She learned early how to be small. Not small like a child—small like a stone that sinks clean beneath the surface of water. You could step on it, and it would not squeal. You could ignore it. It would not be a nuisance until you lifted it and found the mineral under the mud.

Outside the school gate, a boy called her “ghost” and meant it as an insult. He pushed his shoulder into her as if she would float away, but she did not. She tasted dust and cheap cologne, and somewhere behind the row of parked bikes, someone laughed. The laugh had teeth. It made a neat, practiced sound that fit easily into the emptiness she kept.

“Hey—serious face,” the boy said, the amusement gone now that he had an audience. “What happened? You freeze up when people move.”

Clara watched his mouth move and catalogued the exact way his left eyebrow quirked when he lied—she had learned to map small human tells like constellations. It turned out the world was full of predictable designs if you paid attention. Bullying, she’d noticed, liked the same constellations.

“Lana,” someone called. The voice had an easy brightness; it cut through the small theatre of cruelty like sunlight through stained glass. Lana came up behind Clara and, without ceremony, wrapped an arm around her shoulders so their bodies formed a single shape that was, for one instant, entirely whole.

“Leave her, Jonathan,” Lana said, too loud, too public. Her laugh chased the word like it was trying to fix it. She was taller than the boys thought, and when she spoke everyone found space for her words. People made room for Lana the way a stage makes room for a spotlight.

“You’re lucky she’s soft,” Jonathan shrugged. “Some girls are tougher.”

Clara felt the word as if it bounced off her rib and died. She watched Lana, who kept pretending the joke landed. Of the two, Lana was the loud one—every brightness had a shadow, and Clara fit into Lana’s shadow like a second skin. They had different centers. Lana would make friends on a bus and argue with a shopkeeper over the exact color of mangoes; Clara would watch and remember the way Lana’s hands cut the air when she laughed.

“Let’s go,” Lana said, linking an arm through Clara’s. It was a small defiance, this public ownership of a person people wanted to reduce to nothing. Lana always did it: claimed Clara in crowded corridors and smoked-out stairwells the way someone claims a favorite book.

They walked—Lana’s voice spilling into the corridor, adding friction to the silence Clara kept like an old jacket. Lana told a story about a teacher who had assigned them an impossible project; she presented its absurdities the way people present family photos: with emphasis, with affection, with a little scandalous aside. Clara laughed when it felt right; it was half an automatic reflex and half a balm. Laughter with Lana was an approved currency.

“You okay?” Lana asked as they passed the noticeboard, where students’ faces were stapled with small sacrileges: club posters, achievements, and the occasional mean joke. Lana’s eyes measured her—like a hand on the back checking for fever.

Clara let the silence answer. She didn’t have the energy to produce the script other girls offered—snap rebuttals, jokes that punched through the air. Silence had served better: people guessed you were volatile, or deep, or mysterious. It yielded fewer hands.

Lana sighed, lightly. “You can be blunt sometimes, you know that?”

“Noted,” Clara said. She could be blunt if she had to. She could be pretty much anything if she had to. Maybe it was the parents’ house; maybe it was the things that lived inside their rooms. Maybe it was a dozen small betrayals braided into one larger, dependable strand. She was an accumulation of their neglect.

They reached the lunchyard—buses reclining like tired whales—and Lana settled at a bench that had the sun. Two girls waved, and Lana waved back; the air around Lana was the kind of warm that made other people feel blessed to be noticed. People assumed Lana’s brightness was limitless. People always liked to assume abundance.

Clara unfolded her sandwich mechanically and watched the bakery-smeared paper darken with oil. The bread tasted like yesterday and nothing at all. Her phone buzzed and she ignored it. The future had the dull quality of postcards kept too long.

“Guys!” Lana called over, summoning two of her friends. “You won’t believe what happened in history class.” She launched into an impression of the teacher. They laughed—at Lana’s cadence, at the mental picture. Clara watched them, and for a slender, secret second, the sensation of being normal touched her like frost on skin: cold, sharp, real.

At the end of the bell, their silhouettes split. Lana texted incessantly, the day’s trail of small transactions: pictures of a stray cat, a scandal about the lunch lady, a plan to meet at the cliff after sunset. The cliff was the real place people used when they wanted to feel dangerous without doing anything that mattered. It had wind and stones and a view of the small town’s light.

“You shouldn’t go alone,” Clara wrote back. She added a winking face because sometimes she needed to be polite to herself.

“No way,” Lana replied, quick and personal. “You coming or what?”

Clara hesitated, because home would be waiting: Mira’s clipped sentences that pretended to be jokes. The house knew how to fold shame into polite corrections. It was built on pauses. Her brothers would be there, cheeks flushed with their own harmless fears. Her father would be watching some old movie, turning the channel when anything uncomfortable came up. He preferred the soft hum of avoidance to the screech of confession. He was a decent man who cultivated peace like a gardener cultivates weeds.

If she went to the cliff, she would feel the wind press against her face and remember Lana’s shoulder against hers—solid, human. She needed solidity the way a room needs sunlight.

She went.

The path up to the cliff smelled like crushed thyme and the sort of safety that comes with altitude. Lana arrived with a bag of french fries and a grin like a secret. They sat near the lip where the town fell away into fields like a map of things to be undone. The sun was soft and the world shrank into a watercolor smear below them.

“Tell me a stupid story,” Lana said. “About a prince who fell in love with his shoelace.”

Clara told one. It made them both laugh in the middle of the dusk. Lana’s laugh caught in the breeze and seemed to float like a bright piece of cloth.

They sat until the light thinned, until voices from the town became small and distant. Lana leaned her head against Clara’s shoulder, which was the sort of intimacy that had no drama—no labels beyond “this is how we are.” A moth hit the light over their heads and Lana turned toward it, as if the insect were its own small world to be marvelled at.

“You’ll be okay,” Lana said suddenly, earnest. Her fingers made the smallest, deliberate pressure against Clara’s arm. It was a pressure that said more than the everyday slogans people traded. Not just “be okay”—but “you deserve to.”

Clara wanted to tell Lana how tired she was of being a problem people fixed with hushed voice and pointed silence. Instead she watched the horizon, the soft bruise of the evening, and felt something fold open inside that she had been trained not to show.

“Promise me something?” Lana asked.

“Okay,” Clara said. She hated promises she could not keep. She also hated Lana, sometimes—Lana and her absolute generosity. But she would promise to anything when Lana asked.

“Promise if ever you want to run,” Lana said, “you will tell me. Don’t go alone.”

Clara thought of her father’s passivity, of her stepmother’s cold jokes that had the stickiness of sugar in their insistence. She thought, for a second, of the house and its perfectly timed silences. For a moment she forgot which parts of her were armor and which parts were bone.

“I won’t,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

They made a pact, the two of them, beneath the first star. It was a small promise, a rope thrown between them across whatever gaps might come. Neither of them knew how much rope it would take.

When she went home that night, the house smelled like lemon and old arguments. Her stepmother, Mira, counted Clara’s presence like a daily inventory of inconveniences.

“You’re late,” Mira said, the words soft as a mat placed in front of shame. She did not look at Clara the way people look at other people; she looked at her the way you look at a thing that could be rearranged. “You should come home earlier. Your brothers worry.”

The brothers were at the table pretending they didn’t hear. They pretended, for the most part, to be preoccupied with homework, their phones, their scraped knees. They cast looks at Clara that were mixtures of guilt and fear, like people who had seen something in a window and then turned away.

Clara ate without talking. Food warmed her stomach but did not touch the places inside that were cold. She learned the steps of household peace: nod when Mira made a joke she did not like; laugh when a story demanded it; volunteer to wash the dishes because busy hands could be excused.

The television was histograms of sound and light in the corner. Her father, who loved the world in passive ways, patted the armrest of his chair as if to remind himself he existed. He would not be the sort of man to change the shape of a house by stepping into its guilt. He would instead do what he always did best: love his illusions of order more than his own blood.

Later, as she went up to the small rooftop where she kept her secret things—a jar of nickels, a battered book of poems—she pulled the door quietly and sat with the night around her. The town’s distant lights stitched across the plain. She thought of Lana’s promise and felt it like a thin cord still warm from being handled.

A message bubbled on her phone, brief and urgent, from Lana: See you tomorrow. I need you.

Clara’s fingers hesitated. She wanted to answer properly, to write a sentence that would mean something. Instead she texted a winking face and a thumbs-up, two tiny emojis that pretended the future was as simple as a cartoon.

She watched the town, and the stars clenched cool above. She wished, for the thousandth time, that people could be better calibrated: that compassion could be measured like salt. But the world was untidy. People arranged themselves into shapes they recognized and refused to see beyond the edges.

She did not know how that would fail them. She only knew that Lana’s presence cut its own path through nights like someone leaving a lamp on in an otherwise empty, enormous house. For now, that would have to be enough.

When she finally went to bed, the house sounded like an organism in rest: the muffled television, the soft scrapes of kitchenware, the distant low chuckle of her father at something that had not occurred. Clara lay awake and counted the way each breath took up exact, modest room in her chest. She promised herself, very quietly, not to become someone whose life could be rearranged without protest.

She did not know how much courage it took to keep that promise. She only knew that with Lana, the small improbable things—laughter on a cliff, a text that said I need you—arranged the shape of her life into something she might hold.

And the last thing she thought before sleep folded her was that maybe, if lucky, promises could be anchors. Maybe anchors could be enough.

The gate groaned as Clara pushed it open, metal grinding like an old man’s sigh. The house beyond stood in its usual neatness: the freshly swept front steps, flowerpots lined with obedient petunias, the faint lemon scent Mira liked to spray in the evenings to “welcome Dominic home properly.” To the neighbors, it looked like a house where harmony lived.

Clara knew better.

Inside, the silence pressed down, broken only by the rhythmic ticking of the clock above the dining table. The television muttered faintly from the living room. Clara slipped off her shoes and lined them against the wall, careful not to scrape the floor.

“You’re fucking late again.”

The voice drifted from the kitchen, melodic but sharp. Mira emerged, drying her manicured hands with a towel, lips painted in a perfect crimson smile. She never raised her voice; she didn’t need to. Her words cut without volume.

“I was at the fucking library,” Clara murmured. A lie rolled out automatically, smooth from practice.

Mira tilted her head, studying her like a pinned insect. “The library,” she repeated, amused. “Funny how you never bring home a single book.”

Clara kept her gaze on the floorboards. Arguing was dangerous; silence was safer.

At the dining table, Francis hunched over his homework, pencil scratching furiously as though he could stab holes through the paper. John tapped his pen in uneven bursts, eyes flicking nervously between Mira and Clara. For a second, pity sparked in their gazes—but like always, it burned out quickly. They bent lower over their books, cowards retreating into ink and paper.

“Clara.”

Her father’s voice floated from the living room. Dominic sat slouched on the sofa, eyes glued to the television where a black-and-white hero was declaring eternal love to a woman in pearls. “You’re back,” he said, not unkindly, but not warmly either. His eyes flicked over her once, then returned to the screen. “Dinner’s ready?”

“It will be,” Mira said smoothly, already turning her back.

Dinner was a ritual, precise as clockwork. Mira filled the plates, smiled her brittle smile, and laced her words with tiny poisons.

“You hardly eat,” she told Clara, serving her a portion barely larger than a child’s. “It’s no wonder you look like a ghost.”

“You should sit straighter,” she added moments later. “Hunching makes you look weak.”

Between Mira’s remarks, Dominic chuckled absently at the television, laughing at a joke nobody in the room heard. Francis and John shoveled food quickly, as though speed could make them invisible. Clara chewed in silence, staring at her plate until her stomach twisted.

When the meal ended, Mira laid her napkin down with a satisfied sigh. “Clara, dishes.”

Of course. Always Clara.

Her hands moved through soap and water, scrubbing until her fingers pruned. The others disappeared one by one: Dominic to his armchair, Mira to her phone call, Francis and John upstairs to their room. The clatter of Mira’s laughter on the phone echoed faintly, as though even joy in this house was sharpened.

At last, Clara dried her hands, grabbed her phone, and slipped away.

The rooftop was her escape, a place where the air didn’t smell like lemon polish or simmer with tension. She climbed the narrow stairs, pushed the window open, and stepped into the cool night. The city sprawled below, speckled with lights like fallen stars. Above her, the real stars burned—tiny, untouchable flames.

She lay back against the rough concrete, phone clutched to her chest. After a moment, she unlocked it.

One new message waited.

"Still awake?"

Her lips twitched despite the day. Lana.

Clara typed quickly: "Yeah. Roof."

The reply came almost instantly. Figures. You and your stars. One day I’ll climb up there and drag you down just to annoy you.

Clara almost smiled. That was Lana—bright, restless, alive with words. Even when she teased, warmth threaded through. Clara’s thumbs hovered over the keyboard before she typed:

"You wouldn’t survive without me."

Seconds later: "Same."

That single word glowed on the screen. Small. Plain. But it lodged in Clara’s chest like a secret heartbeat.

She set the phone down beside her, eyes drifting shut. The rooftop hummed with silence, but in her hand lay proof of something that tethered her here.

She told herself, as always: "That's my best friend."

Downstairs, Mira’s laughter rose sharp against Dominic’s low murmur. Francis and John whispered in their room, voices anxious. The house was full of noise, yet empty of comfort.

Only here, under the stars, with Lana’s name glowing in her palm, did Clara feel alive.

She opened her eyes and stared at the night sky, whispering to no one:

“Don’t leave me.”



The cliff wasn’t marked on any map. It was just a jut of rock at the far edge of town, hidden behind overgrown brush and a dirt path that most people ignored. To Clara, it was freedom. To Lana, it was adventure. To both of them, it was theirs.

Clara kicked at the rocks as she climbed, the soles of her sneakers slipping on the loose dirt. “Fuck this hill,” she muttered under her breath. Her baggy hoodie dragged against the thorn bushes, snagging at her sleeve.

“Come on, grandma,” Lana called from above, her voice bright, teasing. She had scrambled ahead like she always did, fast and reckless, hair flying behind her. “You’re slower than a damn snail.”

“Eat shit,” Clara shot back, panting, but her lips twitched.

By the time she reached the top, Lana was already sitting at the edge, legs dangling over the abyss. The wind whipped around her, tugging at her T-shirt, her hair a wild halo in the dying light.

“Careful,” Clara muttered, dropping beside her. “One gust and you’re toast.”

Lana grinned without looking at her. “Then you’ll have to jump after me.”

“Fuck off.” Clara shoved her shoulder lightly, but her chest tightened anyway. Jokes like that always lodged somewhere deeper than they should.

Below them stretched the town—tiny houses, glowing windows, streets like veins. Farther off, the dark line of the forest pressed against the horizon. Up here, it all felt small, far away. The cliff gave them distance, a place above it all.

Lana leaned back on her hands, squinting at the sky. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Clara followed her gaze. The sun was bleeding into the horizon, painting everything in bruised gold and deep purple. “Yeah,” she admitted, then added, “but you’re blocking the view.”

Lana snorted. “Wow. Romantic as always.”

They sat in silence for a while, the kind of silence that wasn’t empty but full. Clara picked at the frayed seam of her hoodie, stealing glances at Lana. The way the fading light brushed against her cheekbones, the way her eyes caught fire when she laughed.

Clara looked away quickly. Fuck, stop staring.

“So,” Lana said suddenly, her voice lighter than her eyes. “What would you do if one day I wasn’t here?”

Clara stiffened. “What the fuck kind of question is that?”

“Just curious.” Lana smiled, but it was thin. “Like, if I disappeared. Moved away. Or…” She trailed off.

“Don’t,” Clara snapped. “Don’t say shit like that.”

Lana tilted her head, watching her. “You’d miss me though, right?”

Clara wanted to spit out a joke, to roll her eyes, to say something sharp. But her throat closed. The truth burned at the back of her tongue, dangerous, unspeakable.

“Yeah,” she said finally, voice rough. “I’d miss you.”

Something flickered in Lana’s expression, gone in an instant. She looked away, hugging her knees to her chest. For the first time that evening, her smile didn’t reach her eyes.

They stayed like that until the sun sank completely, shadows crawling over the cliff’s edge. Down in town, the streetlights blinked awake, one by one.

Lana exhaled, long and shaky. “Sometimes… sometimes I feel like I’m wearing a mask. Like if I take it off, nobody will like what’s underneath.”

Clara turned her head sharply. “Who gives a shit about masks? You’re fine the way you are.”

“You don’t get it,” Lana whispered.

Clara’s chest ached. She wanted to reach out, to grab Lana by the shoulders, to shake the sadness out of her. Instead, she muttered, “Then make me get it. I’m not going anywhere.”

Lana’s smile returned, soft but fragile. “You’re a terrible liar.”

Clara scowled, but the words landed deep.

The air grew colder, the night pressing in. Clara pulled her hood up, shivering. Beside her, Lana leaned closer, their shoulders brushing.

Neither of them moved away.

After a while, Lana whispered, “Promise me something.”

“What?”

“If I ever… fall, you’ll remember me.”

Clara’s stomach twisted. “Shut the fuck up, Lana.”

“Promise,” Lana insisted, her voice fierce now, almost desperate.

Clara stared at her, heart pounding. The wind howled across the cliff, carrying their breaths away.

“Fine,” Clara growled. “I promise. But you’re not going anywhere, so stop talking like a fucking maniac.”

Lana smiled faintly, eyes shining with something Clara couldn’t name. “We’ll see.”