SLIDING INTO YOUR DMS

CHAPTER 4: LONELY VERSES

Robert's voice was still in his head when Jace opened the notes app.

You think you're special? You think anyone cares about your little poems?

He typed the first line without thinking.

I am a house with no windows, a door that no one knocks on.

The parking lot was empty except for his car, and the streetlights threw long shadows across the pavement. He wrote three more lines, read them seven times, and posted them to @lit.with.jace before he could change his mind.

I am a light that stays on in a room no one enters.

Then he closed the app and put his phone face down on the passenger seat. He didn't want to see the notifications or read the comments from people who thought they understood. He wanted to sit in the dark for a while.

The next morning, his phone had 847 notifications.

The poem had gone viral, not in a massive way, but enough. People were sharing it and reposting it and tagging their friends. His follower count had jumped by a few thousand, and the comments were full of heart emojis and this is me and i felt this in my bones.

He scrolled through them for a while, not really reading, just watching the numbers climb. Then he saw one that made him stop.

@maya.studies: liked this

Maya Chen had liked his poem. Maya Chen, who hated him, who rolled her eyes at him in the hallway, who argued with him in class like he was personally responsible for everything wrong with the world. She had liked his poem.

It shouldn't have mattered. She was just another stranger with a username, but it did matter. She had liked it because of the words, not because of who he was, and for a long time now, no one had seen him for what he actually was.

---

He was walking to class when he saw her.

Maya was standing by her locker with Priya, laughing about something. She looked different when she laughed, softer and less guarded. He didn't mean to stare, but he did, and then she looked up and saw him. The laugh died on her face. Her eyes went hard, and she turned away and kept talking to Priya like he wasn't there.

Jace kept walking, but as he passed her, he caught that smell again, vanilla maybe, and he stopped. Just for a second, long enough to register it.

She didn't notice because she was too busy pretending he didn't exist.

He went to class.

That night, his phone lit up with a message from Nova.

Nova: your poem. the one you posted. it's everywhere.

@lit.with.jace: I know.

Nova: did you mean it?

Did he mean it? The house with no windows, the light in an empty room, the door no one knocked on.

Yes, he typed. Every word.

Nova: good. it's beautiful.

@lit.with.jace: You're the only one who thinks so.

Nova: i doubt that.

@lit.with.jace: I'm serious.

Nova: then you're not looking hard enough.

He didn't know what to say, so he typed: goodnight, Nova. She didn't send anything back, and he put the phone down and laid back on his bed. He pressed his thumb into the edge of his desk until it stung, then let go and watched the ceiling fan spin above him. Somewhere out there, someone he had never met thought his words were beautiful, and that was more than he could say for anyone he actually knew.