The diner's bell coughs them back onto the street.
By the time they reach the school, the sun has traded softness for glare; the parking lot shimmers like a cheap mirage.
Lucia kills the engine and lets the bike tick down, metal cooling in tiny shrinking sounds.
The building looms the way old choices do—familiar enough to hurt, changed just enough to pretend it didn't.
She swings her leg off, plants both boots, and hands Sofia her backpack.
Traffic hums, a lawn mower chews distant grass into a green fog, a flock of uniforms migrates toward first period in clumps of chatter and headphones.
Lucia lifts two fingers in a wave. Sofia half-turns, then remembers who she is and who Lucia is supposed to be here.
— "Don't talk to me inside," Sofia says, low, quick.
— "Act like you don't know me."
Lucia's hand falls. She nods once, the kind of nod that means understood and of course and whatever keeps you moving.
— "Go on."
Sofia hesitates—just a breath, just enough to count—then heads for the doors, the helmet indent flattening out her hair, the lipstick smudged into something less sure.
She blends, because that's the trick you learn or you don't.
At the steps she looks back, opens her mouth, thinks better, and disappears into the swarm.
Lucia stays where she is.
9:02.
Her McDonald's shift runs to 10, but the thought of those lights, that register chirp, the coffee smell riding the vent like a ghost with a grudge—it's a wall her body won't climb.
She leans against the bike, visor up, eyes half-lidded, and lets the day press its thumbprint on her.
Time becomes a puddle she stares into: reflections wobble—clouds, birds, a plane that drags its own thin rumor across the blue.
She doesn't think; she drifts.
Migraine shadows move furniture in the back of her skull, then stop and listen to see if she noticed.
The little gray pouch sits quiet under her jacket like a secret well-behaved for once.
Bells ring inside the building, the first-period trumpet and then the late bell with its scolding nose.
A teacher's voice cuts the air and is pulled thin by distance. A skate wheel chatters past and is gone.
9:31.
She straightens, feeling every hour that never let her have it back. The side gate yields to the custodian keys she wasn't supposed to have yet and learned anyway. Concrete breathes its old cool into her ankles.
The halls smell like pencil shavings and disinfectant, the way memory does when it's been scrubbed hard.
The janitor's closet is a narrow ribcage of mops and plastic chemical jugs. A bare bulb hums above the lockers like it's chewing something.
She clocks in on the ancient punch with a thud that pretends to be official. The uniform hangs there on the hook: gray and durable, the color of resignation, with her badge clipped crooked where the hole wore wide.
She peels off the jacket, the gloves, the tank's damp, the night's salt.
The mirror in here is worse than the one at McDonald's: a rectangle of metal polished to a suggestion.
Still human hides under the collarbone's neat line and the day's new fabric.
The dotted lines on her wrists disappear under sleeves designed to turn a body into "staff."
She steps into the pants.
Pulls the drawstring.
Buttons the shirt.
Clips the badge where it always goes, over the lie of a heart that means well.
Tucks the gray pouch deep into the locker's back—out of sight, not out of mind.
The boots trade road grit for slick school tile. She ties the laces with a motion she could do blind.
The locker door shuts on its hollow echo.
The bulb hums approval.
The uniform fits like a sentence she's already serving.
The afternoon smells like lemon cleaner and dust wearing a school's perfume. Lucia pushes the barrel cart down the hallway, rags folded to rectangles, sprays lined like short soldiers. Doors open and close around her in a ticking pattern: bells, chatter, the hush that follows tests, the scuff of sneakers learning the difference between hurry and hurry up.
She moves by habit—trash first, then sweep, then mop—but the order is a superstition more than a science.
The floor gleams in strips behind her, a mosaic of diligent rectangles that no one will notice.
A teacher leans out of Room 212 with a coffee mug and a harried expression.
— "Hey, sorry—spill in here. Can you…?"
— "On it."
She ghosts in, ghosts out.
Paper towels surrender by the handful; a faint ring remains like a watermark on memory.
Back in the hall, she clicks the handle lock with the hip she always uses and keeps moving.
She crosses Sofia's orbit twice.
The first time, Sofia is nested in a half-circle of girls, laughing into the light of a phone, her hair doing that casual fall that says practice more than luck.
One of the girls glances at Lucia the way you glance at a sign you've passed a thousand times: registered, dismissed.
The second time, a boy tells a story with his hands, and the laughter arrives with too much volume, ricocheting off locker metal and putting itself back together as something meaner.
No one knows they share a last name.
Everyone knows the janitor once sat where they sit and didn't make it to the end.
That's enough to carry a rumor without words.
She empties bins in the staff room and loops fresh liners with the quick twist that never tears. She shakes chalk dust out of the bottoms of old trays.
She squeezes a mop until the head drips clear and then drips a little longer just to be sure.
Time dilates; then it snaps.
The big clock in the administration office clicks from 5:42 to 5:59 like it's choosing a side. The day exhales in the way buildings do—lockers thud, chairs scrape, the last bell shakes a ribbon of noise down the rafters.
Students pour out as if the walls learned to release them.
The sky outside has turned the color of a peeled orange.
Sofia leaves in a pack, a kaleidoscope of bracelets and brittle laughter, the kind of goodbye that isn't said to anyone in particular.
She doesn't look back.
Lucia watches until the crowd beheads itself at the door's lintel and reforms on the other side as smaller, faster creatures.
She sweeps the last length of a hallway and finishes with a push that feels like a period.
In the locker room, the mirror is still an insult.
She peels out of gray into black: jacket, tank, shorts. The stitched line under her collarbone sits clean, a quiet seam. The dotted lines on her wrists reappear like punchlines she's tired of.
She stares at herself and hears the thought in its flat, unforgiving voice: is this it?
Wasting a whole life mopping up after other people's day?
Breaking your back for a kid who only notices the floor when it's sticky?
Every time someone comes close, you shove.
Every time no one does, you ache. Look at you.
A gravity well with rings for soap and coins.
She snorts once, ugly in the echoing tile. The sound doesn't change anything. She buttons her jacket and the lie over her sternum disappears again: Still human.
Maybe.
Depends who's counting.
She slams the locker lightly so it won't bounce back, punches the clock with a knuckle, lets the machine cough out its tiny paper approval.
The corridor is empty now, all the color drained into custodial gray.
Outside, the lot has thinned to lonely faculty sedans.
Her bike rises from its shadow like a friend who knows better than to ask questions.
— "Night," the security guard calls from the booth without standing.
— "Night."
The engine learns her again—first the cough, then the smooth.
The helmet's foam cradles the day's leftover ache without consoling it.
She swings out of the space and takes the curb slow, then the street quick.
The construction site waits down the grid: floodlights stacked on pallets like false moons, rebar bundled into iron wheat, a foreman with a clipboard and a joke that won't be funny.
She angles toward it, the city peeling past in long, tired strips, and lets the road pull her forward.