The high school gym buzzed with the suffocating energy of a public execution. Sharp laughter, whispered jabs, and the squeak of sneakers echoed off the polished hardwood. Students circled the center, forming a dense, suffocating ring of spectators. In today’s digital age, cruelty was content; dozens of phones hovered, lenses aimed at the school’s most invisible inhabitant.
At the center stood Anna—a girl defined by absence. Small, slight, perpetually swallowed by a gray hoodie, she had mastered invisibility. She sat in classrooms’ back rows, avoided cafeteria drama, and tried to dim the brilliance that made her exceptional. Today, her quiet intellect had drawn the wrong kind of attention.
Opposite her loomed Marcus, the school’s “golden boy,” all entitlement and arrogance. Captain of the varsity football team, coach’s favorite, and predator in plain sight, he saw the world as divided into those who fed his ego and those who obstructed it. Today, Anna was an obstacle.
“So, the genius finally graces us with her presence?” Marcus boomed. The gym erupted in sycophantic snickers. “You wanted to make me look like an idiot in front of the scouts?”
Anna’s hands trembled inside her hoodie pocket. “I just answered the teacher’s question,” she whispered.
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