Chapter 1

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.

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