The next morning, I walked onto campus bracing myself for the whispers. I expected the sideways glances, the hushed conversations that would stop the moment I passed, the pitying or mocking stares that had defined my existence since the rumor first surfaced. I kept my head down, shoulders tense, waiting for the familiar weight of judgment to settle on my skin.
But it never came.
No one looked at me differently. No one whispered. The students parting around me did so with a new kind of deference—not the casual avoidance of someone tainted by scandal, but the careful distance reserved for someone untouchable. A girl who’d once smirked at me in the hallway now dropped her gaze and hurried past. Two boys who’d been loud near the notice board fell silent as I approached, their eyes flicking a
