جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 7

It is not real blood. I checked once, in the dark, running my tongue over my teeth and the soft inside of my cheeks. Nothing. Just the copper memory of biting down too hard while I cried. The crying has become a habit the way breathing is a habit. I do it without deciding to. My pillow is permanently damp on one side. The skin under my eyes feels thin and bruised, as if someone has been pressing their thumbs there every night while I sleep.Charles used to kiss that place. Soft, almost not there, the way you kiss something you are afraid of breaking. Now he looks at me like I am already broken and he is glad.I lie still and listen to the house. It is too quiet. The quiet has a weight. It sits on my chest and makes every breath shallow. My mother’s bedroom door is closed. It has been closed for weeks. Sometimes I stand outside it and press my palm flat against the wood, as if I might feel heat or movement or the shape of an apology. There is nothing. Only the empty space where her per

I am standing at my locker when the office aide walks him down the hallway. The aide is talking, pointing at doors, explaining something about schedules and maps. The boy listens with the polite half-attention of someone who has done this before. He is tall. Not the soft kind of tall that still looks unfinished. The kind that has already settled into itself. Dark hair that falls a little too long over his forehead. A face that looks like it was put together carefully and then left alone. He carries himself like the hallway belongs to him even though he has never walked it before.People notice. Of course they notice. A few girls go quiet as he passes. Someone laughs too loudly for no reason. The air shifts the way it always shifts when something new and unbroken enters a place that has already decided what it is.He does not look at me. There is no reason he should. I am only the girl with the word still faintly visible on her locker from last week’s marker, the girl whose name has be

I woke up still here.That was the first surprise. The second was how ordinary the light looked when it finally came through the curtains. Pale. Unbothered. Like the night had not tried to swallow me whole and almost succeeded. My body felt heavy in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Every muscle remembered the hours I had spent sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the quiet wish that I could simply stop. The wish had not left. It had only grown quieter, more patient, waiting for the next time the weight became too much.I sat up slowly. The room smelled the same—dust and the fading ghost of the detergent my mother used to buy. I pressed my hands against my face and breathed. In. Out. The air still worked. My lungs still filled. I hated them a little for that.Getting ready took longer than it should have. Every movement felt like I was borrowing someone else’s limbs. I washed my face with cold water until my skin stung. I pulled on clothes without caring if they matched. I b

The glass stayed cold under my palm. The street below returned to its ordinary emptiness, the oak tree casting the same familiar shadow, the sidewalk holding no proof that anyone had stood there at all. But I had seen him. Tristan Hale. Looking up at my window with an expression that did not belong to the boy who walked the hallways like none of this was his concern. Something had lived in his face for those three seconds—something that looked like recognition, or regret, or the weight of a decision he had not yet spoken.I stepped back from the glass and sat on the edge of the bed. My heart would not slow. The dark of the room felt different now, charged with the knowledge that he had been there. That he had chosen to stand under my window and meet my eyes before turning away without a word.I did not sleep easily. Every time I closed my eyes I saw him again—half-hidden by the tree, face tilted upward, the quiet intensity that had never shown itself in daylight. Questions circled wit