Eli | POV
The jacket was just an excuse to get out of the house.
That's what I told myself walking over. Sable had left it on my couch two nights ago and I could've texted her, could've waited until Monday, but I needed air and movement and something to do with my hands that wasn't staring at my ceiling replaying every small wrong thing from the past two weeks.
So I walked to Sable's.
Her mom let me in without knocking — she'd been doing that since ninth grade, just waving me through like I was furniture that belonged there. "She's upstairs," her mom said, already turning back to the kitchen. "You know where."
I did.
I took the stairs two at a time. Her bedroom was at the end of the short hallway, the door slightly open the way it usually was when she was home. I could hear music from somewhere else in the house. Nothing from her room.
I pushed the door wider.
"Hey, I brought your—"
I stopped.
The wall to the right of her desk.
That was where it was. Floor to ceiling, edge to edge, photographs covering every inch of it in overlapping layers like wallpaper made from a single subject.
Me.
Every single one of them. Me.
I stood in the doorway and my brain did this thing where it refused the information for a full three or four seconds — just bounced it back, tried again, bounced it back. Like the image was in a language it hadn't loaded yet.
Then it loaded.
Me at my locker — freshman year, I recognized the shirt — caught mid-reach, not looking at the camera. Me at lunch from above, like the shot was taken from a standing position at the table behind mine. Me sleeping on her couch, one arm over my face, completely unaware. Me at a game, on the bench, staring at the field. Me walking home. Me at a bus stop. Me laughing at something I couldn't remember anymore.
Years of it.
Not a few photos. Not a corner of a corkboard. A wall. An entire wall of my face in moments I hadn't known were being captured, hadn't consented to, hadn't even felt the presence of another person during.
The earliest ones looked faded. Old. We must have been twelve, maybe thirteen in some of them.
She had been doing this since we were twelve.
My jacket was still in my hand. I became aware of it suddenly — the fabric, my fingers gripping it — because my body needed something concrete to hold onto.
I heard her footsteps on the stairs.
She came into the room and stopped when she saw me.
Not startled. Not panicked. She just stopped in the doorway the way you stop when you find someone in a room you'd expected to be empty — a brief recalibration, nothing more.
Her eyes moved from my face to the wall. Then back to my face.
And she tilted her head slightly, the way she did when she was explaining something she found simple.
"You've always been beautiful," she said softly. "I just didn't want to forget."
Her voice was the same as it always was. Quiet. Even. Like she was commenting on the weather.
I didn't speak.
She crossed the room calmly and sat at her desk chair and pulled her knees up, making herself small in that way she had, and she looked at the wall the way you look at something you're proud of. Something you made. Something that was yours.
"I know how it looks," she said.
I found my voice somewhere. It came out lower than I expected. "How does it look?"
"Strange. To someone who doesn't understand it." She turned to face me. Her eyes were completely steady. "But you're my favorite person, Eli. You've always been my favorite person. Is it so wrong to want to remember every version of you?"
My mouth was dry. "You took pictures of me sleeping."
"You sleep at my house all the time."
"That's not—" I stopped. Breathed. "Sable. That's not the same thing and you know it."
She watched me for a moment. That calm, assessing look. Then she said, "Are you upset?"
The question was genuine. Like she had actually run the calculation and come up uncertain.
"I don't know what I am," I said.
She nodded slowly, like that was an acceptable answer she'd file away for later. She stood up and took the jacket from my hand — gently, her fingers briefly touching mine — and hung it over her chair.
"You should sit down," she said. "You look pale."
I didn't sit down.
But I didn't say anything else either. That was the shameful part, looking back. I stood in that room with a wall full of secret photographs of my own face looking back at me from nine years of moments I hadn't known were being collected — and I said nothing.
Because saying it out loud made it real. And making it real meant everything that came after it would also be real. The note in my locker. Reeve's growing silences. Jade's weird day. The anonymous complaint. The humming from my kitchen.
I wasn't ready for all of it to be the same thing yet.
So I looked at the wall one more time — at the version of me sleeping, mouth slightly open, completely trusting, completely unaware — and I backed out of the room.
"I'll see you Monday," I said.
"Okay," Sable said. Pleasantly. Like nothing had happened.
I walked home in the dark and I didn't think about the wall.
I didn't think about it so deliberately and so completely that by the time I reached my front door I'd almost convinced myself I hadn't needed to.
Almost.
That was the moment, I'd realize later. That was the exact moment the thing I'd refused to look at began cracking through anyway — slow and quiet and unstoppable, the way water finds every fault in a surface it's decided to break.
I just didn't know it yet.
I should have.