Chapter Five: Small Cuts
714 Words
It started with the little things, which was, Sienna would later realize, exactly how it was designed to start.Her lab partner in Chemistry stopped showing up to their sessions, then acted surprised when Sienna mentioned it, like she'd imagined the whole arrangement.
Her name disappeared off a group project list and reappeared, mysteriously, on a different one with the two kids nobody else wanted.
Someone left a comment on a photo she'd posted of her sketchbook — just three words, *try harder lol* — from an account with no profile picture and a username that meant nothing.None of it was big enough to report. That was the trick of it, she was starting to understand.
Every individual moment could be explained away as nothing, a misunderstanding, bad luck, and only the pattern of them stacked up into something that had a shape.
She still hadn't said anything to her mom."How's school going, really?" her mom asked one night, the rare night she was home for dinner instead of a twelve-hour shift, sitting across from Sienna over reheated pasta."It's fine. Different. I'll get used to it."Her mom studied her for a second too long — nurses were good at reading people, Sienna had learned, good at spotting the difference between fine and *fine*.
"You'd tell me if it wasn't fine.""I would,"
Sienna lied, and hated herself a little for it, and did it anyway, because her mother had cried in the car twice last month about money and Sienna wasn't going to be one more weight on a woman already carrying the both of them.
At school, the only place that still felt safe was Mr. Halloway's classroom during free period, where she was allowed to sit and read while he graded papers, and the library at lunch, where nobody bothered her at all, mostly because nobody seemed to notice she existed there — which she'd decided, on balance, was better than the alternative.
She noticed Kayla Ashford differently now.
Not just the girl who used to be first, before Sienna unknowingly took that from her.
Kayla was starting to feel like a weather system — you could tell when she was in a room the way you could tell a storm was coming, some shift in air pressure that made the whole hallway hold its breath.
Sienna didn't understand yet that she was the cause of that pressure.
She just knew that Kayla's eyes found her sometimes, in class, in the hall, and stayed a beat too long, cold in a way that had nothing to do with unfamiliarity anymore.
One Thursday, walking to her locker, she found her sketchbook — the one she kept in her backpack, private, unfinished pieces she wasn't ready to show anyone — sitting open on the floor of the hallway. Pages torn. Not all of them. Just enough.
Just the ones she'd been proudest of.
She stood there holding the ruined book, and for the first time since Ohio, since the divorce, since the move, she let herself cry in a school hallway, quiet and fast, wiping her face before anyone could see.
Nobody claimed it.
Nobody ever did. That was the other trick of it — cruelty that left no fingerprints, no name attached, nothing you could point to and say *this person did this to me,
* just a slow erosion with no single villain, only an atmosphere.
She didn't know Kayla's name had been on the group chat that discussed exactly which pages to tear.
She didn't know Bree had done it while Kayla watched from the end of the hall, feeling something curdle in her stomach that might have been guilt, if she'd let herself call it that.Kayla didn't let herself call it that.
She told herself it was just a joke that had gone slightly too far, the kind of thing that would blow over, the kind of thing that didn't really count.
She was wrong.
It counted.
It was already starting to count in ways neither girl could see yet — one of them breaking down slowly in a hallway, the other one breaking down slowly in a closet, and neither of them understanding they were breaking in the same direction, toward the same reckoning, from two very different kinds of pain.
- Writer
