version sounded most interesting.

Carlton caught up with me outside the library that afternoon, his expression tight in a way I hadn't seen on him before.

"Someone told me what happened. The notes." He kept his voice low, glancing around like he wasn't sure who might be listening. "Why didn't you just tell me?"

"I didn't want to make it a bigger thing than it already was."

"It is a bigger thing. Someone's threatening you, Jenna." He ran a hand through his hair, frustration bleeding into something closer to worry. "Do you have any idea who's doing it?"

I hesitated, the name sitting right there on the edge of my tongue, and something in my hesitation must have given it away, because his expression shifted, understanding landing before I said a single word.

"You think it's Freya."

"I don't know that. I just—" I stopped, unsure how to finish the sentence without it sounding like an accusation I wasn't ready to make. "I don't know who else it would be."

He didn't say anything for a long moment, jaw tight, something working behind his eyes that I couldn't fully read. "She wouldn't do something like this," he said finally, though it came out less certain than I think he meant it to.

"Okay."

"I mean it, Jenna. She's not—" He stopped himself, running a hand through his hair again. "I'll talk to her."

"Carlton, don't. If it is her, and you go accuse her with nothing but a guess, it's just going to make everything worse."

"So what, I just do nothing?"

"I don't know. I don't know what the right move is here." My voice cracked slightly on the last word, the exhaustion of the entire day finally catching up with me all at once. "I just want it to stop."

He looked at me for a long second, something softening in his expression, and for a moment I thought he might actually reach out, close the small distance between us in some way that would have terrified me and steadied me in equal measure. Instead he just nodded, jaw still tight.

"I'll figure it out," he said. "I promise."

I didn't know, watching him walk away toward the parking lot, whether that promise was one he'd actually be able to keep. And I didn't know yet that the notes in my locker were only the beginning, a small, careful test of exactly how far someone was willing to go before the real damage started.