School corridors became long galleries of sound she no longer had to enter.
The bell rang → echo → footsteps → locker slam → laughter shaped like knives → all of it happened on the other side of very thick glass. She could see every detail. She simply wasn't in the picture anymore.
One Tuesday in late November she sat on the last bench of mathematics class watching rain hit the windowpane in Morse code she no longer bothered to translate.
The teacher called her name three times.
On the fourth call something inside Aashi made a very small, final sound—like the click a door makes when it locks itself from the inside.
After that the body kept attending school.
It wore the correct uniform, tied the correct braid, wrote approximately correct answers.
But nobody was home behind the eyes anymore.