Skin Deep Enough
Copyright© 2026 by Danielle Stories
Chapter 8: The Appeal
The denial was a physical weight. It sat in the center of my chest for days, a dense, cold stone of defeat. The world, which had buzzed with the drama of the hearing, grew quiet again. The news cycles moved on. I was no longer a hot story; I was a resolved one in the public’s eye: Troubled Teen Loses Bid to Attend School Naked. The narrative had ossified. Case closed.
Except it wasn’t.
Janelle appeared at our house two days after the ruling, carrying a thick binder and a determined expression that brooked no wallowing. “Appeals court,” she announced, dropping the binder on the kitchen table with a thud that made the cutlery rattle. “We’re not done. We’re just changing venues.”
My mother, who had been moving through the house with a somber, defeated air, looked up from scrubbing an already-clean counter, a flicker of wary hope in her eyes. “An appeal? How long does that take?”
“Months. Maybe a year,” Janelle said, not softening the blow. “But it’s our only shot at overturning the injunction denial before a full trial, which could take even longer. The appeals court looks for legal errors, not facts. They decide if Judge Morrison applied the law correctly.” She fixed her gaze on me, her sharp eyes holding mine. “Her ruling was conservative. By-the-book. We need to convince three appellate judges that the book is wrong, or at least that she read the wrong chapter.”
“How?” I asked, my voice dull. The thought of another year in this suspended, naked animation, a ghost in my own life, was unbearable.
“By reframing the question,” Janelle said, opening the binder to reveal a labyrinth of highlighted case law. “Morrison focused on ‘disruption.’ We need to make the appeals court see the preliminary injunction not as a question of school order, but as a question of irreparable harm. What’s the greater harm? Allowing a traumatized girl to express that trauma in a way that makes people uncomfortable? Or forcing her to suppress it, to participate in her own re-victimization, causing psychological damage that can’t be undone?” She tapped a decisive finger on the table. “We argue that forcing you into clothes is an irreparable harm.”
She pushed a fresh legal pad toward me. “I need you to write again, Amara. Not an affidavit this time. A declaration. I want you to describe the harm of putting on clothes. Not philosophically. Physically. Psychologically. What does it feel like, in your body and your mind, when you even consider zipping up a pair of jeans now?”
It was a brutal assignment. To dissect my own pain for legal utility. But it was also a lifeline. Action. Purpose.
I spent the next week in a strange, painful communion with my own aversion. I would unknot the garbage bag, pull out an item, my favorite soft, worn-in blouse, a pair of leggings, a sock, and hold it. I would sit with the visceral, nearly nauseating reaction that rippled through me. It wasn’t just about shame. It was about erasure. Donning the blouse felt like pulling a shroud over the girl on the gym floor, smothering her testimony. The fabric seemed to whisper of compliance, of agreeing to be a ghost in my own life. I wrote it down. The tightening in my throat, like a noose being cinched. The way the material against my skin would feel less like covering and more like burial. The profound sense of betraying the raw, screaming truth of my body for the quiet, comfortable lie of normality.
“It would be a performance,” I wrote, my handwriting jagged with the effort. “And every day of that performance would be a day I told myself that what happened to me was less important than everyone else’s comfort. That is a harm I do not know how to recover from.”
Janelle called it “powerful and precise.” She wove my declarations into her appellate brief, arguing that the lower court had failed to properly weigh this unique, irreparable harm against the school’s speculative concerns about disruption.
While she crafted legal arguments, the real world didn’t stop. My suspension was now indefinite, upheld by the court. I was a non-person at Mesa Mirage High. Lena brought me work when she could, a tether to a simpler reality. My grades, maintained via sterile independent study packets approved by a wary district, became a bizarre refuge: algebra problems and history essays were territories where rules made sense and had clear, answerable solutions.
I ventured out for walks again, mostly at dusk. The neighborhood had grown accustomed to me, in a way. The stares were less shocked, more weary, occasionally lingering with a curious, uncomfortable fascination. Mr. Pendell no longer scurried inside; he just turned his back pointedly to his azaleas, a silent sermon delivered to his flowers. I was becoming part of the local scenery. A peculiar landmark.
One evening in early December, as I walked past the park, I saw a figure sitting on the same swing I’d used. Micah Thorne. He was sketching in a large pad balanced on his knees, his threadbare army jacket hanging open despite the chill. He didn’t look up as I approached, his pencil moving in swift, sure arcs that whispered against the paper.
I stopped a few feet away. He finished a long, curving line, then tilted his head, still not looking at me.
“You always walk around like that now?” he asked, his voice calm, same as before.
“Is that a problem?” I echoed our first exchange, the words feeling like a worn talisman.
He shrugged, a small, economical movement. “Not for me.” He scooted over on the swing, the chains groaning softly. An invitation.
I sat. The cold metal chain bit into the side of my thigh. The silence between us wasn’t empty; it was full of the dry rustle of palm fronds, the distant hum of the freeway, the scratch of his pencil resuming.
“I saw you lost the injunction,” he said after a while, still focused on his sketchpad.
“News travels.”
“Yeah.” He finally looked up, his eyes a dark, serious brown in the fading light. “Doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
“The judge seemed to think so.”
“Judges are people who like rules. You’re breaking a big one.” He flipped his pad around.
It was a sketch of me. But not as I was now, hunched on a swing. It was me from the witness stand, my back straight, my head held with that forced, monumental calm, my bare shoulders rendered in subtle, powerful cross-hatching. He’d captured the tension in the line of my jaw, the dignity in the set of my neck, the terrible, unwavering vulnerability. In the drawing, I didn’t look like a victim or a disruption. I looked like a monument. Something built to withstand weather.
My breath caught. “When did you...?”
“I was in the gallery. Back row.” He shrugged again. “I draw things that stick in my head.”
I stared at the sketch. It was the first time I’d seen myself from the outside without a filter of horror, pity, or clinical assessment. He’d seen the stance. The defiance in the stillness. “It’s ... It’s good.”
“It’s true,” he said simply. He ripped the page out with a careful, crisp sound and held it out to me.
I took it, the paper warm from his hands and smelling faintly of graphite and dust. “Thank you.”
He stood, closing his pad with a soft snap. “They’re scared of what they don’t understand. And you ... You’re something they definitely don’t understand.” He gave me that same half-smile, a fleeting crack in his solemnity. “Keep being confusing, Amara Delane.”
He walked off into the twilight, leaving me on the swing, holding a piece of paper that reflected a version of myself I was still struggling to believe in.
The appeal was filed. More waiting. But the encounter with Micah, the sketch now carefully tucked under my mattress, acted as a kind of fuel. He was an unexpected ally who saw the person I was trying to be, not just the problem I appeared to be. It was a tiny, honest mirror held up in the darkness.
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