Crestwood High at 7:15 a.m. smelled of floor polish and burnt coffee. The hallways echoed with sneakers squeaking against waxed linoleum, laughter bouncing in groups, the slam of lockers as students hurried to beat the bell. To anyone who looked, Lily Dawson was just another girl in that sea of faces.
She wore her uniform like armor: navy skirt, white blouse, cardigan buttoned all the way up. Her hair was always tied back neatly, never a strand out of place. Teachers liked her. She handed in assignments on time, spoke when spoken to, smiled just enough to appear polite, and faded into the background again like a shadow.
That was Lily's secret. People only saw what she wanted them to see.
"Morning, Lily!" one of the girls from her math class chirped as she passed.
Lily returned a small smile, but her eyes were already elsewhere—tracking, cataloging, memorizing. She noticed how the girl's shoelace trailed untied, how she walked too quickly, how her laugh was a fraction too loud as if she was desperate to be noticed.
That was what Lily did best: notice. Details, habits, vulnerabilities. She collected them like shiny stones in her mind, storing them away. She never wrote them in notebooks where they could be found. Instead, she carved them into memory until they glittered there, sharp and permanent.
No one suspected what she really was beneath that quiet mask.
At home, her room was immaculate. Books alphabetized on the shelf. Desk free of clutter except for one small, locked box. Inside the box lay her true diary—not words, but tokens. A hairpin she'd stolen from another girl's locker. A crushed soda can Marcus Grant had thrown at her head once in the cafeteria, dent still marked by her rage. A strip of fabric from a dress her mother had thrown away years ago, the only thing Lily had ever cared about.
Each object held a memory, a reason, a wound.
Her mother never came into her room anymore. That was a blessing. Lily had learned young that showing her true self led only to punishment or, worse, disappointment. Her father had left when she was nine, muttering something about "the way she looks at people," and her mother had since chosen to bury herself in work.
So Lily became invisible.
But invisibility had a cost. People thought it meant weakness. People like Marcus Grant.
Marcus was Crestwood's golden boy in a different sense than Jason. Where Jason carried a natural charisma, a quiet confidence that drew people in, Marcus was loud, brash, and cruel. He liked to humiliate. He liked to choose someone quiet in the cafeteria, lean over their food, and make a show of mocking them until his friends laughed.
And lately, Marcus had chosen Lily.
"Library girl," he'd sneered last week, yanking the book from her hands and reading the passage aloud in a fake, nasal voice. "Wow, listen to this—we got a genius here! No wonder you don't have friends."
The laughter that followed was hot and sharp against Lily's skin. She had smiled tightly, lowered her gaze, and pretended it didn't matter. But that night she took the soda can he'd tossed at her and placed it in her box.
It mattered.