Chapter 8: Hallway Between

The rest of the second period passed in a fog.

Not the fog of grief, I knew that fog, had lived in it for seventy-three days, had worn it like the coveralls I’d finally thrown away. This was a different fog. The fog of being watched. The fog of feeling thirty pairs of eyes on your back, even when they weren’t looking. The fog of knowing that every whisper, every glance, every shift in someone’s chair was somehow about you.

I wrote my reflection.

To be authentic is to be without armor. It is to stand in the world as you are, not as you’ve been told to be. It is to risk judgment, ridicule, rejection, because the alternative is a life lived behind a mask, and a mask is just a lie you tell with your body.

My father died in June. For seventy-three days, I wore coveralls. I thought I was hiding from the world. But I was really hiding from myself.

I’m done hiding.

Mrs. Delgado collected the reflections at the end of the period. She didn’t look at me, she just took it from my hand and placed it on top of the stack, professional and calm, like she’d done this a thousand times before.

“The bell is going to ring in two minutes,” she said. “Your next period is”

“History. Room 108.”

“Mr. Yamamoto. He’s a good teacher. He won’t make a fuss.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The bell rang.

The sound was louder than I remembered, harsher, more insistent, like a command you couldn’t refuse. The students around me stood up, gathering their things, their eyes darting toward me and then away, always away, like looking at me for too long might be contagious.

I stood up too. Sling my backpack over my shoulder. Adjusted my father’s hat.

The hallway outside was chaotic.

Hundreds of students stream between classes, laughing and talking, and shoving each other in the way that teenagers have been shoving each other since the invention of hallways. They moved around me like water around a rock, parting and flowing and then coming back together on the other side.

But they looked.

God, they looked.

Some of them were subtle about it, a sideways glance, a quick up-and-down, a whisper to the person beside them. Others were not subtle at all. They stopped. They stared. They pointed, sometimes, like I was an exhibit in a museum, something to be observed and discussed and then forgotten.

Keep walking.

Don’t stop.

Don’t look back.

Keep walking.

I walked.

Room 108 was on the other side of the building, past the cafeteria, past the library, past the row of vending machines that dispensed stale snacks to students who had forgotten to pack a lunch. The hallway narrowed as I got closer, the crowds thinning, the noise fading.

A group of girls stood outside the door, juniors, probably, from the way they carried themselves, the way they leaned against the lockers, as if they owned them. They saw me coming. The talking stopped. The laughing stopped.

One of them, tall, blonde, wearing a shirt that said something about volleyball, stepped into my path.

“Excuse me,” she said.

I stopped.

“You’re the girl. The one who’s not wearing clothes.”

“That’s me.”

“Why?”

The question hung in the air between us, small and sharp, like a stone you could throw or hold or skip across the surface of still water.

“My father died,” I said. “And I’m tired of hiding.”

The girl’s face changed. The hardness softened just slightly, just for a moment, the way ice softens when you breathe on it.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She stepped aside. I walked past her, through the door, into Room 108, where Mr. Yamamoto was writing something on the whiteboard about the Constitution and the rights of citizens and the strange, fragile experiment that was the United States of America.

I found a seat near the back.

The bell rang.

And the world kept spinning.

Lunch was at 12:15 PM.

I hadn’t thought about lunch. I hadn’t thought about where I would sit, or what I would eat, or who I would talk to. I’d been too focused on getting through the morning, on surviving each period one at a time, on keeping my feet moving and my head up and my hands at my sides.

But lunch was inevitable. Lunch was the hour when the structure of the school day fell away, when students were released into the cafeteria like animals from a cage, to socialize and eat and do all the things that teenagers did when adults weren’t watching.

I stood in the hallway outside the cafeteria, my back against a locker, my backpack at my feet.

You don’t have to go in.

Yes, I do.

You could sit outside. In the courtyard. By yourself.

That’s not why I came here.

I pushed open the cafeteria doors.

The noise hit me first: the roar of hundreds of conversations layered on top of each other, the clatter of trays and silverware, the hum of the industrial refrigerators that kept the milk cold and the yogurt from spoiling. Then the smell of pizza, mostly, and something that might have been tacos, and the underlying scent of floor wax and teenage sweat.