Skin Deep Enough
Copyright© 2026 by Danielle Stories
Chapter 2: Echo Chamber
Eventually, last night, I left the room. I went down to the kitchen and prepared something small to eat, all while my mother wouldn’t even look at me before heading back to her own silence. I ate in the fluorescent glare, briefly checking my phone. It was too much. The world had already written its first draft of my story, and I couldn’t bear to read it.
On the bare mattress I’d stripped the sheets, too, in my frenzy, I didn’t sleep. Sleep felt like a country I’d been deported from. My body was a museum exhibit labeled Trauma: Unprocessed. The ceiling fan spun lazy circles above me, its hum the only sound in the house. Every rotation felt like a countdown to something worse.
This morning, I didn’t come down for breakfast.
I wasn’t hungry.
Well, that’s not true. I was starving. But not for eggs or toast or the cereal that snapped too loudly in the bowl. I was starving for softness. For the version of my mother who used to hold me after nightmares, who would stroke my hair and whisper, “It was just a dream, baby. Just a dream.” For the sound of laughter that didn’t end with a shove. For the feel of a fabric that didn’t feel like a concession speech.
But normal had been peeled off me like a sticker, and the sticky residue left behind was raw, smarting, and entirely mine. To wear. To live in.
“Amara!” she called from the kitchen. A single, sharp note. “Come downstairs!”
I didn’t move. I stared at the crack in my ceiling plaster, the one that looked like a tiny lightning bolt. I’d made a constellation out of it when I was ten.
A minute later: footsteps. Measured. Heavy. Not the rushed, angry steps from yesterday, but the deliberate, ominous tread of someone approaching a problem that hadn’t fixed itself overnight.
I sat upright, spine straight, hands folded on my bare thighs like I was in church. Or court. The posture felt absurd, but I needed structure. Something to hold the pieces of me together.
She opened the door and stopped. The doorframe filled with her, dressed for work in navy slacks and a cream blouse, her hair still damp from the shower. She carried a mug of coffee. The normalcy of it was a slap.
I didn’t look away. Neither did she.
Her eyes performed a slow, painful scan. From my face, down my neck, over my collarbones, my breasts, my stomach, my legs, all the way to my feet curled under me. It was a clinical assessment. A damage report. Her face was tired, lined not with age but with a disappointment so deep it had carved its own geography.
“You’re going through with this,” she said. Not a question. A verdict.
“I already did.” My voice was sandpaper.
“And what,” she asked, her tone dangerously flat, “do you think this makes you? Strong?”
“No.” I held her gaze. “I think it makes me honest.”
She flinched. Just barely. A tiny, seismic tremor around her eyes. The word honest had found a fault line.
“You think walking around like that is going to make the world take you seriously? Make them see you as anything but a ... a spectacle?”
“No,” I said, the words forming slowly, like ice. “But maybe it’ll make them look. And keep looking. Until they realize what they’re looking at. Until they see what they’ve done.”
She crossed her arms, the coffee mug held like a shield. “You’re just giving them more ammunition. More to laugh at. More to film.”
“They already fired the shot, Mom. I’m just refusing to pretend I’m not bleeding.”
A pause. Thick, suffocating. Her eyes dropped to the sagging black garbage bag in the corner, the tomb of my old life. Then they came back to me, to the living girl outside the tomb.
“You can’t stay in here forever,” she said, but the fight had leaked out of her voice, replaced by a hollow exhaustion.
“I know.”
She shook her head, a tiny, defeated motion. Then she turned and left without another word, closing the door softly behind her. Not a slam. A seal.
That was our rhythm now. Her silence, my defiance. Rinse. Repeat.
I spent the next few hours drifting from room to room like a ghost haunting my own house. The air felt different on my skin in each space. Colder in the tiled kitchen. Warmer in the sun-patch by the living room window. I was a sensor, registering the world without the filter of fabric. Every draft was a conversation. Every sunbeam was an interrogation.
Have you ever tried watching TV when your whole body feels like a bad dream?
It doesn’t work. Every commercial is too loud, too bright, too full of smiling, clothed people selling happiness in a bottle. Every laugh track feels like it’s aimed at you. I clicked it off. The silence was worse, but at least it was honest.
Eventually, I drifted to the dining table where my laptop sat, a closed black lid. A portal.
I shouldn’t. Every sane cell in my body screamed not to. But there’s an urge, isn’t there? A morbid, magnetic pull. The one where you have to touch the bruise to make sure it still hurts. To prove the pain is real. To see if the world remembers your disaster.
I opened it. The screen glowed to life.
And there it was.
The world hadn’t forgotten.
It wasn’t just a rogue video on someone’s private Snapchat anymore. It had a title now, curated for maximum clickability: Spirit Weak: Amara’s Breakdown.
Funny, right? Weak instead of Week. Clever.
It had been uploaded to a public video platform. Not the raw, shaky footage, but an edited version. Someone had trimmed it, zoomed in on the most vulnerable moments, my face contorted, my hands scrambling for cover that wasn’t there. They’d added a peppy, ironic pop song over the top, the kind that plays during movie montages of parties.
Thousands of views. The number ticked upward as I watched.
Hundreds of comments.
My stomach liquefied. A cold, heavy dread pooled in my bare lap.
I clicked. A waterfall of judgment scrolled past.
Someone get her a therapist AND a stylist lol.
She kinda walked into that one, though.
Plot twist: she was into it
This is not even bullying; it’s evolution. Weeds out the weak.
Is this even legal? She’s naked.
She’s got issues. But lowkey respect for not crying.
Amara Delane? More like Amara Defamed. GOTTEM
Who cares? It’s just a prank.
Kind of iconic though?? 🔥 – added by @BreezyBee23
I know @BreezyBee23. Brianna Lewis. We’d been lab partners in freshman biology. She’d borrowed my highlighter last week.
Iconic.
You strip a girl in front of 400 students and call it “iconic”?
Would it still be iconic if I hadn’t gotten up? If I’d stayed on that gym floor? If the sound that followed the laughter had been an ambulance siren, not a viral soundtrack?
The words weren’t just on the screen. They crawled inside me. They took up residence in the hollows of my ribs, cold and squirming. Issues. Weak. Into it. Iconic.
I slammed the laptop shut. The sound was too loud in the quiet house.
But it was too late. The digital infection was in my bloodstream. I could feel it, a sickening buzz under my skin.
I curled up on the couch, still unclothed, still exposed, and pulled my knees to my chest, making myself as small as possible. The rough weave of the upholstery pressed patterns into my back. I was a statue of shame in the middle of our normal living room, with its family photos and potted fern.
I whispered to the walls, to the empty air, to you:
“They can’t take anything else. Not if I take it first.”
And maybe that sounds like power. A battle cry.
But it wasn’t. It was grief. Grief dressed up as strength. Grief howling in an empty house.
I wasn’t reclaiming anything yet. I was just stating a fact. They had taken my clothes, my dignity, my narrative. The only thing left to take was my life, and I was still clinging to that, a life raft in a sea of pixels and laughter.
I was still bleeding. But at least now, I knew what kind of war I was in. It wasn’t a war of fists or locker-room shoves. It was a war of perception. A war of stories. And my story had been stolen, edited, and set to music.
Are you still here?
Still watching me fold in on myself like a discarded piece of laundry?
Good. Because it gets worse.
The noise started in the afternoon. A soft ping from my phone, buried under a cushion. Then another. And another.
Notifications.
I’d been tagged. In the video. In memes. Screenshots of my face, eyes wide with terror, were now superimposed on funny backgrounds. My body, blurred but recognizable, was a reaction GIF.
My Instagram follower count was shooting up. Not with friends. With ghouls. The DMs were a sewer.
ur actually pretty hot for a crazy bitch
Send nudes? oh wait lol
How much for a private show?
What’s wrong with you? Put some clothes on, you’re embarrassing yourself
And amidst the filth, a different kind of message, somehow more chilling:
You’re so brave. You’re starting a revolution.
I wish I had your courage.
You’re a symbol for all of us.
I wasn’t a symbol. I was a girl on a couch who needed to pee but was afraid to walk past the windows. I was a raw nerve. They were turning my nerve into a flag, and I hadn’t given anyone permission to wave it.
My mother came home from work just after five. I heard her key in the lock, the sigh as she dropped her bag. She walked into the living room and stopped. She saw me on the couch and saw the laptop on the floor.
“You looked at it,” she said.
I nodded, my chin resting on my knees.
She walked to the kitchen. I heard the fridge open, the clink of a glass. She came back and stood over me. She didn’t offer me a drink.
“This is what you wanted,” she said, but her voice was empty of accusation. It was just a statement of bleak facts. “Attention. Well, you’ve got it. Now what?”
Now what? The question echoed in the hollowed-out cavern of my mind. Now I wait for the world to finish eating me. Now I wait for the next clever hashtag? Now I wait to see if I simply evaporate from the sheer, sustained pressure of being seen?
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
She sat down in the armchair across from me, the one my dad used to sit in. She looked old. “Amara ... this path you’re on. It only leads to more pain. To institutions. To a case file. Is that what you want?”
“I didn’t want any of this!” The words burst out of me, a surge of frozen lava. “I didn’t want to be stripped! I didn’t want to be filmed! I didn’t ask to be a meme or a symbol or a cautionary tale! I just wanted to be left alone!”
My voice broke on the last word, a fissure in the ice. A hot tear, traitorous and stupid, spilled over and traced a path down my cheek. I swatted at it angrily.
She watched the tears. Her own eyes glistened, but nothing fell. “I know,” she said, so softly I almost didn’t hear it. “I know you didn’t. But the world doesn’t care what you want. It only cares what you do next. And what you’re doing ... It’s letting them keep hurting you. To say you’re crazy. To lock you away.”
“So I should just put on a sweater and go back to school?” My voice was thick with sarcasm and snot. “Smile? Say it was all a misunderstanding?”
“I should make you,” she said, her own voice gaining an edge. “I’m your mother. I could drag you upstairs and dress you myself.”
We stared at each other across the no-man’s-land of the carpet. Two armies at a standstill.
“You could try,” I said, the challenge hanging in the air.
She looked at my naked shoulders, my defiant, trembling chin. She saw the tear tracks. She saw the ghost of the little girl who used to climb into her bed during thunderstorms. And she saw the new creature, hard and shattered and terrifyingly still.
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