Hallwaymorning and lockerslam metalclang and she steps into the current and the current parts around her half-inch too wide and then reseals and the reseal leaves seamlines faintvisible and she feels them like drafts along skin and the word normal hovers overhead like fluorescent hum and the hum contains a thinner frequency underneath shhh-shhh-shhh and she cannot tell whether it is ventilation or language and when she passes a cluster of girls the laughter dips and rises again and the dip is small but measurable and she begins measuring everything.

  Her name travels corridoridor attached to other syllables and detaches before she can catch the full construction and Callum floats through sentences half-heard and the coupling clangs metallic in her ear and she turns once too quickly and finds only shoulders and backpacks and ponytails swinging in innocent arcs and she tells herself coincidence coincidence and yet the air feels tuned to her outline and when she reaches her locker there is nothing written nothing carved nothing explicit and the absence presses louder than graffiti would and she imagines invisible ink across the door spelling story story story.

  In class she feels eyes recalibrate not hostile not tender simply attentive in a new way and attention has weight and she lowers herself anglecareful into the chair and the contact-point sparks and she hides the flinch in a cough and the teacher’s voice threads chalkdust across the board and somewhere behind her a whisper hisses softsoft and she catches only rough and laugh and maybe and the maybe elongates and frays and she feels the showersteam reassemble in memorytile and the word lucky rebounds against skullbone and the rabbitmask flickers not on a face but in the darkspace between two desks earshadow curved against backpack canvas and blinkblink it is geometry again.

  Lunchroom clatterfork and traydrag and she sits and the table seems fractionally larger than yesterday as if an empty chair has widened and someone across from her scrolls a phone and turns the screen away midmotion and the turn is casual too casual and she wonders if the image has multiplied if the copies have gone digital if her grass-close angle is circulating beyond fencewire and the thought accelerates pulsequick and she swallows and tastes metallic trace and she wants to ask what are you looking at but the corridoridor of speech narrows and collapses and she remains still and the stillness reads as guilt in her own mind though no one has accused.

  After school the whispers persist not constant but intermittent like faulty wiring and she hears fragments as she passes stairwells—did you see—no way—he wouldn’t—and the sentences refuse completion and that refusal wounds more deeply than clarity would and she begins to imagine entire narratives stitched from half-syllables and in her imagination the rabbitmask smiles widewhite from behind locker doors and then vanishes into ventshadow and she presses her palm flat against cool tile and tells herself noise only noise only and yet the noise has shape and contour and direction and it leans.

  Walking home she studies every window reflection and sees her own outline doubled and tripled and she cannot tell whether the doubling is glass or rumor and the fence at the meadow entrance stands ordinary dewstrung and empty of paper and she wonders whether she tore down the only copies or whether removal itself has become part of the story and she understands slowly that whispers require no evidence no proof no image even and that the image has merely offered permission and she moves through the evening carrying the soft relentless shhh-shhh under rib and underbone and the silence inside her grows louder than any accusation ever spoken.