Sunflower Girl

Chapter Two: Invisible

Sienna Reyes had a system for surviving new schools, and by sixteen, she'd had a lot of practice.

Rule one: don't sit in the back.

Backs of classrooms made you invisible, and invisible kids got talked about more, not less.

Rule two: answer every question you're sure of, and half the ones you're not.

Rule three, the hardest one: don't make friends too fast.

Friends made in October were rarely the friends you kept in June, not in her experience, not with the way her mom's job moved them.

Dayton, then Columbus, then here — some suburb outside the city with a school that had a fountain in the courtyard and kids who wore blazers like they'd been born in them.

She hadn't meant to beat anyone's grade. She genuinely hadn't been thinking about rank when she wrote that essay on *The Great Gatsby*, hadn't known there was a girl named Kayla Ashford who'd apparently owned the top spot since middle school like a title deed. Sienna just wrote what she thought — that Gatsby's whole tragedy was thinking love could be earned through performance instead of honesty — and Mr. Halloway had liked it enough to read a paragraph out loud.She didn't notice the shift right away.

That was the thing about being new. You couldn't read a room you'd never seen before the walls went up.

It started small.

A group project where she got assigned last, after every real team had already formed. A "table's full" from a girl named Bree when Sienna sat down at lunch, even though there were two empty seats.

A laugh that traveled across the courtyard when she tripped on the last stair, timed just a little too perfectly to be coincidence.Sienna told herself it was nothing.

New school. People take time.She ate lunch in the library instead, which she didn't mind, actually. Libraries had never judged her. She pulled out her sketchbook — she'd started drawing again since the move, small studies of hands and doorways, things that didn't ask anything of her — and lost twenty minutes to shading before her phone buzzed.A text from her mom.

*Long shift tonight, sweetheart. Dinner's in the fridge.

Proud of you for the classes, I know it's a lot.

*Sienna typed back a heart and nothing else. Her mom didn't need to know about the lunch table.

Her mom was already carrying enough — a double shift at the hospital, a divorce that still had paperwork trailing behind it like a wound that wouldn't close, a new city they'd landed in because it was the only place with a nursing position that paid enough.

Sienna wasn't going to be one more thing her mother had to manage.So she kept her head down.

She answered questions in class. She drew in the margins.

She told herself that whatever was happening with the girls at Westbrook — the cold shoulders, the group chats she could tell existed by the way certain girls' phones lit up at the same moment, then went suspiciously dark when she walked by — none of it was really about her. It couldn't be. She'd been here three weeks.

You couldn't hate someone you didn't know.She was wrong about that.

She just didn't know it yet.At the end of the day, walking to the bus, she passed Kayla Ashford and the boy everyone called Chase, his arm slung over her shoulders like a trophy he wore instead of carried.

Kayla's eyes flicked to her and away so fast it might not have happened at all.Sienna almost smiled at her.

Habit, mostly — the reflex of a girl raised to be polite even to people who scared her a little, though she couldn't yet say why Kayla scared her.

Kayla didn't smile back.She didn't do anything at all.

And somehow that