Claire sat in the back row, where she always sat. Quiet. Serious. Doing what she had learned to do in that particular school — make herself as small as possible and hope the day passed without incident.Mark sat behind her.
He was the kind of teenager that small towns produce and then spend years celebrating. Broad-shouldered, loud, easy with a grin. The sort of boy that teachers quietly excused and classmates quietly admired. He moved through every hallway as though the building had been designed specifically to hold him.
Claire was everything he was not. Thoughtful. Reserved. Invisible by choice, because invisibility felt safer than the alternative.That morning, while the teacher worked through a lesson at the front of the room, she felt a small tug at her braid.
She assumed it was accidental. Mark was always restless, always shifting, always taking up more than his share of the space around him. She ignored it and kept her eyes forward.Then the bell rang.
She stood up.
Pain shot across her scalp, sharp and sudden, and for a confused second she could not understand why she could not straighten up, could not move, could not make sense of the laughter that erupted around her from every direction.
Then she heard someone say it.
He had glued her braid to the desk.
