Mika learns to read the school the way other people read weather. A sheet of paper on a bulletin board can mean sun or a storm depending on whose handwriting is at the top and whose initials are tucked beside the “approved” box. In Student Activities, the rosters are always clean. Nothing about them looks personal. That’s the point.
The language is always the same: limited capacity, first come first served, must have prior experience. A QR code that loads a form with a countdown bar. An “updated deadline” posted after lunch, after the people who needed to see it already did. Mika stands close enough to scan, far enough not to look like she’s hovering, and feels her shoulders lock into that careful posture she’s perfected, polite, unbothered, not asking for anything.
Her phone vibrates anyway. A notification from a group chat she isn’t in: because someone screenshotted it for her, out of sympathy or curiosity, she can’t tell which. The message is harmless on its face: Hey! Just a reminder to sign up by 2:00! It’s 2:[^17]. The sign-up link, when she tries it, is dead with a cheerful error page.
She could email the advisor. She could, technically. But she knows how it plays: adults love tidy explanations. We had to close early because of demand. We posted it; maybe she missed it. The burden always lands on the person who’s already behind. Mika imagines her scholarship file, a thin stack somewhere, growing heavier with little notes that sound concerned: difficulty managing commitments, needs to be more proactive.
In the hallway glass, she sees Yuki glide past with a lanyard and keys, moving like she owns the time. Haruko follows a step behind, smiling at someone’s mother near the front office, voice soft enough to be kind, soft enough to be impossible to quote.
Mika turns away before anyone can catch her looking, and keeps walking as if nothing changed. Her thumb taps refresh. Then refresh again.
The sign-up sheets move through the same hands every time. Paper becomes permission, and permission becomes a kind of inheritance. Mika watches the clipboards circulate: passed from advisor to “student lead,” from “student lead” to the person who always happens to be standing closest, pen already uncapped. The ink looks identical no matter who writes it, but the pattern doesn’t change: the same neat signatures, the same last names that show up on banquet programs and donation plaques, the same people who can afford to stay after school without asking anyone for a ride.
It isn’t loud. That’s what makes it work. A pause before a clipboard reaches her. A soft, “Oh, I thought you were busy this semester,” said like a favor. A rule that appears only when she’s about to qualify (prior experience required) as if experience is something you get naturally, like height.
She feels it like gravity: not violent, not even personal, just relentless. Tradition dressed up as logistics. Nothing she can screenshot cleanly. Nothing anyone would call cruel. Just a system that keeps the best chances in the same pockets, and calls it normal.
Decisions are made in the bright, fast-moving space of group chats: threads with club logos in the header and pinned messages that read like policy. A meeting location shifts with a single “FYI,” a new form appears with a shortened deadline, a “quick vote” goes up during sixth period and closes before Mika’s last class lets out. The tone stays cheerful, efficient, impossible to argue with without sounding dramatic. Screenshots circulate like contraband: proof that something happened, not proof it was wrong. When Mika finally hears about it, it’s through a forwarded image with her name absent from the member list, a time stamp already old. She can feel the decision settling into place, hardening into “what everyone agreed on.”
By the time anything reaches an advisor’s inbox, it’s been sealed in polite language and tidy bullet points: we checked availability, we took a quick vote, we’re trying to be fair. A screenshot of the poll, a forwarded “summary,” a list of names that looks inevitable. Adults hear the students decided and relax, praising leadership. They don’t see the coordination underneath, the timing, the missing invitations.
Leadership isn’t a crown here; it’s a keypad. The right names get the code in advance, passed in DMs and “quick reminders,” while everyone else meets the locked door and assumes they missed a memo. Exclusion arrives in soft packaging (“limited spots,” “nothing personal,” “maybe next time”) so clean and reasonable it turns into self-blame before it ever becomes anger.
Mika learns to make her excellence feel impersonal. Not the kind teachers clap for in front of the class. No bright anecdotes, no “she’s going places,” no little moments that invite someone to decide they know her. Her best work has to read like it could’ve been produced by any diligent student with access to a printer and enough sleep, even when she’s doing it on four hours and a tension headache that won’t quit.
She keeps her notes immaculate in the specific way that discourages questions: clean headers, consistent margins, neutral pen colors. Nothing cute, nothing that looks like a signature. In the margins, she avoids jokes, hearts, the tiny drawings other girls trade like currency. She writes definitions like she’s submitting evidence. If someone flips through her binder looking for a reason to talk about her, they find nothing but structure.
Even her asking for help is engineered. She doesn’t hover after class; she waits until the line thins, then steps forward with a single question she’s already rehearsed so it sounds like diligence, not panic. She makes her gratitude quick and ordinary, like a receipt. Thank you. Got it. I’ll fix it.
The scholarship office likes “consistent.” Advisors like “mature.” Those words are supposed to mean safe. Mika lets them mean invisible.
Online, she does the same thing. If she posts, it’s an event flyer, a club reminder, a photo cropped so tightly it could belong to anyone. She checks her privacy settings the way other kids check their hair. She answers DMs with complete sentences that can’t be screenshotted into something sharp. No sarcasm. No heat. No proof of being human on the wrong day.
When praise comes, she redirects it toward process so people leave with a resource instead of a story. She wants her success to feel like policy: dependable, boring, and difficult to argue with. That way, if someone tries to turn her into a problem, they have to work harder than she does.
She calibrates her body the way other kids calibrate their outfits. Shoulders back, chin level, elbows tucked close like she’s conserving space. In the bathroom mirror before first period, she tests expressions the way she tests mic volume: neutral, attentive, faintly pleasant. Nothing that reads like a dare. Nothing that reads like a confession. Her hands learn where to go so they won’t betray her, thumbs folded over knuckles, fingers laced, palms flat on the desk, stillness as an alibi.
Her voice is the same kind of careful. She aims for soft enough that people lean in if they want to hear, but not so soft a teacher says her name twice. She keeps her sentences clean of slang that can be twisted, keeps her tone steady so no one can screenshot a caption and attach “attitude” to it. Even laughter is measured, the quick exhale that suggests she understood the joke without offering more material.
She watches the room while pretending not to. The angle of Haruko’s smile. Yuki’s eyes flicking to phones. The moment someone decides a story needs a main character. Mika makes sure it isn’t her.
In clubs, she gravitates toward the kind of work that disappears the moment it’s done. She arrives early, finds the half-finished piles of handouts, and makes them whole: corners squared, staples aligned, names checked against the roster like it’s math, not belonging. If the projector cable is missing, she locates it without announcing the search. If the sign-up sheet is a mess, she redraws it in clean columns and leaves it where someone else can “discover” it. She learns to anticipate gaps before they can become questions aimed at her: Who forgot? Why didn’t you? Are you even committed? When someone thanks her, it’s brief and generic, the kind of gratitude that closes a topic instead of opening one. Curiosity needs a spotlight; she gives them efficiency instead.
She learns to phrase her sharpest thoughts as invitations. Would it help if we moved the deadlines up? Should we just split the list by last name? It sounds like she’s volunteering for the boring parts, not correcting anyone. When she needs to push back, she wraps it in procedure (policy, schedules, “just to be safe”) so if someone bristles, she can retreat into helpfulness.
Every decision runs through the same silent calculation: don’t become discussable. If she turns into a story, her foster placement and scholarship aren’t just paperwork. They’re handles. Haruko can offer “support” that sounds like concern. Yuki can “clarify” rules to an advisor. One screen-captured moment, and adults start steering meetings, reviews, and phone calls like they’re protecting her.
Mika learns, slowly and with the kind of embarrassment that sticks to the roof of your mouth, that the real line isn’t posted anywhere. It isn’t in the student handbook, or in the club bylaws with their tidy bullet points and “respectful communication” clauses. The line is aesthetic. You can be late if you arrive apologizing in the right cadence. You can miss a form if you hand it in with a self-deprecating laugh that gives someone else permission to feel gracious. You can even complain, technically, as long as the complaint sounds like you’re blaming yourself for having needs.
What you can’t do is disturb the surface everyone is balancing on.
She sees it in small, ordinary scenes that shouldn’t feel like traps. A meeting table, a shared Google Doc projected on the wall, the soft tap of keyboards. Someone makes a decision too fast, skipping a step, and Mika’s brain catches on the snag. An inconsistency in dates, a missing name, a policy note that will matter later. She opens her mouth thinking she’s being useful, thinking “follow-up” is a neutral word.
“Sorry,” she says, careful. “Just. Where did the volunteer list get posted?”
It’s nothing. It’s a logistical question. But the room shifts anyway.
Not dramatically. Not enough to point to. A silence that’s more like a held breath than a pause. Eyes lift and then slide away, as if looking directly at her would make it real. Someone’s smile fixes in place, polite and thin at the edges. A chair squeaks; a pen clicks. The advisor’s expression stays pleasant, but the attention moves off her and onto the air around her, the way people look when something has spilled and they’re all pretending it didn’t.
Mika feels the heat climb up her neck. She replays her tone, the exact spacing between words, searching for the moment she knocked something over.
She learns the cost isn’t immediate. Nobody snaps at her. Nobody says don’t ask. They just smooth things back down, and in that smoothing she can feel herself being filed away: not as wrong, exactly, but as a potential interruption. A risk. A story waiting to happen.
Small requests don’t stay small here. They take on weight the moment they leave her mouth, like the air itself is trained to listen for subtext. A casual, “Hey: was the volunteer list posted somewhere else?” is heard as I want special access. A careful, “Can you clarify what you meant?” lands as accusation. The words get translated into a language she didn’t agree to speak.
No one argues. That’s the trick. They offer smiles that are technically friendly, the kind you can’t call out without sounding paranoid. Someone tilts their head like she’s asking for help tying her shoes. Someone says, brightly, “Oh, it was in the chat,” and doesn’t say which chat. Another person nods, sympathetic, already turning their body away as if the matter is settled.
Mika watches the filing happen in real time: her name quietly moved from competent to complicated. Difficult, but not in a way that requires proof. Just enough of a feeling to keep handy. Later, when a slot “fills up” or a reminder “doesn’t go through,” the explanation is already waiting, pre-written: she’s intense. She’s making things weird.
Online, the rules tighten into something she can’t see until she’s already touched it. If she types out the full timeline, DM timestamps, the missing context, people reply with soft-eyed language: you’re spiraling, take a break, we’re worried. If she posts nothing, the silence becomes its own confession. Hiding, they say, like truth is a debt that accrues interest.
She drafts statements the way she writes essays: claim, evidence, calm conclusion. She deletes them because the calm reads rehearsed. She tries brevity; it reads cold. Even a single sharp sentence, even a justified flicker of anger, gets screenshot and circulated as temperament, not pain. Proof that she can’t regulate.
And then “concern” arrives in her notifications, polite as a teacher voice, edged enough to cut.
The label that sticks isn’t liar or rude; it’s unstable. Unstable is the word that lets them talk about her like weather. It’s how someone can suggest she’s a risk to the club, a distraction to the team, a “wellbeing concern,” and sound kind doing it. Supportive language, but it slots her neatly into something adults can monitor.
Once an adult is pulled into it, speech stops being air and starts being paperwork. “Just checking in” turns into a logged email, an email turns into an appointment, and an appointment turns into language that can be copied, forwarded, stapled to her name. Mika watches how quickly “disruption” gets translated into “safety,” and how safety comes with forms already waiting.
Mika doesn’t call it evidence. In her head it’s closer to homework. At her desk, the phone’s brightness is turned down until the screen is almost bruised-blue, and she works with the practiced efficiency of someone who knows how fast a story can be edited into a trap.
She scrolls back through DMs and group chats, not to reread the feelings, but to catch the structure: the first message, the shift in tone, the moment someone stopped answering and someone else started speaking for them. She screenshots whole threads, names, timestamps, the little “Edited” tag, then immediately pulls up the photo info to make sure the date is there. If someone deletes a message, she screenshots the empty space too. Proof of absence. Proof that something was there.
In her Notes app she makes entries that look harmless, the way you’d write a grocery list if you didn’t want anyone to ask questions. “JCC chat 8:[^14] pm, Yuki: ‘we already filled it, sorry!’ (polite, clipped).” “Kaito DM, 2:[^03] pm: said he ‘heard concerns’ (kept vague).” She avoids adjectives that sound like accusations. She writes like a witness on a stand, not a girl who can’t sleep.
A second folder lives in her email drafts, unsent and unnamed, because a folder labeled “screenshots” is basically an invitation. She forwards images to herself one at a time with subject lines that could be anything (“schedule,” “club,” “reminder”) then deletes the sent confirmation. Her camera roll stays clean. Her hands don’t.
When she hears footsteps in the hallway of the foster house, she locks the screen so fast it feels like flinching. No one’s trying to take her phone. That’s not the point. The point is to look normal. To keep all of this from becoming a new kind of problem, a new reason adults lean in with soft voices and file-ready concern.
She builds a record that can survive their versions of her, and she makes it look, from the outside, like nothing at all.
Mika teaches her thumbs a kind of etiquette that has nothing to do with respect and everything to do with survival. Every response gets rehearsed in her head before it touches the screen, tested for sharp edges, for phrases that could be lifted out and made to sound like an admission. No jokes. No italics. No “lol” that could be read as mocking. She keeps her sentences short enough that there’s no room for interpretation to breed.
“Got it, thank you for the reminder.”
“Understood. Before she hits send, she glances at the clock, at the
little “seen” markers, at the way silence can be edited into blame. When
her pulse jumps, she waits. A minute. Two. Long enough to look calm.
In clubs, Mika starts choosing work that stays out of the spotlight but leaves a trail you can touch. She offers to take inventory, to label storage bins with dates, to restock the printer paper in the yearbook room, to fold programs until the creases are uniform enough to look intentional. Jobs with outcomes. Jobs that can be pointed to later (there, on the shelf; there, in the sign-out log; there, in the clean sink with the brushes laid flat to dry) without anyone having to vouch for her in front of a crowd.
It isn’t pride, exactly. It’s defense. If someone says she didn’t help, she can name the box count, the receipt, the photo she took “for reference.” Useful, quiet, undeniable.
She learns the choreography of harm delivered in a good-girl voice. The jokes arrive wrapped in softness, and she answers with a small, practiced laugh, like a lid clicking shut. When a comment backs her into a corner, she nods once and offers gratitude fast, bright, automatic. Thank you becomes a shield: proof she’s “easy,” not “dramatic,” not worth reporting.
Before any conversation can harden into a story she can’t correct (she lingered, she listened, she agreed) Mika plans her exits like procedures. A glance at the clock. A quiet, audible, “I have to get to tutoring,” said to more than one person. She waves where witnesses can see, leaves her chair tucked in, and walks off while “responsible” still fits her.
In the hallway between third period and lunch, Haruko finds her the way a song finds a hook, soft, inevitable, already in everyone’s head. Mika is balancing a folder, her phone, the corner of a poster tube that keeps sliding. She’s halfway to the stairwell when a pen appears in her peripheral vision, offered like it’s no effort at all.
“You dropped your cap,” Haruko says, even though Mika didn’t. The cap is still on. Haruko’s thumb rests there anyway, steadying it, saving Mika from the tiny scramble that would make her look flustered.
Mika’s reflex is to accept the frame. She adjusts her grip, makes her voice small. “Oh: thanks.”
Haruko’s smile is the kind teachers like: clean edges, gentle eyes. She doesn’t block the walkway; she simply occupies the exact angle that makes stopping feel like the polite option. Around them, bodies stream past in orderly currents. A few faces tilt, register, file it away. Haruko talking to Mika. Haruko being kind.
“Just checking in,” Haruko says, and the words land warm, but Mika feels the measuring tape behind them. “You’re still good for the sign-up by Friday, right? I know you have… a lot.”
Mika does know. She knows because she’s already built her week like a spreadsheet, because missing deadlines is the kind of mistake that grows legs and runs straight to an advisor. Still, Haruko saying it out loud makes it public. It turns Mika’s private competence into something Haruko can be seen supporting.
“I’m good,” Mika says. She keeps her posture neat, shoulders down. The phone in her hand buzzes, a notification, a pulse, and she resists the urge to look.
Haruko’s gaze flicks to the screen anyway, quick as a blink. “And, um,” she adds, lowering her voice by half a step, “if anything online is stressing you out, you can always tell me. We’re all just trying to keep things safe.”
Safe. The word slides under Mika’s ribs and presses there. Mika nods once, grateful in the right tone, the practiced tone that says: I’m fine. I’m not a problem. Don’t make me a project.
Haruko steps aside with perfect timing, letting Mika pass while still holding her attention for one beat longer than necessary. Like closing a drawer slowly, to make sure it latches.
The favor comes with invisible stitching. It isn’t the kind you see while it’s being done: the pen offered, the reminder phrased like concern, the little rescue that saves her from looking scattered in front of witnesses. It’s the kind you feel days later, when she tries to move on like the moment never mattered.
Haruko remembers in a voice that stays soft no matter what it’s doing. In club rooms and hallway light, she’ll tilt her head and say, almost fond, “Oh, right: when I helped you with that,” as if she’s sharing an anecdote, not cashing a check. The words never accuse. They don’t have to. They rearrange the room. Mika can sense people recalculating where she stands: not independent, not simply competent, but sponsored.
Mika learns the pattern: help arrives early, before she can refuse without looking rude. Then it’s stored, labeled, and retrieved at exactly the moment she tries to choose for herself. Gratitude isn’t a feeling here; it’s a deadline. If she misses it, if she seems “unappreciative,” the story writes itself.
Yuki doesn’t do drama the way Haruko does. She does process. If you watch the seams instead of the center, you can see her hands everywhere: the volunteer roster “updated” at 11:[^47] p.m., the timestamped edit that bumps certain names up and others down; the group chat link that “didn’t send,” even though three people swear they got it; the sign-up sheet on the clipboard in Student Activities where the ink skips right over the line Mika knows she wrote on. It’s clean enough to deny, but too consistent to be a glitch. Mika starts taking screenshots, not to post, never to post, but to remember, because memory is treated like emotion here, and emotion is treated like evidence you can dismiss.
One slip could be chance; a pattern is architecture. Mika begins counting absences the way she counts missed assignments, dates, screenshots, who was present, who wasn’t. The same names surface first in every thread, tagged before the event is even announced. Others learn secondhand, too late to volunteer, too late to object. Access moves with a quiet logic: proximity to Haruko, usefulness to Yuki, silence guaranteed.
Rumors move through Seishin Bridge like they’re carrying tea. Two hands, careful posture, eyes lowered. Mika hears them in the same gentle cadence from different people, always prefaced with concern. “I don’t want to assume,” someone says, “but I heard…” The disclaimer is the weapon: polite enough to quote to an adult, sharp enough to bruise her name and call it caution.
Mika sets her phone face-down on the desk like that could make it stop existing. The screen goes dark; her reflection fades. A minute later her hand moves anyway, almost gentle, flipping it back over as if she’s checking on a sleeping animal. Nothing. No banners, no red numbers, no relief. Her thumb hovers where the notifications would spill in, and the empty space feels louder than a ping.
Silence is never neutral anymore. Silence is what happens before someone decides to “just ask a question” in the wrong group chat, before a teacher’s tone shifts into careful disappointment, before a screenshot becomes proof of whatever story people need. She watches the top bar (battery, time, service) like those symbols are a kind of fate she can read. 9:[^13]. 9:[^14]. The minute changes, and her stomach tightens as if time itself is a countdown.
She tells herself: Don’t check. Checking looks guilty. Checking looks obsessed. But not checking feels like walking past an open door at night and pretending you didn’t hear movement inside. Her fingers drag down the screen to refresh, once, then again, fast enough that it’s like she’s trying to outpace whatever is happening without her.
Nothing new. Which means someone could be talking somewhere else.
She opens settings and adjusts privacy she’s already adjusted (who can tag her, who can message, who can see past posts) tiny locks on a house with too many windows. She scrolls through old DMs and stops on the thread that started it, the one where her words look harsher without the rhythm of her voice, without the apology she typed and deleted and typed again. The timestamp sits there, permanent. She can’t change it. She can only look at it until it burns.
On the desk beside her math worksheet, her phone vibrates. One buzz, the kind that could be anything. Her body responds before her mind does. She flips the screen up so quickly the motion feels like a confession.
It’s just a calendar reminder: club meeting moved to Thursday.
Her shoulders don’t drop. They stay held in place, braced against the next buzz, because she can’t tell the difference anymore between normal life and the start of a file.
At school, Mika wears neutrality the way she wears her uniform, pressed, intentional, inspected. She loosens her jaw on purpose, softens her eyes on purpose, keeps her eyebrows in that safe, uninterested line that teachers read as “mature.” It’s a performance with no applause, just the absence of punishment.
By third period, the effort turns physical. The headache starts as a tight band at her temples and then pushes inward, settling behind her eyes like someone’s thumb. The fluorescent lights feel louder than they should. Her pencil squeaks once and she flinches, then stills her hand as if even reflexes can be misinterpreted.
In the hallway, she threads around clusters without seeming to. Her shoulders stay square, backpack straps even, steps measured. She gives out a soft smile when someone looks too long. Small enough to be polite, not big enough to look like she’s trying. She listens for her name the way you listen for a siren: not to hear it clearly, just to know it’s getting closer.
When her phone vibrates against her thigh, her face doesn’t change. Only her stomach does.
Every conversation turns into a drill she runs without meaning to. While someone is still talking, her brain is already building the version she’ll need later: what she meant, what she didn’t, which words could be lifted cleanly out of context, how a timestamp can look like intent, how a screenshot can crop out the one sentence that makes her human. She hears her own voice in advance, too defensive, too flat, too eager, and then sands it down mid-breath. Keep it simple. Keep it polite. She answers in safe syllables adults can file away as “mature”: yes, ma’am. No, sir. I understand. Thank you for telling me. The performance leaves her throat tight, like she’s swallowing her real sentences before they can be misquoted.
She begins trimming herself down to what can’t be quoted. Posts become nothing, jokes die in her mouth before they can land wrong, DMs sit unsent because tone is a coin toss on someone else’s screen. She answers in thumbs-up and “got it,” keeps her feed clean, her comments generic. What remains is homework and approved club labor participation with no sharp edges.
Safety, she realizes, isn’t living: it’s managing angles. It’s the way she tucks her chin when she laughs, how she holds her hands still so nobody can call her “dramatic.” It’s rehearsing innocence in advance, trimming herself to what can’t be screenshotted. Here, “misunderstanding” is a method: cheap to launch, permanent to wear, nearly impossible to untangle once it hardens into record.
Mika watches the clip loop until her thumb aches. The motion is tiny, two seconds of her face at the edge of someone else’s video, yet it’s been stretched into evidence. Cropped so tight it erases what she was looking at, slowed just enough to make her blink read as a decision. The fake subtitle sits at the bottom like a verdict, white text with a thin black outline, the kind of caption people trust because it looks familiar.
She tilts the phone, as if the angle could reveal what’s missing. The light from the screen paints her knuckles a sickly blue. She tries to remember what she actually said in that moment: the air-conditioned sting of the hallway, the weight of her backpack strap cutting into her shoulder, someone’s laughter behind her. There had been context. There is always context. The clip refuses to hold it.
Again. Again.
Each loop scrapes her down to the version of herself other people are being handed: smug, two-faced, pretending. Her stomach tightens, a hard pull beneath her ribs that makes breathing feel like doing math in public. She taps the progress bar to catch the frame right before the half-smirk. But the pause freezes her expression into something worse: a still image that could mean anything, which means it will mean whatever they want.
Her other hand goes to her hair clip, checks it’s still in place. A useless reflex: be neat, be harmless, be easy to file away. The notification bubble at the bottom of the screen swells and shrinks with new activity, like the phone is breathing for her.
She considers the simplest response, delete, report, ignore, and her mind supplies consequences like a practiced list. Screenshots don’t need originals. Silence gets interpreted. Denials get edited.
She hits play again, as if repetition might turn distortion back into truth.
She opens the comments, closes them, opens them again. The movement is small enough to hide behind her phone, but her eyes keep snagging on the same circles of faces. Icons she recognizes on sight. A lab partner with a pink aesthetic. The taiko treasurer who always says “good job” like it’s a stamp. A debate kid who once lent her a charger without making it weird. Even an upperclassman she used to watch from across the library, the kind of person adults point to as an example.
Their reactions line up too neatly. Not just laughing emojis, but the same careful phrasing, the same “yikes” and “I’m just saying” and “this is disappointing,” like there’s a template being passed around. Mika scrolls until her thumb starts to tremble, then stops on a comment that includes a timestamp: proof someone has done homework on her.
She clicks into profiles, checking who follows who, who liked whose reply, tracing the shape of a group chat she isn’t in. Her stomach drops at the familiar clustering of club leadership. It isn’t chaos. It’s choreography.
In the hallway, Mika makes her body into something deliberate: shoulders squared, chin level, steps measured so her shoes don’t squeak. She keeps her voice low when she answers a passing “hey,” the polite syllable placed carefully, like setting down glass. The air itself feels angled, as if the corridor has edges she might cut herself on. A knot of students near the water fountain thins without moving: one person slides a foot back, another turns a shoulder, creating space that reads as courtesy until it doesn’t. Their talk dips as she approaches, then returns in a softer register, the kind of discretion adults praise. She hears her name as a breath, not a sound. It’s worse than laughter: a performance of kindness that leaves no bruise you can point to.
She moves through the corridor as if through a room of mirrors. Eyes slide away at the last second, replaced by reflections: screens dimming to blank, the trophy case splitting her into shoulder, mouth, a clipped strand of hair. People glance down, then up, a quick inventory: is she the smirk, the subtitle, the warning? Their faces stay politely unreadable, which feels like a verdict.
A new message slips in among scholarship reminders and club notices, its subject line smooth as a laminated name tag: Just checking in. Mika’s throat tightens before she even taps it. Neutral doesn’t mean safe here; neutral is how adults start building files. She watches the sender field (an advisor, a counselor, someone with access) and feels the story trying to become paperwork.
Mika opens the email anyway. The subject line stays polite while her pulse doesn’t.
The advisor’s greeting is warm in the way a sign-in sheet is warm. Her name spelled correctly, a line about how “impressive” her last progress report was, how the summer program committee “likes to see consistency.” Mika reads it twice, catching the invisible staples: compliment, record, future.
Then the careful pivot, written in that smooth institutional voice that never raises itself above a murmur. I’ve seen some things circulating, and I wanted to check that you’re representing yourself appropriately. The word appropriately is soft and final, like a door almost closed. No link. No question about context. No “Are you okay?” Just a request for confirmation that she is still the kind of student the paperwork expects.
Mika stares at the cursor blinking beneath the message, as if it’s waiting for her to confess to something. Her thumb hovers over Reply. She thinks of the clip: her face frozen mid-sentence, the caption stapled on top of it like a new name. She thinks of screenshots saved in someone else’s camera roll, untouchable as evidence. She thinks of how “concern” can become a meeting, and a meeting can become a note in a file that travels farther than truth.
On the right side of the screen, the email thread shows past check-ins: reminders about deadlines, a “proud of you” after midterms, a smiley face that now feels like a stamp. She scrolls, as if the old messages can prove she’s still herself.
The room around her is loud (foster home kitchen noises, a faucet, someone’s TV through thin walls) but the email makes everything quiet inside her head. She starts to type anyway, choosing each word like it has weight.
Thank you for checking in. I’m aware of what’s been shared, and it’s missing context. Her fingers stop. Missing context sounds defensive. Circulating sounds like she’s supposed to accept it as weather.
She deletes the sentence and tries again, softer. Not apologizing. Not admitting.
Outside, a notification buzzes, another like, another comment, another tiny shove, and she forces herself not to look. If she answers wrong, this stops being a rumor and starts being a record.
Third period smells like dry-erase marker and the citrus spray the custodian uses too early. Mika keeps her phone face down, as if the black glass can’t accuse her. Mr. Endo is midway through taking attendance when he says her name, then pauses on it. Half a beat too long, like he’s checking whether the room is watching.
His gaze drops to the rectangle on her desk. Not angry. Careful. The kind of careful adults use when they think they’re being kind.
“Before we start,” he says, voice light enough to pass as routine, “I just want to make sure you’re being respectful online.”
A few pens stop. Someone’s chair leg squeaks. Mika doesn’t look up fast; fast reads as guilty. She keeps her shoulders square, hands folded, nails pressed into the side of her thumb where no one can see.
Respectful. Standards. Words that don’t need proof, just agreement.
He doesn’t say her name again. He doesn’t ask what was posted, or who edited it, or why it’s traveling so neatly. He’s already moved to the safer question: whether she understands the kind of student she’s supposed to be.
Mika answers the way she’s trained herself to: spine tall, chin level, voice kept small so it can’t shake. “Yes, of course.” She lets the words land without extra explanation, like a form signed in the right box. A couple of students glance up and then away, relieved the moment didn’t turn into something messy they’d have to witness.
Mr. Endo nods once, satisfied by compliance more than clarity, and turns back to the board. The lesson moves on but Mika feels the air shift around her seat, a quiet re-sorting of who is safe to be near. Respectful isn’t a question. It’s a doorway. And she can feel it narrowing.
At lunch, a decathlete she’s worked study guides with slips into the seat across from her, tray balanced like a peace offering. His smile is too bright, eyes flicking past her shoulder to see who’s watching. “People are just worried,” he says, like he’s announcing rain. “You know how it looks.” Then comes the script: don’t clap back, apologize in general, keep your head down. Advice shaped like a warning.
By the time she reaches the library, the phrase has already been handed to her three times, each delivery wrapped in the same gentle packaging: a little sigh, a moral keyword, a suggestion she fix herself quietly. Mika hears the pattern more than the accusation. Her stomach drops: not because of the clip, but because the language is coordinated, coached. Like someone distributed a script and called it “care.”
She refreshes until her thumb aches, then switches hands like that makes it less desperate. The screen keeps snapping back into focus, names she recognizes from club rosters, from honor-roll lists, from the temple volunteer sign-in sheet, then smearing again as her eyes water from staring. It isn’t the insults that catch in her throat. She can catalog those, file them away as noise. It’s the shape of the “kind” ones.
Same opening clause. Same gentle hedge. Same little moral cushion: Not trying to start anything. I’m not judging. Just checking in. The words land with the weight of adult language, the kind that pretends to be neutral while it decides where you’re allowed to stand.
She clicks into one comment thread and sees it repeated three times in a row, like a chant someone taught them. A sophomore in taiko, a girl from yearbook, someone with a profile picture cropped so tight it’s basically a neck and a smile. All of them offering “concern” the way you offer a tissue. Mika scrolls back up to the caption on the clip. Cropped at the exact second her face turns away. The subtitle added in white text that mimics the app’s default style, the kind meant to look unedited: See? This is how she is. The comments below don’t argue about what happened. They argue about what it “means,” and somehow they all reach the same conclusion with the same soothing vocabulary.
A tension headache pulses behind her eyes, in time with the refresh wheel. She tries to find an outlier, an awkward sentence, anything that reads like a person instead of a memo. The uniformity feels like a hand at the back of her neck, guiding her into a smaller version of herself.
She thinks, briefly, of replying. Just one sentence, just facts, timestamps, context. Then she imagines the screenshot of her reply traveling faster than the truth, packaged as “defensive.” Her finger hovers over the keyboard, then retreats. She refreshes again, because even knowing it’s managed doesn’t stop the hope that somewhere, someone will say something unscripted.
In her DMs, the kindness comes preformatted. Three separate names, three separate profile pictures (someone’s dog, someone’s kendo selfie, someone’s blank pastel circle) and yet the messages land with the same structure, the same breathless softener. Hey Mika! I saw the clip… then a pause line, then the pivot like a careful lane change: I just want what’s best for you.
Even the punctuation matches. The exclamation point after her name. The ellipses that pretend to hesitate. The little heart at the end of one, like it can make the words less sharp. She reads them twice, not because she doesn’t understand, but because her brain keeps insisting there should be differences. Instead, each sender offers the same gentle warnings in slightly rearranged order: don’t post, don’t “make it worse,” take a break, maybe talk to an advisor. None of them asks what actually happened. None of them says, Are you okay? in a way that leaves room for an honest answer.
It feels like being ushered toward a door that’s already closed, while everyone smiles to prove they’re not the one turning the lock.
A notification pops up like it’s routine: an image attachment from someone in Japanese Culture Club with a too-casual, oops sorry wrong chat. Mika opens it anyway. It’s a screenshot of the club group chat, names stacked in bubbles she recognizes from sign-in sheets and festival committees. The messages aren’t mean. That’s the point. They’re tidy, careful, phrased the way student leaders write when they want adults to nod along: In the interest of maintaining a respectful environment… Her eyes catch on the line like a snag in fabric. She’s seen it in leadership announcements, in volunteer reminders, in those emails that end arguments before they start. Here it’s been turned sideways. No one says her name, but every sentence points at her like a diagram. No accuser, just “community standards,” and somehow she’s already out of compliance.
She drags her thumb back through the timeline, squinting at minutes like they’re math. It comes in pulses. A post. Then, exactly as it starts to catch, two “gentle” comments land with the same soft hedge. A few beats later, a DM arrives (same opening, same cautious ellipses) like someone hit send on a template. Call-and-response. If she answers, the echo will frame it as confirmation.
The pattern clicks into place with cold clarity. This isn’t rumor drifting; it’s discipline: messaging with a leader’s handwriting. Polite enough to survive a counselor’s skim, vague enough that no one can be cornered, sharp enough to make distance feel like duty. Everyone gets to sound kind while they step back. If she pushes, she’ll be “dramatic.” If she stays quiet, the silence will count as proof.
Mika moves through the day like she’s practicing invisibility: shoulders squared, chin level, hands kept busy so no one can accuse her of hovering. She’s learned the choreography: pause half a step before doorways, let louder people go first, laugh softly at jokes she doesn’t hear, keep her backpack close so it doesn’t brush anyone’s desk. The hallways are bright and full, but the air feels thin, like she has to ration breaths between passing periods.
Between classes, she watches the micro-weather shift around her. Conversations don’t stop; they simply tilt. Someone’s voice lowers a register, a sentence gets rerouted midstream, a name becomes a pronoun. At the water fountain, a girl she’s volunteered with slides a foot forward: not blocking, just occupying the space where Mika would naturally stand. It’s small enough to deny if challenged, practiced enough to be deliberate.
In English, the boy behind her taps his phone screen twice, then sets it face down with a gentleness that reads like innocence. Her own phone stays in her pocket, heavy as a stone. She can feel the pull to check, notifications, comments, the tiny red numbers that make her stomach flip, but she keeps her gaze on the board and copies notes she already knows. If she looks frantic, they’ll call it “unstable.” If she looks calm, they’ll call it “not taking accountability.”
At lunch she chooses a table on the edge of the courtyard, where the wind carries cafeteria noise into harmless blur. Two seats over, a group rearranges themselves without meeting her eyes, knees angled inward like a closed gate. Someone says, too lightly, “We’re just trying to keep things… respectful,” and the word lands with the same smoothness as the posts.
Mika smiles when someone glances over, the kind of polite, narrow smile adults like. Her jaw aches from holding it. She catalogs who looks away first, who watches her a second too long, who already seems certain about a story she hasn’t been allowed to tell.
In the Library Media Lab, Mika slips into a back row where the fluorescent lights flatten everyone into the same tired color. Printers whir and cough out stapled packets; keyboards click in polite, steady bursts. She opens a test-prep PDF on her phone, thumb moving in slow, believable scrolls, and keeps her face arranged in the neutral focus teachers like.
Across the room, the sign-up sheets are laid out with sharp corners, weighted by a half-empty stapler. Yuki stands beside them like she belongs to the furniture: lanyard centered, keys tucked out of sight, posture ready. Her smile is bright in a way that feels rehearsed, a little too symmetrical. She talks in that careful, measured tone that sounds like responsibility when you’re not the target.
Mika watches without staring, using the reflection in a dark monitor to track Yuki’s hands as they hover over the paper. Names are pointed to, circled, rewritten. Yuki laughs softly at something a junior says, then lowers her voice and leans in, as if sharing concern instead of instructions. Mika can’t hear every word, but she recognizes the cadence: gentle, guiding, airtight.
A freshman hovers at the edge of the table, backpack straps twisted tight in her hands. Her voice barely clears the printer noise. “Is the group chat… safe?” It’s asked the way you ask where to stand, how to breathe.
Yuki doesn’t even pause her smile. She tilts her head like she’s being patient with something obvious. “Keep it private,” she says, light and firm. “For everyone’s safety.”
The phrase is clean enough to be quoted to an advisor. It sounds like care until you feel the lock click into place. The freshman nods fast, cheeks flushing, as if she’s done something wrong by asking. Mika watches the nod and hears what isn’t said: safety means silence, and privacy means permission.
Yuki’s pen skates down the volunteer roster with the calm speed of someone doing homework, circle, checkmark, a neat little arrow that reroutes a name to another column. It looks like routine. Mika leans in a fraction, pretending to reach for a stapled packet, and the page sharpens into fact: where her name used to be, there’s only blank space. Erased without cross-out, like she was never there.
No one needs to get loud for the message to land. The room keeps its polite hum while Mika watches the machinery work: a roster “reformatted,” a DM thread “migrated,” a reminder posted where she won’t see it until it’s too late. Everything looks like efficiency. She slows her breath, pins her expression in place, because she knows this kind of harm, quiet, procedural, and built to leave no witness.
Kaito appears at her locker like he belongs there, like the space between the dented metal and the hallway traffic has always been reserved for him. He waits until the bell’s gone and the rush thins to a manageable current, then leans in just enough to be heard without making a scene. Shoulders loose, backpack hanging easy off one strap: an effortless version of himself Mika doesn’t trust, because she’s seen how much effort it takes him to look effortless.
“Hey,” he says, and keeps his tone gentle, the way staff talk when they’re trying not to scare someone. His eyes land on her face, then flick down, as if he’s giving her the dignity of not staring at whatever the internet has decided she is this week. “You holding up?”
Mika’s fingers are already in her combination, already doing the small, obedient motions that make adults comfortable: open, close, straighten a stack of papers that doesn’t need straightening. Her phone vibrates in her pocket like a second pulse. She doesn’t take it out. She can’t afford to look like she’s checking.
“Fine,” she says, soft and automatic. The word tastes like lying. She tries to make it sound like weather, like nothing.
Kaito nods, slow. A practiced nod. The kind that implies he’s already heard worse, already filed it away in the part of his brain that knows how to phrase things for counselors and club advisors. Mika notices, absurdly, the faint pale line at his wrist where a hospital band used to sit, the way his sleeve shifts like he’s hiding it on instinct.
“It’s… a lot,” he says, and the pause is careful, measured: space for her to disagree, space for him to stay reasonable. “People are talking.”
“I know.”
Another nod. His gaze goes past her, over her shoulder, scanning the hallway like he’s checking who might be listening. Then he lowers his voice further. “I saw some of what got posted,” he admits, like it costs him something to say it. “It’s not, ” He stops, swallows the rest of the sentence, and replaces it with something safer. “It’s not fair.”
Not fair is what you say when you don’t plan to fix it.
Mika feels the words land and slide off the surface of her, leaving a cold residue. Her locker door trembles slightly under her hand. She presses her palm flat against it until it steadies, until her body remembers how to look composed. She watches him the way she watches a teacher’s mouth when they’re about to deliver a consequence: for the part that won’t be spoken, for what he knows and won’t name.
Kaito shifts his weight, the hallway light catching the careful neutrality on his face. When he speaks again, it’s not to argue with the clip or correct the caption; it’s to manage the fallout like it’s a schedule conflict.
“Just. “You should lay low for a bit.”
The phrase is gentle. It’s also a directive, delivered with the calm certainty of someone who has sat in offices and been believed. Mika can almost hear how it would sound in an email: student is overwhelmed, needs space, community should de-escalate. He keeps going, building a case out of reasonable words.
“Skip a couple club meetings. Don’t comment. Don’t post explanations.” His eyes flick to her pocket like he can feel her phone vibrating through fabric. “If you’re not there, there’s less for them to… attach to.”
Attach. Like she’s something sticky, something attracting debris.
“It’ll move on,” he adds, quieter, as if offering comfort. “It always moves on to someone else.”
Someone else. Said like an inevitability, said like permission.
Mika waits for the sentence that would make this simple: It’s cropped. It’s a lie. You know that. His mouth opens like it might go there, then veers: skirting the truth the way people step around broken glass so they can claim they never saw it.
He doesn’t defend her; he drafts a plan. His voice stays soft, reasonable, full of options that aren’t really options. If she keeps her head down, if she doesn’t “feed it,” if she lets the noise burn itself out. As if her silence could be mistaken for humility instead of consent.
Mika hears what he doesn’t say, in the gaps between his careful words. He’s treating facts like evidence in a case he doesn’t want to touch. And the worst part is how practiced he is at it: like he’s done this before, and survived.
The carefulness gives him away. He names names like he’s reading off a roster, who’s “concerned,” which advisor is “already hearing things,” which hallway rumor has reached the scholarship office, and then he edits himself mid-sentence, swapping certainty for “maybe.” He mentions what could get “documented,” the exact word, and Mika feels the pattern lock: he isn’t predicting weather. He’s tending it.
When Mika asks (soft, precise) where he saw the original, who has the uncropped version, who’s saving screenshots, Kaito’s composure pinches for a heartbeat, like he’s swallowed a pill dry. His gaze slides past her shoulder, toward the windows, toward teachers. “I’m just trying to help,” he says, carefully. Not a denial. Not an answer. A refusal disguised as kindness, sealing the story in place.
The email arrives at 11:[^43] p.m., when the house is quiet enough that every notification feels amplified. Mika’s phone lights the ceiling with the district’s blue-and-white header, the school logo crisp as a stamp. She opens it anyway, because not opening it would be a kind of superstition, and superstition has never paid her rent.
Subject: Social Media Concern / Scholarship Eligibility.
The words sit there like a diagnosis. She reads it once, then again, then a third time with her thumb holding the screen steady so it won’t blur. There’s no accusation, not exactly. No mention of the clip, no link, no quote from the caption everyone has been dunking on. Just a tidy paragraph about “community standards,” “student wellbeing,” and “maintaining eligibility requirements,” as if the scholarship is a living thing that can be startled and withdraw.
A meeting request. A time window. A reminder that participation is “expected.”
Her stomach tightens, not from fear of being punished but from the way the system turns implication into paperwork. A file. A note. A checkbox that can follow her into a committee room where no one has ever watched her wash dishes at midnight so she can finish homework, where no one has ever heard the foster mom’s voice turn sharp at the word trouble.
She clicks the counselor’s name. The signature block is cheerful: pronouns, office hours, a line about being “here to support.” Support can be a leash. Support can be a record.
Mika sets the phone down on her desk, palms flat like she’s steadying herself against an earthquake she can’t stop. Her breathing goes shallow; she counts silently, four in, six out, until the dizziness recedes. Then she reaches for her laptop, the one she uses for essays and application portals, and opens a blank document.
She types the subject line exactly as written, then the date and time received. She starts a list: repost chains she remembers, handles she recognized, the first comment that called her “fake.” She takes a screenshot of the email and drags it into a folder labeled, simply, Accuracy.
Only after that does she draft her reply. Not angry. Not pleading. One clean sentence asking for the original, unedited footage for verification. Her cursor hovers over Send, and she lets herself feel it. How small this is, how deliberate, how hers.
In the hallway the next day, she catches it happening in real time: the recalibration. Mr. Dwyer, who used to nod like she was just another kid with a backpack, gives her the careful smile. The one that checks her face for cracks. “You doing okay?” he asks, too bright, too public. It lands like a spotlight.
Outside the Yearbook room, the advisor pauses with his hand on the knob, eyes flicking to her phone as if it might announce something. He says her name with a question mark attached, warmth withheld until he can confirm the safest version of her. Two girls from Taiko stop talking when she passes, not abruptly. Mika keeps her shoulders squared, chin level, steps measured. She hears her own voice go softer when she answers, not because she wants to shrink but because softness has always been the price of being left alone. Inside, though, she’s counting: the half-second delays, the way adults angle their bodies to block a doorway, the new word, “concern”, slipping into sentences like a password. Evidence, not feelings. Patterns, not panic.
Her thumb floats over the app out of muscle memory, a reflex like picking at a scab. Refresh. Refresh. The little loading circle feels like it’s tightening around her ribs. She makes herself stop. Physically presses the screen dark, flips the phone facedown. Not denial. Triage.
In Settings, she kills notifications one by one, the way you shut off valves before something floods. The silence that follows is loud enough to make her ears ring. She opens Notes instead and starts building a ledger: exact time posted, account handle, caption wording with every casual “lol” preserved. She lists reshared stories, who tagged who, which threads use “concern” like a shield and which ones say “accountability” like a verdict.
The spiral doesn’t vanish, but it sharpens into corners she can hold.
She studies the clip like a problem set, replaying frame by frame until her eyes sting: what’s missing, where the jump cuts land, how the audio drifts a fraction behind her mouth. She cross-checks the date against the event schedule, remembers which corners always have tripods, who never stops filming. Yearbook socials. Shared drives. “For content.” It doesn’t feel like a dunk. It feels delivered.
She opens a blank email and keeps cutting it down until there’s nowhere for tone to hide. No extra adjectives. No “I just wanted,” no apology that could be filed as confession. A greeting, a single line of purpose, one request: the original, unedited footage, for accuracy. Another sentence. Please attach source material to any meeting notes. She hits send like she’s stapling the rumor to an invoice.
Mika starts with the safest kind of curiosity: logistics, the kind that can pass for diligence instead of desperation. Between second period and lunch she drifts toward the edges of conversations, near the bulletin board, by the copier in Student Activities, and asks questions that sound like she’s trying to keep her life organized. “Is the volunteer roster still on the same spreadsheet?” she says, thumb poised over her phone like she’s about to add it to her calendar. “Do we have the old agenda doc, or did it get moved?”
Her voice stays soft. She stands straight. She makes her face into something neutral enough that no one can accuse it of accusing.
In Japanese Culture Club, she catches Yuki at the storage closet and asks, almost offhand, “Do you know who has the keys this week? I don’t want to bother the advisor.” Yuki’s smile doesn’t change, but her hand tightens on the lanyard. “It’s handled,” she says, and then, too quickly, adds, “We’re just trying to keep things safe.”
Safe. The word hits like a hand on the back of Mika’s neck.
At the library media lab, a yearbook kid she used to trade captions with gives her the same careful tone. “Advisor preference,” he says, eyes sliding to the doorway as if someone might overhear. When Mika asks which advisor, he laughs softly and says, “You know how it is,” like they’re sharing a joke instead of a locked door.
She tries the smallest follow-up questions: What date was the link updated? Who sent the reminder? What’s the file name? Each time, the air shifts. People who can recite APUSH timelines suddenly “can’t remember.” Phones appear in hands; the excuse of a notification becomes a lifeline. One girl says she’ll “check and get back,” and then Mika watches the message sit on delivered for two days.
In the hallway mirror of glass trophy cases, Mika sees how she must look: composed, contained. The only giveaway is the way she holds her planner too tightly, knuckles pale, as if neatness could keep her from being rewritten.
The answers she collects have a sheen to them, like they’ve been laminated. Different mouths, same sentences: We’re just trying to keep things safe. Advisor preference. It was clarified. The repetition is almost soothing: until it isn’t. It’s the kind of language adults use when they don’t want to name the real reason, the kind that sounds responsible enough to end a conversation.
Mika keeps her expression mild and moves to specifics, the way she would for an assignment. “What day was it clarified?” she asks. “Do you remember the file name? Was it the one with ‘final’ in it?” She offers options like she’s helping them remember, not testing them.
They pivot anyway. Someone laughs like she’s being adorably intense. Someone says, “I’m not sure,” in a tone that suggests she should stop asking. A boy who can list every requirement for NHS suddenly frowns at the ceiling as if dates have become abstract concepts.
She starts tracking the phrases the way she used to track vocabulary: who uses which line, how quickly, and whether their eyes flick toward the same hallway corner before they say it.
Online, the tells don’t bother pretending. Her question about the spreadsheet link gets seen (blue check, then nothing) until midnight, when a reply arrives that reads like it was dropped from a template: It was clarified. Please follow advisor preference. It doesn’t answer what she asked. It doesn’t even use her name.
In the Japanese Culture Club group chat, the participant list thins in small, deniable ways. A familiar icon disappears from the top bar; old thumbs-up reactions on Mika’s messages quietly vanish, like someone went back and tidied the record. The member count ticks down and then up again, as if people are being removed and re-added for show. She refreshes twice, three times, watching the numbers shift the way you notice a door settling into its frame: no slam, just the certainty that it’s closed.
In her notes app, Mika makes a list that looks like homework: columns, timestamps, clipped phrases copied verbatim. Fast replies that say nothing. Slow replies that offer one usable detail and a warning wrapped in friendliness. No replies at all. Left on read like a boundary. The same names keep surfacing near the same choke points: rosters, keys, “updated” docs. She doesn’t blame; she just watches the pattern harden from paranoia into procedure.
Mika tests the edges with a single, politely worded ask. For my notes.” It should be a click, a paste, done. Instead it’s a daisy chain: Yuki says Haruko has it, Haruko says the advisor “archived” it, someone else says it “isn’t accessible anymore.” Then a “summary” arrives: bullet points, sanitized, already defending itself. Her stomach goes cold. The doc isn’t gone. It’s curated.
Mika keeps her face neutral at the Media Lab computer, posture squared the way she’s trained herself to sit. Like a student who belongs here, like someone doing ordinary work. The room smells faintly of warm plastic and dust, the kind of air that sticks to your throat after too many hours under fluorescent lights. Around her, keyboards chatter in short bursts; a printer hiccups, then goes still.
She clicks through the same dead-end links from earlier, not because she expects them to resurrect, but because repetition looks innocent. Thorough. The kind of persistence teachers praise. Each tab opens to the same bland error page, the same “access denied” banner that feels less like a boundary and more like a hand over her mouth.
Her inbox refreshes with a soft, almost apologetic animation. Nothing. Nothing. She waits three beats, then refreshes again, careful not to look like she’s waiting.
A new email arrives.
The address is unfamiliar: letters and numbers pressed together like a throwaway, a domain she doesn’t recognize at first glance. No subject line. No greeting. No “Hi Mika,” which would have felt like a trap anyway. Just a permissions notification and one shared file.
Her pulse kicks up, sharp as a headache beginning.
She does what she always does when she’s trying not to panic: she inventories. Sender: unknown. Content: minimal. Attachment: none, technically: just a link. She moves the cursor slowly over the name, over the file title, reading it twice like the act of reading could make it safer. A small part of her expects a punchline, a screenshot of her own words arranged into a weapon.
Her hand hovers over “Report phishing,” and she imagines what that report would look like if someone later asked: Why were you sent this? Why did you open it? Why do you have access?
She glances at the clock in the corner of the screen, time, always time, and then at the row of computers reflected in the darkened window. No one is looking at her. Everyone is looking at their own screens, their own lives.
The file icon sits there like it’s been waiting. Like someone has decided she’s finally worth a risk.
Mika doesn’t click right away. She reads the domain again, then again, breaking it into pieces the way she breaks down a hard math problem, prefix, suffix, what it’s trying to imitate. Her cursor drifts to “Report phishing” and pauses there, a neat little button that would let her pretend she never saw this. The safe move. The move that keeps her scholarship file clean, her foster placement unbothered, her name out of any adult email thread that starts with concern.
But reporting it would create a record, too. Questions. Screenshots. A trail that could be turned around on her.
She exhales through her nose, slow, and chooses the smallest possible commitment: open in preview, no download, no “Save to Drive.” Her shoulders pull up toward her ears as the loading bar inches forward. The lab’s fluorescent hum seems louder now, as if it’s reacting to her choice.
She keeps her eyes on the screen but listens past it: chair legs, a cough, the soft slap of someone’s backpack hitting the floor. Footsteps could stop behind her at any moment. She adjusts her posture into practiced normal and watches the file resolve, pixel by pixel, into legibility.
The spreadsheet sharpens into focus with the kind of discipline Mika associates with honor-roll binders and people who never miss a deadline. Tabs line the bottom in muted colors (“Leadership Updates,” “Advisor Comms,” “Volunteer Hours,” “Incident Tracking”) names that sound harmless until she clicks. Columns are color-coded by month; dates march down in tight rows. Each entry has a timestamp, a source, a clipped note: transition confirmed, advisor looped in, roster exported, summary sent. It reads like weather logs: no outrage, no blame, just measurements.
Then she notices the quiet tell: edits logged hours after meetings ended, roster versions overwritten, “final” lists replaced with new ones. Someone has been watching the same way she watches. Only with permission, and practice.
As she scrolls, repetition hardens into something she can’t unsee: the same five names surfacing beside every wave of “concern,” the same two advisors CC’d at the exact moment a rumor turns into a record. Volunteer rosters get “updated” after deadlines, seats reassigned, ride lists trimmed. Always the same kind of student ending up alone. It isn’t one bad read. It’s procedure.
Mika opens a blank doc and starts an outline the way she was taught to study: headings, dates, who was present, what changed. Only what could be defended as “club records,” nothing that reads like accusation. No screenshots. No forwarding. No receipts that could be called retaliation. When she’s done, she closes the preview, clears the recent list, and sits very still, pulse steadying into a shape she recognizes: intent. Someone made this. Someone wanted her to find it.
Tomo’s message arrives the way school messages always arrive.
Hey. Quick logistics check-in.
I’ll be by Student Activities 3:25–3:[^40] (same window as the
volunteer binder drop). Courtyard benches by the vending machines. If
that doesn’t work, give me a window that does.
Question: what conditions would make a conversation feel safe
for you? You can be specific.
Mika reads it once, then again, thumb hovering over the screen like her body doesn’t trust permission when it’s offered cleanly. No “are you okay?” No sympathy that could be forwarded as proof she’s unstable. No urgency that could turn into a trap. Just a time bracket and a location chosen for plausible deniability: foot traffic, cameras, teachers passing through on their way to meetings. A place where no one could corner her without being seen.
Her first instinct is to say nothing. Silence has been her safest setting for weeks. Fewer words to twist, fewer openings for someone to screenshot and caption. But the question is built differently. It hands her control before it asks for anything.
She opens a Notes app instead of replying directly. Lists are safer than sentences.
No DMs about this.
No screenshots.
No names in writing.
In-person only, short.
If I say stop, we stop.
If anyone else shows up, I leave.
She stares at the last line, then adds: No pity.
Even that feels like too much to admit.
When she finally replies, she keeps her tone neutral, like she’s confirming a club duty. 3:[^25] works. Public spot is fine. I can do ten minutes. No screenshots or posts. If I say I’m done, I’m done.
The read receipt pops up. A few seconds later: Agreed. Ten minutes. Your stop means stop. I won’t bring anyone.
Mika locks her phone and sits back, shoulders still square the way she’s trained them to be. Under the neat posture, her thoughts sprint: risk assessments, contingency routes, where to stand so she can see exits. But threaded through it is something new and sharp-edged: a plan that begins with her terms, not her apology.
Tomo arrives with a folder tucked under his arm like he’s headed to turn in forms, not start a rebellion. He doesn’t sit too close. He glances once at the stream of students and then back to her, as if he’s checking exits the same way she is.
“I’m going to start with what I won’t do,” he says, voice low enough to be private without looking secret. “I’m not asking you to post. I’m not asking you to go on record. I’m not pulling an advisor into this yet, because that turns into a file before it turns into a fix.”
Mika keeps her hands folded in her lap so they don’t drift to her phone. Her stomach tries to climb her throat anyway.
“No social media,” Tomo continues. “No threads, no ‘clarifications,’ no tagging anyone into a corner. And I’m not collecting screenshots from you. If something exists, we treat it like a hazard: not ammunition. I won’t make you carry it.”
He opens the folder just enough for her to see blank paper and printed policy excerpts, nothing with names highlighted.
“And if you want out,” he says, meeting her eyes, “we pause. No questions. No guilt. You don’t owe me momentum.”
Mika keeps her voice even, like she’s answering an advisor’s question and not negotiating her own safety. “I can check things,” she says. “Quietly. I can ask what looks like normal club questions, compare what people say, note who repeats the same phrasing. I can read policies and tell you what the rules actually are, not what people pretend they are.” Her fingers tighten once around the edge of the bench, then relax. “I can’t be the person on the flyer. I can’t be the one everyone points at. I can’t do anything that looks like calling someone out, or I lose my scholarship. Maybe my placement, too. And I’m not giving anyone screenshots or quotes they can call ‘drama.’”
Tomo nods, no pause, no persuasion. “Good. Then we build it so you never have to be seen.”
To see if his steadiness is performative, Mika gives him one small, verifiable thing: the exact week the volunteer roster “updated,” and the sentence that floated afterward. Tomo only flips a page and slides his phone slightly, showing an unrelated email thread with the same wording, same timestamp range, forwarded through a faculty-trusted name.
Tomo doesn’t tell her who’s “good” or “bad.” He sends receipts adults can’t dismiss: district policy excerpts on harassment and retaliation, the club bylaws about membership access, the exact complaint-routing phrases that turn emotion into procedure. Underneath, a spare list: three paths, each framed as compliance and equity, each with built-in exits. Mika reads it twice and feels, unexpectedly, useful.
Mika doesn’t make a dramatic spreadsheet. She makes something that could pass for homework: a notebook page folded into quarters, dates in the margins, arrows so small they look like doodles. Between classes she opens it just long enough to add one more clean fact: time posted, account name, a caption copied exactly, a comment that repeats a phrase she’s seen before. Then she closes it again, as if she’s guarding a test answer.
At first it’s noise. A story highlight here, a repost there, the same blurry crop of the same screenshot migrating between accounts like it has legs. People she barely knows type the same soft qualifiers, “not trying to start anything,” “just worried,” “hoping she gets help”, and the comments arrive in little storms, fifteen minutes apart, then quiet, then another storm. She marks the clusters with a dot, then a second dot when the same three usernames show up together again.
She uses safe questions, the kind that sound like she’s trying to keep up, not dig. In the Yearbook room she asks, neutral, whether the club is still using last month’s sign-up link. In Japanese Culture Club she asks if anyone knows who’s coordinating volunteer shifts. No one answers directly. They answer sideways: “Oh, I think it changed,” “Someone said it got updated,” “I heard we’re supposed to go through the right channel.” The phrase “right channel” shows up twice in one lunch period, from people who don’t sit together.
By the time she’s home, her head hurts in that tight, buzzing way it has lately, but the page is full. The pattern doesn’t look like panic anymore. It looks like routing: content pushed through accounts with “good kid” reputations, concern filtered through the same polite vocabulary, silence deployed where clarification would live. She can’t prove intent. But she can see coordination the way she sees a teacher’s rubric: the same structure, repeated, until the grade is inevitable.
Mika starts to understand the mechanism by what it leaves untouched. No one has to make up a lie if they can keep choosing the same angle of the truth, over and over, until it becomes the only angle anyone remembers. A cropped screenshot, a clipped sentence, a paused frame where her face looks harder than she felt, real, technically, but arranged like evidence. The comments underneath don’t sound cruel. They sound careful. “Just checking in.” “I’m concerned.” “We should give her space.” Space, she learns, can be a kind of burial.
When she tries to supply the missing piece people’s eyes flick away as if context is an accusation. Someone will nod too quickly and say, “Yeah, I don’t know, it’s complicated,” and the conversation folds shut. Later she’ll see the same person repost the original crop with a caption about “accountability,” as if refusing to listen is a moral stance.
Selection, not invention. Elevate the harshest interpretation; smother the rest with soft smiles and a practiced refusal to elaborate.
In the club group chats, Mika starts seeing the same language land like stamps. “Community standards.” “Wellness.” “Just want to make sure everyone feels safe.” And then, always, the cleaner blade: “Not a good fit for leadership.” It isn’t slang, not the way kids usually talk when they’re annoyed. It’s adult-ready phrasing, prepackaged and polite, the kind that sounds like it came from a training slide. She watches it get copy-pasted across different threads, from people who don’t normally sound alike, as if they’ve all been handed the same script.
The words do a specific job. They turn opinions into “concerns,” and “concerns” into something you can screenshot and forward with a straight face. Suddenly gossip has a header, a tone, a place in a file.
The screenshot doesn’t need to be a lie to work. Once she imagines it in an email thread, subject line “FYI,” the cropped edge implying a tone she never meant, its leverage makes sense. Accuracy becomes irrelevant when the framing is legible to adults: policy words, timestamps, “pattern of behavior.” Something that can be forwarded to an advisor, to scholarship staff, with everyone insisting they’re “just documenting,” not targeting.
The pattern finally clicks into something colder than rumor. They don’t need her expelled, not even humiliated loudly: just positioned. A clean, quiet example with tidy documentation and sympathetic language, the kind that makes adults nod and classmates go still. If Mika becomes the reference point for “what happens,” everyone else will start trimming their own messages, their own faces, before anyone has to say a word.
Tomo doesn’t ask Mika how she’s doing, not in that soft-voiced way that makes an answer feel like a test. He meets her in the narrow strip of hallway outside the Yearbook room where people pass through too quickly to linger, where the fluorescent lights flatten everyone into the same pale patience. He doesn’t block her path. He stands a half-step to the side, notebook tucked under his arm like he’s waiting for someone else.
“What do you have,” he says, and it lands with the plainness of a task. “Links. Screens. First time you noticed the wording change.”
Mika’s throat tightens anyway. Having something implies she’s been collecting, implies intent, and intent is what gets you written up. She keeps her hands folded around her phone so they won’t shake. “I. There’s a repost chain,” she says, voice low. “It spikes within five minutes when certain accounts share. The phrasing switches right after lunch on Tuesday. Same sentence structure. Different people.”
Tomo nods once, like she’s telling him the headcount for volunteer shifts. “Okay. Where are you seeing the first appearance?”
“Story captions,” she says, then corrects herself, precise. “The captions are paraphrased. But the comments repeat exact words. That’s where the copy-paste is.”
He doesn’t smile at her for being careful. He doesn’t look impressed in a way that would make her feel exposed. He just flips his notebook open and writes. “Can you pull the earliest timestamp you have,” he asks, “and the earliest one you don’t?”
Mika blinks. It’s such a clean question it steadies her. She can answer it without explaining herself. “Yes,” she says. “I can do a window.”
“Good.” Tomo’s gaze shifts briefly to the passing students, to the way faces tip toward them and then away. He lowers his voice. “And the screenshot you’re worried about: do you know who saved it, or just that it exists?”
Her stomach drops, but his tone doesn’t change, doesn’t turn it into a confession. Mika swallows. “Not who. But I know the time range,” she says. “And who had access to that thread.”
“Then we start there,” Tomo says, as if the word we is just another logistical fact. “No noise. Just a map.”
Tomo angles his phone between them, brightness turned down, and opens a shared drive. It isn’t fancy. Just clean. A top folder with the month, subfolders by date, each one split into “Original,” “Repost,” “Comments,” “Emails.” He scrolls like he’s showing her volunteer sign-up sheets. “Same system I use for permits,” he says quietly. “If anyone asks, it’s documentation for equity concerns. Not drama.”
Mika’s shoulders loosen by a millimeter. Procedure means she can breathe without looking guilty.
He taps a file name:
2024-03-12_IG_story_accountname_14-03_PT.mp4. Another:
2024-03-12_comment_screenshot_14-07_exactphrase.png. “No
edits over the originals,” Tomo adds. “If you need to crop for clarity,
save it as derivative and keep the source untouched.”
Then a spreadsheet: columns already labeled: platform, account, timestamp, wording match (Y/N), screenshot link, notes. A cell highlighted with a dropdown for “copy-paste / paraphrase / moralizing caption.”
Her habit of checking, rechecking, reopening the same screen until it hurts stops being a spiral. It becomes a method.
Mika works in short, careful passes, like she’s doing homework in a room where someone might walk in. She logs the first post, then the first repost, then the first comment that repeats the exact same sentence, capitalization, spacing, even the stray period. Some accounts lift the wording clean; others soften it into “just concerned” language, and a few tack on the same neat little caption that turns accusation into community service.
Within an hour the spreadsheet stops looking random. There’s a cluster that moves almost on a timer: one account posts, two share within three minutes, a third adds the moralizing line, and then the engagement jumps: likes and “so true” comments from handles that never touch anything else she’s in. It’s not a pile-on. It’s a route. A handoff.
Tomo asks for one more layer: not feelings, not motives, but infrastructure. “After the boost,” he murmurs, “who goes quiet in the chats. Who stops reacting. Who suddenly ‘doesn’t get it’ using the same sentence.” Mika starts a new column. She’s seen this before: tone shifts that pass as organic to adults, but arrive on schedule, like weather rolled in by someone’s calendar.
He slides her a second task, voice still calm but sharpened at the edges: follow what gets sent upward. Not posts: emails. Which teachers get the same “just concerned” phrasing in separate threads, how many minutes apart, which disclaimers repeat like a signature: I’m not trying to cause drama, I just worry about safety. Mika builds a log. When she marks the duplicates, Tomo exhales, relieved, like her vigilance has finally become evidence.
Mika catches Tomo between periods, in the library’s shadowed aisle where the campus tour groups never go. The air smells like paper and dust and somebody’s sweet coffee, and the carpet swallows their footsteps so thoroughly it feels like being underwater. Tomo doesn’t lean in like he’s sharing gossip. He stands with his notebook against his chest, posture straight, voice kept at the volume adults praise as “appropriate.”
“This is what holds,” he says, eyes flicking once toward the circulation desk. “If we ever have to bring it to an advisor, it can’t be ‘I heard.’ It can’t be ‘it felt like.’ It has to be: this was posted at this time, then this phrasing appeared again, then it showed up somewhere else.”
Mika nods like she’s being assigned a project in AP Lit. Her throat tightens anyway. Adults had looked at her before with that same careful interest Tomo is trying to avoid. Interested only if she can be sorted cleanly into victim or problem.
He flips his notebook open to a page of tidy columns. Dates. Platforms. Exact wording. A section labeled “channel” with blank space underneath: group chat, email, sign-up form. “Patterns are harder to argue with,” he adds, not unkindly. “Wording repeats. Timing repeats. People move the same way across places. If we can show that, we don’t have to convince anyone of feelings.”
“I can do that,” Mika says, quieter than she means to. She pulls her own notebook from her bag (small, spiral-bound, the kind that fits inside a planner) and clicks a pen like it’s a grounding exercise. Her handwriting comes out crisp from habit.
“What format do you need?” she asks. “Spreadsheet, timeline, screenshots with captions? And, ” She hesitates, then forces her voice steady. “What’s the threshold where it becomes… usable. Like, what’s enough.”
Tomo’s mouth twitches, almost a smile. “Enough that someone who doesn’t like you still can’t dismiss it.” He turns the page to a fresh sheet. “Start with what you can verify. We build from there.”
Mika lays out her boundaries the way she’s learned to lay out everything that matters: clean, unemotional, hard to misread. No confronting Haruko in hallways where adults can mistake fear for attitude. No cornering Yuki by the storage room door. No vague posts that invite people to “connect the dots” and turn her into the kind of girl teachers warn you about.
And she won’t use other students as collateral. If a classmate sends her something, she asks first, explicitly, whether she can keep it, whether she can cite it, whether it can be shown to an advisor. If they hesitate, it stays off the record. Mika doesn’t say consent out loud, but she treats it like a rule.
What she can do is smaller and steadier: her own DMs with full headers, public posts with visible timestamps, club communications she’s legitimately in, sign-up forms and announcement screenshots that show dates without cropping. She can write what happened without assigning motives. Message sent. Reaction removed. Phrase repeated. Neutral verbs. No adjectives that sound like revenge.
If she’s going to be seen, she decides, it will be as accurate.
That night, Mika clears space on the corner of her desk like she’s setting up a lab station: laptop centered, phone facedown, water glass pushed back from the edge. She opens a blank spreadsheet and builds the template slowly, naming the columns in plain language that won’t embarrass her later, timestamp, platform, sender/recipient, exact phrasing, link or file name, and a final column she titles how obtained so she can’t forget to be honest. Then a second tab: source log. She gives each entry a label (direct evidence, personal observation, secondhand) and a notes field for what would make it verifiable. Anything that relies on “someone said” goes into a separate, unsaved draft. If it can’t survive “How do you know?” it doesn’t get to live here.
Over the next few days, Mika moves through the club network like she’s checking supplies: “Do we still need volunteers for Saturday?” “Which chat has the updated flyer?” The questions land soft, harmless. People answer, then, without meaning to, repeat the same polished “just concerned” line. Mika copies the exact phrasing into her spreadsheet, notes where it surfaced, and when a smile slips into silence, she marks the timestamp and keeps walking.
She compiles the first packet for Tomo like she’s turning in an assignment: a folder of unedited screenshots from her own DMs, a preliminary timeline with timestamps, and a half-page summary written in policy-safe language. Her thumb hovers over send while an apology drafts itself in her head. She opens the message box, deletes the reflex, and sends the record.
Mika drafts the pinned thread the way she writes scholarship essays: spare, structured, and built to survive hostile reading. Not a diary entry. Not a confession. Something that could be printed, stapled, and handed to an adult who already thinks she’s “a lot” without giving them a sentence to circle in red.
She opens a blank note and types a header that is almost clinical.
Timeline , [date]
Then she makes herself start with what can’t be argued: what she posted, when she posted it, what she meant it to be. She pulls up the original DM chain and scrolls until her eyes sting, verifying the tiny numbers in the corner, 9:[^47] p.m., 9:[^52] p.m., as if precision can protect her. She screenshots only her own messages and the full timestamps, cropping wide enough to show context but not so wide it becomes a scavenger hunt. Anything that includes someone else’s name gets blurred. Anything that feels like a gotcha gets deleted.
Her hands shake when she sees the phrase that got stripped of tone and turned into a weapon. She doesn’t edit the past; she annotates it. One line of plain language under the image: “This was in response to [topic], not a comment about anyone’s body.” No adjectives. No “I’m sorry if.” No “please understand.” She can almost hear Haruko’s voice (sweet, pained) explaining to an advisor that Mika is “being dramatic online.” So Mika refuses drama the way she refuses slouching.
She adds a section titled What I’m not claiming, and lists two bullet points. She’s not accusing anyone of editing screenshots. She’s not asking people to pick sides. She’s providing her own record.
She rereads it once, then again, deleting anything that sounds like defending her character instead of clarifying facts. The last pass is merciless: remove the sentence that feels too human. Remove the line that might be read as begging. Keep the bones.
When she finally looks up, the room has gone quiet around her, like her life is holding its breath with her.
She posts, pins, and watches the blue loading wheel spin like a dare. For a second her thumb hovers over delete, muscle memory from every foster-home rule about not “making waves.” Then the thread settles into place at the top of her profile, plain header, numbered timestamps, blurred names, like a document slid under a door.
She moves fast after that, the way she does in the last five minutes of a test. Reply permissions: followers only. Keyword filters: the phrases they’ve been using like hooks. Message requests: off. She toggles off notifications and the sudden quiet feels physical, a pressure releasing behind her eyes.
The point isn’t to win anyone over. It’s to make the next move obvious. If someone screenshotted her thread to mock it, the cruelty would sit beside her clean timeline and look like what it is. If someone tried to bait her into arguing, the absence of replies would make their persistence loud.
She sets her phone face-down on the desk, palms flat on either side, and takes one measured breath as if posture can hold the line.
Within an hour the orbit closes in, gentle as a hand on her elbow, firm as a grip. Under her pinned thread, familiar names appear with soft warnings, “You’re making it worse,” “Just take it down for now”, as if calm documentation is a tantrum. In her message requests, “checking in” arrives in paragraphs, concern threaded with instructions: be humble, be quiet, stop embarrassing people who “care about you.” A couple of stories float through the hallway’s digital echo, no names, just the loaded fog of “accountability” and “some people don’t know when to stop.”
Mika reads, cataloging tone the way she reads test questions: what’s being asked, what’s being implied. She doesn’t argue. She doesn’t apologize into a trap. She opens the thread, adds one line, “Update: I will not be responding in comments; the timeline stands”, and closes the app like a door she’s learned to lock without slamming.
The next day at Seishin Bridge, Mika moves through the corridor like she’s only late to class, not late to judgment: chin level, backpack straps even, eyes on the far door. Voices brush her name and slide into “Hey, can we talk?” as she passes. When someone angles in to make her stop, she gives the same sentence twice, polite, factual, finished, and walks on, letting the hallway keep its noise.
At lunch, she sits with her carton of milk unopened, scanning the room like it’s a map. When someone drifts close with a sympathetic tilt and a question that’s really a trap, Mika answers once (soft, specific) then returns to chewing, eyes down. After club, same routine: she thanks, declines, keeps walking. The non-reaction becomes its own message, and her thread stops feeling like a plea and starts reading like instructions.
Her inbox fills the way a sink fills when the drain is half-clogged: slow at first, then all at once. New request. New request. Names she recognizes from the edges of club photos, and names that mean nothing except a tiny profile picture and a private account. Each message is small and wrapped in caution.
“Is this relevant?” one says, followed by a screenshot: a story caption, a time stamp, a poll sticker asking a question that isn’t a question.
“I’m not trying to start anything,” another begins, then attaches a DM thread where someone nudges, gently, for “a statement” Mika never agreed to give.
Mika sits at her desk with her laptop open to scholarship requirements, something solid and official, and her phone facedown like a trapped animal. She flips it over, checks the time, then opens the first screenshot. She reads like she’s grading: What is the claim. What is the evidence. What is missing.
Her replies are brief, almost sterile.
“Crop out the usernames. Leave the time/date visible.”
“Don’t repost this. Save it.”
“If you send it to an advisor, use ‘I observed’ not ‘they always.’”
She doesn’t ask why they’re helping. She doesn’t ask what they want. Wanting is what gets you caught.
A junior from Taiko sends a blurry photo of a sign-up sheet with Mika’s name circled in pen. “It was like this when I got there,” they write. “I don’t want you to think I did it.”
Mika’s thumb hovers over the keyboard. Her headache pulses behind her eye, a metronome. She types: “Thank you. Please delete the photo from your camera roll after you email it to yourself. Don’t mention me in your caption. If anyone asks, say you were organizing your own schedule.”
The advice feels wrong and necessary at the same time: teaching people how to disappear without admitting there’s something to hide.
Between messages, she adjusts her posture, shoulders squared, chin level, as if the angle of her spine can keep her from becoming a story. The screen reflects her face in fragments. She keeps her voice soft even here, in text, choosing words that won’t tremble.
Neutral verbs. Policy language. No heat.
She learns, in real time, how many students have been watching quietly: and how carefully they’ve been surviving.
A sophomore from Robotics (purple hoodie, hands still smelling faintly of solder) DMs her at 10:[^47] p.m. as if the timestamp itself is an apology.
hey. sorry. i don’t want drama. but like… how do you say it so it sounds like facts, not attitude?
Mika reads it twice, letting her first answer die in her throat. The urge to explain, to defend, to make them understand. That’s how people get branded: emotional, messy, “escalating.”
She opens Notes and builds a small, clean scaffold.
“Start with what you personally observed,” she types. “Use dates/times. Use neutral verbs: ‘I saw,’ ‘I heard,’ ‘I received.’ Avoid ‘they tried’ or ‘they always.’”
Then a template, like a lab report:
“On [date] at [time], I observed [specific action]. The screenshot/log shows [what is visible]. I’m sharing this because it may affect [club/scholarship/participation] and I want the record to be accurate. I’m not requesting punishment; I’m requesting clarification on policy.”
She adds one more line, softer but precise: “No opinions about motives. Adults call that tone.”
In the library media lab, the air smells like warm plastic and printer toner. Mika claims her usual corner terminal, the one with the screen angled away from the aisle, and sets her bag down like a paperweight. She opens a doc she doesn’t intend to write in (something harmless, a scholarship essay draft) so anyone glancing over sees diligence, not triage.
A chair scrapes softly. A boy from Academic Decathlon she’s only nodded at drops into the seat beside her without looking at her face. His laptop opens; a study guide fills the screen. Two minutes later, another student (yearbook, camera strap still looped around her wrist) chooses the opposite side, earbuds in, gaze fixed on her timeline of thumbnails.
No one says, Are you okay? They just make the table occupied, ordinary, defended by the pretense of homework. Mika keeps her shoulders square, eyes on her cursor, and lets their quiet presence do what her voice can’t.
Receipts start moving sideways through group chats she isn’t in: screenshots trimmed down to corners and timestamps, names blurred into gray blocks, then retyped word-for-word like someone copying scripture so it can’t be traced. What circulates isn’t outrage. It’s procedure: timeline first, context second, links saved off-platform, conclusions left blank. Even the punctuation looks careful, like it’s trying not to be punished.
By Thursday, Mika can predict the opening line in her DMs. Not sympathy. Strategy. People arrive with screenshots half-cropped, with rosters and sign-in sheets, with questions typed like they’re afraid of sounding “mad”: what can be shown, what must be blurred, who counts as a witness. She answers in calm bullet points, and that borrowed calm starts to repeat across accounts, quiet, consistent, almost synchronized.
Haruko’s circle doesn’t counter Mika’s thread the way Mika expected: no quote tweets, no angry paragraphs, no “gotcha” compilations that could be disproven. They pivot into a softer, safer weapon: interpretation. Facts are allowed to stand, but only as symptoms.
In the main club group chats, the language changes first. Not “she lied,” but, “I’m worried about her.” Not “she’s manipulating,” but, “She’s fixating.” Someone posts a heart emoji and says everyone should “give her space,” and it lands like a rule, like a polite announcement at the end of an assembly. The posts come from accounts with clean reputations and volunteer hours pinned to their bios. The tone is gentle enough that pushing back feels like stepping on a prayer.
Mika watches it happen through secondhand screenshots, the way you watch weather approach on someone else’s phone. The concern is always phrased as a boundary: stop engaging, stop asking her for updates, don’t spread her “receipts” because it will “make it worse for her.” Under the softness is something methodical. Her calm sentences get saved with the same care as a confession. Time stamps, punctuation, the way she says “for clarity” instead of “you’re wrong.” Composure becomes framed as “calculated,” as if speaking without crying is proof she planned it.
Yuki’s hand is quieter but everywhere, the little shifts that make a story feel unanimous. A message gets pinned: “Reminder: do not archive private conversations.” A volunteer sign-up link appears under it, as if order can be restored by staying busy. People who keep sharing Mika’s timeline are nudged privately. This feels intense. They start to feel watched, not by bullies, but by caretakers.
Mika drafts responses and deletes them. Every option seems pre-labeled. If she explains, she’s “spiraling.” If she stays silent, she’s “getting the help she needs.” Even her steadiness (her neat bullet points, her careful blurring) gets recast as the most suspicious thing about her.
By Friday, the story is no longer about what happened. It’s about Mika’s “wellness,” a word that sounds like a blanket until it’s used to smother. In hallway corners and advisor offices, Haruko’s circle delivers concern in measured doses, the way they deliver sign-up sheets: she’s overinvested, she’s triggered, she needs support. They say it gently, with a sympathetic tilt of the head, as if Mika’s posts are less information than a symptom flaring.
The phrasing is careful. Clinical enough to travel upward without sounding like gossip. It doesn’t accuse, it diagnoses. It implies that the most responsible thing is to stop engaging, stop asking her questions, stop forwarding her timeline “for her sake.” The trick is in the framing: any new clarification becomes evidence that she can’t let it go. Any boundary she sets becomes defensiveness. Any silence becomes progress.
Mika hears about it through fragments. An advisor’s softened voice, a friend’s nervous paraphrase. Each time, her stomach tightens at the same realization: they’ve built a trap where speaking is relapse and quiet is compliance.
Yuki doesn’t argue the facts; she files them. In private messages to captains and committee leads, she rewrites the vocabulary of the week so it sounds like a handbook, not a feud. She drops phrases like she’s quoting training: archiving private DMs, documenting without consent, escalating conflict under the guise of transparency. Then she follows with a soft, reasonable question, are we supposed to allow this in club spaces?, and lets the silence do the rest.
No one gets threatened outright. But a paper trail of “just checking” accumulates, and suddenly the leaders picture an advisor asking why they didn’t intervene sooner. They start to preempt blame by preempting Mika: calling it “process,” calling it “risk,” calling it “responsible.”
Access tightens with a gentle script: let’s pause replies, let’s not tag her, let’s keep this out of club channels “until things cool down.” Links get buried, comments get closed, and anyone who asks where the thread went is told (softly) not to “feed it.” It’s quarantine dressed as care. Her posts can still exist, but only where they read like fixation, not documentation.
By lunchtime, a tidy “official” recap blooms from clique-adjacent accounts: pastel graphics, gentle fonts, a soft request to “move forward respectfully,” and a timeline with the sharp parts sanded off. Comments are limited “to reduce harm.” Mika’s quietness is labeled calculated; her receipts, “archiving.” The rule flips depending on who benefits, document and you’re manipulative, stay vague and you’re healed, until the inconsistency starts pulling more attention than her thread ever did.
Mika recognized the rhythm before she recognized the names.
It started as a notification from an account she didn’t follow, Taiko Ensemble, second-year, a girl Mika had only seen in the hallway with bachi tucked into her tote like an afterthought. The post wasn’t dramatic. No crying selfie, no accusatory captions. Just a thread header in plain text: Context Log: Performance Roster Change (Taiko Spring Showcase) and then a sequence of bullets, each one time-stamped down to the minute.
3/02, 7:[^14] p.m. , Sign-up confirmation email
received.
3/05, 4:[^08] p.m.. No response.
3/06, 8:[^02] a.m. , Advisor announced “final roster,” no
mention of changes.
The screenshots were cropped so tightly Mika had to squint: only the date bars, the system notifications, the gray “seen” checkmarks. No faces. No handles. Nothing that could be called a callout, nothing that could be punished as “starting drama.” It looked almost like an assignment turned in late. Mika’s stomach clenched anyway, the old reflex, don’t be the reason someone gets in trouble, followed by something newer and sharper: they weren’t quoting her. They were copying her posture.
In the replies, people didn’t pile on. They asked for clarifications like they were building a record. “Was this communicated in person or only digital?” “Any official policy about roster changes?” “Do you have the version history of the doc?” Someone wrote, careful and small: “Not saying anyone had bad intentions. Just want the timeline straight.”
Mika watched the thread travel. A bookmark here, a quiet share there, the kind of circulation that didn’t spike metrics but did change room temperature. Her own chest tightened with each refresh: fear at being linked, relief at not being alone, and a strange, almost guilty pride at seeing facts held the way you held a fragile thing: by the edges, without smudging.
In the hours after that first thread, Mika began to notice the same words appearing, not like slogans but like rules people could hold onto. In DMs from classmates she barely knew, in the comments under posts that weren’t hers, the language stayed clipped and careful: verifiable. Direct quote. Firsthand. Hearsay. It sounded like a civics worksheet, and that was the point. If you wrote it like a report, adults had to read it like one.
A sophomore from Yearbook sent Mika a screenshot of a Google Doc titled, blandly, Incident Log (Neutral). One page. No names at the top, just fields: What happened (one sentence). When (timestamp, include time zone if relevant). Where (room, platform, or event). Who witnessed (first initials only). Evidence attached (screenshot, email header, sign-in sheet). What you did next (asked advisor, emailed, stayed silent). At the bottom: Avoid adjectives. Avoid assumptions. Don’t infer intent.
It moved through club group chats the way a safety pin moves through a crowded room: passed hand to hand without being displayed. Mika didn’t forward it. She just saved it, heart thudding, as if the act might light her up on someone’s screen.
The template didn’t stay a document; it became a shared way of moving through the school. A folder naming convention settled in, date_first, club, topic, copied exactly, down to the underscores, so anyone could sort it without asking questions. A checklist followed, simple enough to memorize: calendar invite, a photo of the sign-up sheet with the corner of the table for context, an email header with the chain visible, a brief note from an advisor meeting written the same day while it was still clean in your head. The repetition did something Mika hadn’t expected. Each new log read less like a complaint and more like a record you’d keep for yourself, in case the story got rewritten later.
The pattern hopped club boundaries like a benign contagion. A Yearbook kid who closed at Mizuki Market posted a log about an advisor’s gentle “for the team” pressure, time, office, exact wording. A Kendo sophomore attached a doctor note and the email chain where accommodations were “missed.” A Saturday language-school volunteer showed the roster before and after her name vanished. No insults. Just clean receipts, clipped sentences, and space left for adults to lie in.
Attempts to smother it only made it louder. The morning announcements (soft, vague reminders about “respect” and “not spreading negativity”) landed like fog against the sharp edges of timestamps and email headers. When Haruko’s circle asked for “context” without naming anything, the neutrality of the logs made the omission obvious. You could isolate a person. You couldn’t shun a format. The denials started sounding coordinated.
Mika opens a blank doc and keeps her shoulders square like the posture can hold her thoughts in place. One page. Not a manifesto. Not a callout. Something small enough to hide inside a DM thread without looking like a weapon.
She types the header twice, deletes it twice, then settles on neutral: Context Request (Private). Under it, bullet points, each one a rung you could climb out on if the floor dropped.
Date / time (approx if needed):
Location (room, hallway, off-campus):
Exact wording (as close as you can remember; quotes if
possible):
Who was present (witnesses, adults, students):
What happened after (messages, removal from list, meeting
request):
Evidence that exists (screenshots, email headers, sign-in
sheets, rosters):
Where it’s stored (phone, Google Drive, paper):
What you want done (nothing, record only, advice,
escalation):
She stares at the cursor, feeling the familiar heat of shame behind her eyes: the viral clip, the comments that turned her into a cautionary tale. She forces herself to type the line that matters most at the top, before anyone can feel obligated.
If this risks you, don’t send: your safety first. No pressure. No names required.
The last sentence she adds is for herself as much as for them: This is for self-protection and clarity. Not a movement. Not drama.
She copies the template into her notes app, then into a DM to one person: someone who’d reacted with a single, careful emoji to her last post. No tags. No group chat. The send button looks too bright.
A second DM. A third. Each message starts the same: “Hey. If you want. Only if safe.” Her thumbs hover, then commit.
When she finishes, she turns off her notifications anyway, like closing a door softly so no one can accuse her of slamming it. But even in the quiet, she can feel the template leaving her hands, light, plain, and precise, moving through the school the way rumors do, except this time it’s asking for facts.
The first replies arrive like cautious knocks, each one preceded by a pause icon and then the unsent message disappearing, returning, finally landing. A junior she’s seen at Mizuki Market writes from a break room, hands still smelling like dish soap: Is it okay if I don’t say which club? A scholarship kid from Academic Decathlon forwards a screenshot of a “schedule update” that somehow excludes only him, then adds, Please don’t let this get back to my coach. A freshman, profile photo still the default, doesn’t have evidence, just a memory of an advisor being given a summary that leaves out the one sentence that changes everything.
Mika answers each DM the same way, even when her pulse jumps. Got it. Thank you. I’m going to ask one question for clarity. Then: date first, where they were standing, who else could’ve heard. No “why,” no speculation. She asks, explicitly, Do I have your permission to save this? and waits for the yes.
The routine becomes a rail. People keep their footing by holding it.
She builds a shared timeline in a plain spreadsheet, the kind teachers use for attendance, because the format itself feels unarguable. Columns: date, time window, location, source type (DM, email, roster, screenshot), and a notes field that stays stubbornly literal. She assigns nothing names that could turn into targets. Everything is neutral code and she links only what someone has explicitly given permission to save. When a detail can’t be verified, she flags it as “unconfirmed” instead of smoothing it into a story.
She refuses to embed the viral clip, refuses to quote the cruelest comments, refuses the easy heat of outrage. The restraint changes the texture. It doesn’t read like retaliation. It reads like recordkeeping, and recordkeeping makes people uncomfortable for different reasons.
A pattern clarifies the more entries she logs: the same soft “concern” phrasing, always dropped the week before leadership votes; the same screenshots cropped to look clean, paired with conspicuously absent timestamps and missing preceding messages. Mika builds a second layer beneath each item (policy citations, neutral definitions, advisor-friendly wording) so anyone can carry a summary to an adult that reads like documentation, not an accusation.
Soon, she notices the phrasing in other people’s DMs: the same spare headers, the same “date / place / who heard” order, the same tiny consent line, okay to save?, tacked on like a seatbelt. Screenshots arrive pre-cropped, names blacked out with careful blocks, time stamps left visible on purpose. Mika never calls it a movement. Still, her method travels campus like a whispered safety protocol: quiet, replicable, hard to dismiss.
Mika waits until her foster mom’s kitchen is quiet, the dishwasher humming like a polite warning not to get dramatic. Her phone is propped against a mug; the blue light makes her hands look steadier than they feel. She rereads the draft the way she rereads math proofs: not for beauty, for weak points.
The post is almost aggressively plain. No screenshots. No subtweets. A header with the date. A short list that could have been lifted from a school email.
What happened (my side): a time window, a location, a sentence she knows by heart because she has replayed it in her mind until it’s worn thin.
What I did not say: another sentence, equally dull, equally precise.
What I’m willing to clarify privately: “If you think you’re missing context, you can DM me. Please include the date/time and what you saw.”
What I won’t do here: “I won’t post anyone’s DMs. I won’t argue about rumors in comments.”
She adds one line that isn’t a defense so much as a boundary: “If you’re forwarding things about me, please keep timestamps visible.” It reads like a suggestion for better citations, not a plea for mercy.
Her thumb hovers over Share. She can hear, in her head, the voices that want her to either explode or bow. Either would make sense to them. Either would be usable.
She posts anyway.
For a moment the screen is too still. Then the first likes come in. People she barely knows, a couple of quiet kids from yearbook, someone in taiko who has never spoken to her in the hallway. No comments at first, as if everyone is checking whether this is a trap. She refreshes compulsively and keeps finding the same thing: her own bullet points, unchanged, sitting there with the calm of a library sign.
A reply finally appears: “so are you saying it didn’t happen?”
Mika doesn’t answer in heat. She pastes the same line she wrote on purpose for this: “I’m saying what I said, when and where. That’s what I can verify.”
The steadiness isn’t satisfying. It isn’t entertaining. It’s worse than that. Hard to perform around. And people who came looking for a spectacle keep refreshing, and keep finding only a record.
By third period, Seishin Bridge’s main hallway is a conduit, shoulders, backpacks, the bright glare of the trophy case, and two stories collide in it like opposite currents. A girl near the lockers says Mika’s name the way people say warning, repeating the neat, cruel summary that’s been making rounds. The boy beside her nods like he already decided what to believe.
Behind them, someone else lifts a phone without drama. Not a call-out, not a thread, just a clean image: Mika’s post, the header date, the bullet points, the small insistence on timestamps. The kind of thing that looks like a memo, not a plea. It gets a quick glance, then a second look, and then an AirDrop offer, a forwarded DM, a silent share to a group chat labeled with an innocuous club name.
The contradiction doesn’t spark a fight. It spreads like a correction. People don’t have to argue; they only have to pass along something that already includes its own rules. Outrage needs embellishment. Documentation just needs a screen.
By the end of the week, her format shows up in other people’s hands like a borrowed uniform. A kid from kendo posts an “FYI” story with nothing but a date, a place, and three clipped sentences. Then a line: okay to save? Someone in yearbook circulates a DM recap with names blocked out in thick black bars, but the timestamps left clean, like they’re the point. The clique can’t call it organizing without admitting what they’re afraid of, so they call it “weird,” “extra,” “attention-seeking,” and the words don’t stick.
It isn’t loyalty to Mika, not exactly. It’s practicality. Neat lists make lies harder to dress up. Consent language makes forwarding feel accountable. And suddenly, targeting someone comes with paperwork.
The regime’s usual levers start to grind. A missing name on a roster reads less like discipline and more like spite when Mika doesn’t plead or retaliate. “Just checking on everyone’s safety” posts land wrong beside her dated, boring clarity. Advisors who hate messiness scroll for a policy violation and come up empty, and the emptiness makes every consequence feel like something manufactured.
Mika doesn’t get asked to represent anything; it just happens, like her name is a tab people keep open. She isn’t organizing meetings or making speeches. She’s simply refusing to scramble. In a week of hot takes, her quiet, numbered updates feel almost clinical. The hallway question shifts: if she’s supposedly reckless, why is she the only one leaving receipts?
Haruko doesn’t text anyone. She doesn’t even open the group chat where reactions would pile up like proof of motive. Instead, she sits at her desk with her laptop angled away from her bedroom door, the house quiet except for the low churn of the fridge and the soft click of her trackpad.
She pulls up old emails: the ones from Student Activities after a fundraiser went sideways, the ones from an assistant principal that always start with “I hope this message finds you well,” the ones that thread discipline into “support.” She copies phrases into a blank doc without thinking of them as stolen. Just borrowed patterns, like a uniform hemmed to fit.
“Out of an abundance of caution.”
“Please be mindful.”
“Thank you for your partnership.”
She searches her inbox for “concern” and gets a neat list of subject lines, each one a small lesson in how adults talk when they want to control a situation without admitting it’s a situation. Haruko reads for rhythm: short paragraphs, bullet points, the measured warmth that makes anger sound like policy.
A draft begins to take shape. Not about anyone. Not really. She keeps names out on purpose; names invite arguments, and arguments leave fingerprints. She writes instead about “online conduct” and “student wellbeing,” about “protecting community trust,” and her cursor pauses at trust as if the word itself has weight.
She imagines an advisor scanning it between meetings, nodding because it sounds familiar. Routine. Responsible.
When her phone buzzes, Yuki, a single question mark, Haruko doesn’t answer right away. She rereads the draft and trims anything that could be read as personal. She adds a line about “documenting patterns” because patterns are safer than incidents. Patterns don’t require proof; they require vigilance.
Only after she’s satisfied that the tone is gentle enough to be unchallengeable does she type back to Yuki: Sending something to advisors. Keep it quiet. Then she returns to her draft, smoothing it one last time until it could have come from any office on campus.
Haruko keeps the subject line bland on purpose (something like Shared reminder: community standards + digital conduct) the kind of thing a tired adult will open without bracing. She writes in the same soft register the school uses when it wants compliance to feel like care. No names, no screenshots, no claims that could be challenged. Just a careful shape of concern.
She offers a few “general” reminders: students’ posts travel beyond their intended audience; misunderstandings escalate; clubs and events rely on public trust. She frames it as protecting everyone, a preventative sweep of the hallway before someone slips.
Then she slides in the actual request, dressed up as partnership. Advisors should be attentive to “recurring issues,” should “check in proactively,” should “document patterns” of online behavior that “impact the learning environment.” The phrase sits there like it’s already policy, like it’s always been normal to keep a running record on a kid’s tone.
She ends with thanks (warm, deferential, unassailable) so the vigilance she’s asking for reads like professionalism, not suspicion.
She schedules the send for that thin slice of morning when adults are already late to themselves: attendance sheets open, copier jammed, coffee cooling on a stack of referrals. The subject line is harmless enough to be mistaken for housekeeping, the kind of thing you click because it’s easier than letting it sit unread.
In that hour, a message doesn’t have to persuade. It just has to land.
A few staff skim for bolded phrases, nod at the familiar cadence of “support” and “standards,” and move on to the next fire. Someone forwards it to a colleague with a quick FYI, and the forward carries more weight than the original. By first period, it’s no longer a question someone could trace back to a student’s bedroom desk; it’s ambient context, already filed as reasonable.
Haruko doesn’t hit send from her own account. She forwards the draft to Ms. Oda in Student Activities with a note that sounds like initiative, the kind adults praise. Oda, flattered by “proactive students,” relays it. A booster parent echoes it in a volunteer thread. By then, it’s already consensus, not Haruko.
By the time it finishes rippling through inboxes and forwarded chains, the premise is already agreed on: nothing happened that needs proving. There’s only “support” to arrange, “patterns” to note, “tone” to watch. The language makes supervision feel gentle, like a hand on a shoulder, while it quietly turns a student into a file. Someone to be managed, not defended.
Between second and third period, Mika’s thumb moves on its own, unlock, swipe, refresh, an automatic ritual she can’t seem to stop. The hallway smells like floor cleaner and someone’s microwaved noodles drifting from the staff room. Her posture stays neat, shoulders squared the way she’s trained herself, but her pulse keeps tripping.
The screen loads and loads again.
The threads that used to sit near the top, Japanese Culture Club, yearbook coverage, the festival subcommittee, aren’t there. Not muted. Not archived. Gone. No dramatic “left the chat.” No apology. No fight she can point to and say, that’s when it happened. Just a clean absence, as if the app has decided she never belonged in the first place.
She checks for updates, for a glitch. Turns Wi‑Fi off and on. Closes the app, opens it again. The blankness holds.
A group of girls passes her locker, laughing too loudly for something that’s supposed to be private. Mika keeps her gaze on the phone so she won’t look at their faces and start trying to measure what they know. Her fingers hover over the search bar, then pause. Searching would make it real, would make the removal a deliberate act with a name attached.
She tries anyway.
Some chats still appear but the ones that mattered to her day-to-day scaffolding are missing like teeth you only notice when your tongue runs over the gap. Her breath comes shallow, careful. She can feel the headache she’s been carrying all week throb behind one eye.
At the end of the hall, someone has the club lanyards looped around their fingers, jangling as they walk. Keys. Access. Mika watches the motion without meaning to, the tiny swing of metal that decides who gets in and who stands outside politely pretending they weren’t trying.
At lunch, Mika takes the corner seat that keeps her back to the wall and her face angled away from the loudest tables. Her bento is unopened. She props her phone against her water bottle and taps into the shared volunteer spreadsheet: the one she’s treated like a second planner, a quiet proof she’s useful.
The file loads with the familiar grid and pastel blocks, but something is wrong in the way her eyes don’t land. She scrolls, then scrolls back, as if a different angle will bring her name into focus.
It isn’t there.
Not on the tab for festival set-up. Not on the cleanup rotation. The columns she built (time slots aligned, formulas locked so nobody could overwrite them by accident) now show someone else’s initials in the cells where her handwriting used to live in her head. A new key sits at the top: revised colors, revised labels, the kind of update that pretends it’s housekeeping.
Mika’s thumb hovers over the “Version history” link. Her pulse stutters. Opening it would mean admitting this wasn’t a glitch. It was a choice made while she was in class, breathing carefully, trying not to be noticed.
A notification slips in like it’s doing her a favor. Yuki’s name, profile photo cropped at a flattering angle, the kind of account that never posts anything messy. Mika opens the DM and is met with warmth calibrated to the degree.
Hey Mika! Hope you’re okay. We did a quick rebalance of responsibilities so everything stays smooth. I think it might be better if you take a lighter load for now: just until things settle. A pink heart sits at the end, bright and weightless.
No specifics. No mention of what “things” are, or who decided they needed settling. The message reads like care, but it lands like a stamp: managed. Mika’s fingers curl around her phone, knuckles whitening before she remembers to loosen them.
In Student Activities Hall, Mika pauses at the supply counter. The familiar stack, poster board, tape, raffle slips, has been re-banded with neat masking tape, her handwriting replaced by someone else’s name. When she clears her throat to ask, the answer arrives in lowered tones and practiced compassion. “We didn’t want you overwhelmed,” a girl says, not meeting her eyes. “Temporary,” another adds. “Focus on yourself, okay?”
By last bell, the little permissions that let Mika exist in the club’s bloodstream have quietly evaporated. A calendar notification pings everyone but her; a thread updates with @mentions that stop one name short. When she asks in person, smiles arrive first, concern, softness, “just for now.” Each door closes with a cushion. The pattern sharpens into a single verdict: she isn’t help anymore. She’s risk.
Tomo doesn’t vent in the group chat. He doesn’t posture. He sits at his kitchen table with the club handbook open beside his notebook, the pages weighted down with his water bottle, and writes like he’s building a small bridge over a gap everyone keeps pretending isn’t there.
Subject line: Request for Clarification: Volunteer Roster Access & Role Assignments (dates included). No accusations. No adjectives that could be called “inflammatory.” He lists the dates Mika’s permissions changed, the event tasks reassigned, the messages that framed it as “for wellbeing.” He quotes the handbook’s section on role changes and access removal. Two sentences, copied cleanly. Then the question, simple enough to be embarrassing: who authorized the change, and what steps are required for reinstatement?
He sends it through the official club email the way the handbook insists, cc’ing the advisor and the activities office address printed in small type at the bottom of the page. He attaches screenshots, cropped to remove names where he can, because he knows exactly how quickly “privacy concerns” can become the real issue.
For twenty minutes he refreshes his inbox like it’s a pulse check. When the reply comes, it arrives wrapped in politeness.
Hi Tomo, thank you for being proactive and thoughtful about this. We appreciate students who prioritize a positive environment. We will review the situation and circle back once we’ve had the chance to look into everything. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
No date. No “I.” No “I will.” Just a soft, institutional we, wide enough to hide behind. Tomo reads it twice, then a third time, searching for an actual door handle in the wording: someone to reply to, a form to complete, an appointment to schedule.
He scrolls down for a signature. There’s only a cheerful name block and a line about maintaining community standards.
He taps “Reply,” and his cursor blinks in an empty field, waiting for him to ask for what he already asked for. In the quiet, he can hear how this works: the language of care, the promise of process, and the absence of any step that would force them to move.
Tomo tries again in person, the way adults always say they want: face-to-face, respectful, prepared. He catches Ms. Doi just outside the Activities Hall as the bell releases a tide of students. His notebook is already open, headings neat, dates boxed, the handbook clause underlined like evidence that won’t yell.
“Do you have a minute?” he asks, keeping his voice level.
She smiles like she’s grateful he’s mature, and then her eyes flick past him, over his shoulder, as if checking who might be watching. “I hear you,” she says softly. “But it wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about ongoing concerns in the hallway.”
He offers the page anyway, hovering it between them. “It’s just procedural. Who authorized the change?”
Her smile tightens into something practiced. “If there are concerns, we need them documented through the proper channel so everyone is on the same page.” The words are gentle. The meaning isn’t. Procedure over reality. A promise of fairness that doesn’t include a step he can take right now.
As she turns away, she adds, almost kindly, “And please be mindful about escalating things. We want to keep the environment calm.”
Tomo watches her go, hearing what she didn’t say: the system is already moving, and he’s being asked not to touch it.
Tomo still pulls a meeting together. Six of them around a library table, laptops angled like shields, voices kept low because the Media Lab windows face the hallway. They try to do it the way adults say to: confirm, document, don’t accuse. But every fact they reach for turns soft in their hands.
The volunteer roster in the shared drive opens with a gray banner: permissions updated. Mika’s column is there, but her edit history is gone, replaced by blank timestamps. The festival event permit that was “submitted” yesterday now reads pending administrative review, no contact listed, no expected turnaround. When Tomo asks who changed the settings, the student who used to handle logistics looks past her own screen and says, carefully, “I don’t want to speak out of turn. They told me not to.” The fog feels intentional because it’s so polite.
In the group chats, their questions get met with courtesy that lands like a lid. Let’s not speculate. Please be respectful. We should avoid making this bigger than it is. When Tomo asks for names, dates, a policy citation, someone replies, I’m concerned this tone violates community standards. The calmest messages, usually from Haruko’s side, amplified by Yuki, start deciding what “reasonable” means, and who counts as “escalating.”
Tomo asks for a sit-down, clean and contained: one room, one set of questions, one answer on record. The reply arrives sweetly apologetic: rescheduled. Then rescheduled again. Then “adjusted for everyone’s comfort” into separate check-ins with different adults, “to reduce tension.” Their shared agenda splinters into private narratives, and when the final calendar lands, it reads less like a meeting than a review. With Mika as the variable to assess.
Mika got the email in third period, while her teacher’s marker squeaked through a proof she already understood. Her phone was face-down in her lap, silent, the way she trained it to be, but the screen kept lighting under her fingers like a pulse. When she finally checked, it wasn’t a DM, not a tag, not another vague story slide with no name and too many eyes. It was from Student Support Services.
Subject: Wellness Check-In (Required)
The wording was warm in the way adults practiced: We care about you. We want to make sure you have what you need. Beneath it, the details were hard: two advisors’ names, a room number, a time block that overlapped her lunch and the first ten minutes of club. Attendance marked “mandatory,” as if her body had already been scheduled into compliance.
There were attachments.
Her thumb hesitated, then tapped. A PDF opened with her name typed in the header, spelled correctly, which somehow made it worse. Below, screenshots: cropped tight, usernames blurred everywhere except hers. Red rectangles around phrases she remembered writing at midnight, voice small, trying to be harmless. Timestamps circled. One image had a tiny annotation in the margin (potentially inflammatory) like a diagnosis.
Another attachment: “Timeline of Events.” One page, neat bullet points, dates aligned down the left as if time itself testified against her. Initial post. Community response. Escalation. Reported concerns. In the right column, a section labeled Impact, with language that sounded like policy: “disruption,” “student safety,” “program eligibility may be affected pending review.”
Mika kept her face neutral. She copied the meeting time into her planner in the same careful handwriting she used for assignments, as if neatness could change what a document meant. Around her, classmates turned pages and chewed pens and whispered, ordinary.
She did not open the comments on the email thread. She didn’t refresh anything. She stared at the teacher’s board until her eyes watered, and listened to her own breath, counting it like it was something she could still control.
Mika gets there seven minutes early because early is safe: early means you’re responsible, early means you’re not hiding. She wipes her palms on her skirt before she reaches the door and checks her posture in the dark reflection of the window, chin level, shoulders down. Her stomach keeps trying to climb into her throat anyway.
Inside, the room is too bright. The blinds are half-closed, striping the carpet like a barcode. Three chairs have been set on one side of a rectangular table, slightly fanned toward the far end, not toward each other. Across from them: a single chair, pulled out just enough to imply someone will be guided into it.
There’s a manila folder with a label: MIKA H. The pen on top is uncapped, ready. A laptop sits open, screen angled so she can’t read it, but she can see the blue-and-white glow of a form waiting to be filled.
No one has raised their voice. No one has even arrived yet. Still, it feels like she’s walked in late to a conversation about her. One that already found its conclusion and is only waiting for her to supply the supporting details.
The first questions come wrapped in softness. “Are you feeling safe?” “Do you have support at home?” They wait with their pens poised, like the right answer is a door she’s supposed to walk through. Mika keeps her voice even. Safe, yes. Support, yes. If “support” means a caseworker who answers in business hours and a foster parent who prefers quiet.
Then the angle shifts. “What were you trying to communicate?” “Has anything like this happened before?” The words turn from care to pattern, from today to always. Each time she adds context (midnight, stress, a joke that wasn’t) a counselor repeats it back in a smoother, smaller sentence, shaved of edges, and writes it down. Mika hears herself becoming a summary she wouldn’t recognize.
When she says the posts were clipped and passed around without her consent, the second adult’s smile stays fixed. “Do you know who shared them?” a pen asks. “Who have you been messaging lately?” The counselor tilts her head, gentle. “For now, can you agree to pause any club-related posting?” Mika hears the hinge click: name someone and be labeled dramatic, or refuse and become “uncooperative.”
They close the folder with a careful kind of finality and start listing “next steps” in voices made for calming kids: temporary adjustments, reduced responsibilities, a check-in schedule, looping in “relevant staff” to keep her supported. Mika nods like nodding is harmless. She doesn’t sign anything. Still, she can feel the documentation hardening, typed, forwarded, remembered, moving faster than her explanations ever could.
The next morning, the hallway feels slightly re-angled, like the building has learned a new way to look at her. Mika keeps her shoulders square and her steps measured, backpack strap anchored in the same place it always is. She tells herself it’s just fluorescent lights and no sleep. But she catches it anyway: a pause in the current of bodies when she merges into it, a subtle re-routing as people choose the long way around a column rather than pass close.
In first period, Mr. Carlisle is mid-sentence about the Progressive Era when his gaze snags on her. He stops with his marker half-capped. “Mika,” he says, soft enough to sound like kindness, “you doing okay?”
Twenty-five heads turn with the synchronized restraint of students who know not to stare too obviously. Mika answers with the voice she’s practiced for adults. “Yes. I’m fine.”
“Good,” Mr. Carlisle says, and resumes, but his eyes return to her desk a beat too long each time he underlines a date. Not suspicion, exactly. More like he’s waiting for her to flinch, to crack, to confirm whatever folder-version of her is circulating.
At the bell, a girl from behind her slides past without the usual “sorry,” clutching her phone with the screen faced inward. Two boys ahead lean close over a single set of AirPods; one glances back, then forward again, his face carefully blank. The quiet is worse than if they’d whispered.
By third period, the question has migrated. “How’s everything going?” from a teacher who never uses her name. “Just checking in,” from the attendance clerk, smiling like she’s handing Mika a pencil instead of a label. Even the campus security officer by the courtyard gate tracks her with an expression that tries to be neutral and fails.
Mika keeps her posture neat. She keeps moving. She counts breaths between doorways. Each small concern lands like a pin, polite, precise, and meant to stay.
In club spaces, the air changes the moment Mika steps through a doorway, like someone has turned a dial she can’t see. The chatter that had been bouncing off lockers and folding tables thins into functional murmurs. A few people pivot their shoulders so their backs become polite walls; others suddenly need something from their bag, their phone, their water bottle. Leaders who used to meet her eyes and hand her a stack of flyers or a list of calls now keep their hands busy with clipboards and “quick check-ins,” their smiles small and careful, hovering near her face without ever landing.
She waits at the edge of a semicircle, listening for an opening that doesn’t come. Names are assigned. Tasks get divided. Someone says, lightly, “We’ve got it,” as if she’s offered help out of habit instead of obligation. When she does speak, her voice comes out softer than she intends, the words trimmed down to harmless shapes. She watches their relief at that: how calm she is, how easy. It’s a choreography of concern, and she can feel herself being moved to the side without anyone touching her.
On the Japanese Culture Club whiteboard, beneath a neat block-letter “SPRING FESTIVAL,” a calendar invite is copied in blue marker. She stands with her binder hugged to her chest and watches Yuki uncap a pen with the practiced ease of someone updating a roster.
“Oh, Mika,” Yuki says, smile small and efficient. “We moved you off door check. Just so you can focus on, you know. Everything.”
Someone else chimes in without looking up. “We didn’t want you overwhelmed.”
Tomo’s gaze flickers to her, then away, jaw set like he’s counting seconds.
Mika swallows the question that wants to be loud. No one asks what she wants; they just keep writing, kind ink sealing her out.
In the group chats, everything turns oddly administrative. Announcements drop like memos, dates, dress code, “per advisor”, but her name never appears. Threads keep moving after she stops typing, as if her silence is a checkbox marked complete. When she does reply, the little “seen” bubbles stall, then arrive in a delayed cluster, careful and empty, like people rehearsing not to engage.
By lunch, the distance comes with a gloss of etiquette. People lower their voices when she passes, slide their backpacks in, leave her a chair that stays technically open. “Just giving you space,” someone murmurs, eyes skittering past her shoulder. Mika recognizes the mechanism with sick clarity: make her absence look like care, make her silence look like consent, and let the story set like resin.
The request finds Kaito between fourth period and lunch, in the thin strip of hallway outside the Health Office where the air always smells faintly of disinfectant and microwaved soup. He’s halfway through checking his phone (med reminder, the kind that buzzes like a small scold) when an email notification slides down.
Subject line: Quick Clarification.
It’s from Mr. Sato, one of the club advisors who always says Kaito’s name like it’s already on a letter of recommendation.
Kaito opens it anyway. The message is polite in the way that means it’s not optional. Mr. Sato writes that he hopes Kaito is doing well, that he appreciates Kaito’s “steady presence” in a time when “students can misunderstand each other online.” Then the ask, wrapped in soft words: could Kaito help “clear up a few details” regarding the posts and DMs circulating, specifically timestamps, what was said first, what was meant.
As if meaning has a start time. As if intent is something you can highlight, print, staple, and slide into a folder.
Kaito’s thumb hovers over the screen. He can picture the chain already: if he answers, his words become the version adults can trust. If he doesn’t, they’ll find someone else, and the someone else will be Yuki, or Haruko, or whoever has the cleanest screenshots and the most concerned tone.
A second email arrives before he decides, this one shorter.
Could you stop by after school? Just ten minutes.
He hears his own breathing inside his ribs, measured, practiced. He thinks of his parent’s last voicemail, too bright, too fast, and the way the house feels when he walks in: cluttered with excuses, fragile as glass. He thinks of Mika, eyes fixed on the floor lately like she’s trying to become smaller than the rumor.
Kaito closes the email, then opens it again, like the act might change the words. In the hallway, a counselor laughs quietly with a student. The sound is normal. The request isn’t.
Haruko catches Kaito near the stairwell, just far enough from the Health Office that no one can accuse her of cornering him. She smiles like she’s offering a favor, like she’s doing him a kindness by noticing he looks tired.
“Everyone’s on edge,” she says, voice soft, palms open. “Adults get… nervous when things go online. They start imagining worst-case stuff. Scholarship reviews, club charters, all of it.”
Kaito doesn’t answer. He watches her choose her words the way people choose fruit: pressing gently for bruises.
“I don’t want this to become a whole thing,” Haruko continues. “Mika doesn’t need more eyes on her. None of us do. If you can just explain the order of it (what happened first, what was actually meant) then Mr. Sato can write it up as a misunderstanding and it stays private.”
Translate, she means. Turn messy teenage context into something an adult can file and forget.
Haruko tilts her head, careful sympathy. “You’re the one they trust. You have that calm. It would help keep things from escalating.”
It lands like relief on the surface, like pressure underneath.
By the end of sixth period, the proof isn’t in what anyone says to Mika. It’s in what stops opening for her. A shared volunteer spreadsheet that used to load with her name highlighted now shows a pale gap where her row had been, the cells shifted up as if she’d never been there. In the Japanese Culture Club chat, a pinned message updates the festival prep list; her tasks are reassigned in neat bullet points, tagged to other people with little heart emojis and “so you can rest!!” that read like a lock.
Then an email lands in her inbox, subject line gentle and official: Wellness Check-In / Next Steps. A calendar invite attached. Attendees: advisor, counselor, Yuki: no peers. No agenda, just a sentence about “support” and “risk management,” as if Mika is something that might spill.
Kaito is the school’s favorite kind of witness: steady, articulate, unflinching in front of adults. He knows it, and they know it. In the careful language of “support” and “de-escalation,” they ask for just a short clarification (what he saw, what he understood, what order things happened in) so they can close the loop. His neutrality is the asset they’re quietly borrowing.
He understands what it really is. Not a favor, not “keeping things calm”. A single measured sentence turned into an official note, timestamped and tidy, with his name on it like a stamp of truth. The kind adults quote back to each other. The kind that migrates into folders and eligibility reviews, into meetings Mika will never be invited to, where her silence is filed as agreement.
Mika pins her hair back like it’s still a school morning, even though it’s past midnight; the clip bites her scalp and gives her hands something to do besides shake. Her desk lamp stays off, but her phone paints her walls in a cold, aquatic glow that makes the room feel borrowed, temporary, monitored, easy to revoke.
On the dresser, the foster-home rules sheet is half covered by a stack of SAT prep books. She can’t look at the list directly without feeling watched by it: curfew, check-ins, “no trouble.” The paper is just paper, but tonight it feels like a contract someone else can cancel. She shifts on the bed so her feet touch the floor, like posture can keep the room from tipping.
Her group chats are quiet in a way that’s louder than notifications. The ones that used to thrum with homework screenshots and club reminders sit with “seen” receipts and nothing else. She opens a DM thread and scrolls up, not to read the words (she knows them) but to confirm the timestamps, the context, the missing jokes that don’t travel well when they’re cropped. She zooms in until pixels blur, hunting for proof she didn’t say what the screenshot says she said.
A new like appears and her stomach drops, reflexive. It isn’t on her side. It’s on the repost. She taps the name and watches the profile load, a classmate she’d once smiled at in the hallway because smiling was safer than not. In the bio, “mental health advocate.” Mika imagines the screenshot forwarded with a caption that sounds like concern, the kind that doesn’t count as bullying because nobody uses a mean word.
From the living room comes the soft click of the fridge, then the hush of someone turning in their sleep. The house is full of quiet rules: don’t wake anyone, don’t make it a problem, don’t be a story that needs explaining. Mika presses her thumb hard against the edge of her phone case until it hurts, focusing on the sting like it’s an anchor.
Her eyes burn. She blinks and the glow swims. The clip tugs as she tilts her head, and for a second she imagines just letting her hair down, letting herself look messy, like someone allowed to take up space. She doesn’t. She keeps pinning and unpinning, rehearsing composure for a room that isn’t even looking.
She opens the post again, then the repost of it, then the repost of the repost: each layer flatter, meaner, dressed up in softer language. The quote-tweets are the worst because they wear concern like a badge: just wondering, not trying to start anything, but. Mika reads the same sentence five different ways, swapping emphasis like she’s studying for an exam, like there’s a correct interpretation that will let her breathe.
She starts tracking it the way she tracks practice tests. First like: someone from Japanese Culture Club. First comment: a girl who always asks teachers for “clarification” until the room turns on whoever spoke. A single period after “wow” that turns surprise into accusation. An ellipsis that feels like a smirk. She watches names she recognizes float by (people who borrowed her notes, who laughed at her jokes in the library) now leaving tiny digital fingerprints on a story that isn’t hers anymore.
Her thumb keeps moving even when her eyes can’t focus. The feed stops being words and becomes impact, thud after thud behind her eyes, until the headache feels earned, like punishment she can’t quit paying.
The DMs are worse than the public posts because they were supposed to be small, between two people, the kind of place you don’t have to perform. She scrolls back through her own sentences and hears them in someone else’s mouth, hunts for the faintest tilt toward arrogance. Too sure, too clipped, too smart. A joke reads like cruelty when it’s stripped of the thread it lived in. An apology looks strategic.
She stops on a message stamped with a time she can’t place. The clock at the top of her screen feels accusatory, a number that doesn’t match her memory. Her chest tightens, breath shallow. If she can’t account for this, what else is missing? Somewhere, she’s sure, there’s a clean screenshot, cropped, highlighted, saved, holding the version of her that will be easiest to punish.
Sleep doesn’t arrive so much as cut the feed mid-scroll. She dozes with the phone slack in her hand, then snaps awake to a vibration that isn’t there, heart already running, thumb already unlocking before her eyes can focus. Her jaw throbs from being held shut; her tongue presses hard against her teeth like she can keep something untrue from leaking out. She drinks water, waits, and the headache returns, narrower, sharper, like her body is billing her for being seen.
When the dark at her window softens from black to bruised gray, she isn’t absorbing words anymore. She’s taking inventory, new likes, new subtweets, who viewed her story, who stopped following, counting the way you count exits in a crowded room. Refresh, pause, refresh. Not knowing would mean walking into first period unarmored. Knowing means pressing on a bruise to prove it’s still there. She does it anyway, because the motion is hers.
In the dim hour before her alarm, Mika rehearses an apology the way she rehearses proofs: define the terms, anticipate the counterexample, show her work so no one can accuse her of hiding it. Her pillow smells faintly of detergent and someone else’s dryer sheets, and the borrowed softness makes her feel like an intruder in her own bed. She keeps her face turned toward the wall so the blue light won’t stripe the room, as if the phone’s glow could turn into evidence.
Premise: people felt hurt. Concession: her words could be read wrong. Conclusion: she is sorry. It stacks neatly. It also isn’t true in the way they want true: the version that pins intention to her like a name tag.
She tries on sentences and listens to how they would sound in Haruko’s gentle voice, delivered to an advisor with the right amount of concern. “I understand why it looked that way.” The phrase is designed to let everyone keep their grip on the story. It gives them the satisfaction of being reasonable. It makes her the problem without ever saying the word.
“I should have known better.” Better than what, exactly. Better than trusting a DM to stay a DM, better than being funny, better than sounding smart. Better than existing loudly enough to be noticed.
“I’ll step back for a while.” She can already see the calendar shrinking around that decision: clubs, summer program eligibility, recommendation letters that depend on being seen as dependable. Stepping back is the polite version of disappearing.
Her temples throb in time with the quiet house. Somewhere down the hall, the heater clicks on, then off. She imagines her foster parent’s careful questions over breakfast, the kind that leave no marks but still feel like being measured for a file. Mika inhales, counts, exhales: like she can pace her panic into something respectable.
She rearranges the apology again. She makes it shorter, then softer, then emptier. Each draft feels like sanding down an edge that might cut someone, until she can’t tell whether she’s smoothing the words or erasing herself.
She opens the notes app and stares at the blank page like it’s an answer sheet. The cursor blinks with the same patient insistence as a teacher waiting for her to speak up. She types: I’m sorry for, and her throat tightens as if the phone can hear her. Delete. She tries again, smaller: I want to clear something up. Delete. The words feel too sharp, too much like a defense, and defense is what guilty people do in Haruko’s world.
She swaps verbs the way she swaps uniforms. Anything that looks less like a stain. I didn’t mean to becomes I can see how it could be taken as. Specifics dissolve into fog: no names, no dates, no mention of the screenshot she knows exists. Just a smooth, careful shape that lets everyone land where they’ve already decided to land.
Each revision makes her sound more reasonable, more responsible. It also makes her sound less like herself. She reads the draft back in her head in an advisor’s tone, in a counselor’s tone, in Kaito’s steady voice, and flinches at how neatly it could be filed.
Her thumb hovers over “share,” then over “trash.” The cursor keeps blinking. She keeps bargaining with it.
At breakfast her foster parent doesn’t pry so much as arrange the conversation into safe little boxes. “How’s school?” comes with a pause that invites specifics, then another, like there’s a checklist she’s trying not to show. Mika watches the careful neutrality on her face and feels her own body respond on autopilot: shoulders back, hands folded, smile calibrated to “okay.”
“Fine,” she says first: too quick. Then she supplies the acceptable attachments. Grades are solid. Teachers are normal. Clubs are busy but manageable. No, nothing happened. Nothing she can’t handle.
She keeps her voice soft, even, the way you speak when you want to be believed. Under the table her knee bounces against the chair rung, a small private tremor she can pretend doesn’t count.
The silence after her answers stretches just long enough to become a verdict. Mika hears her own voice the way an adult would: steady, trimmed of mess, a little too perfect for a kid who swears everything is fine. She can almost see the invisible annotations, composed, cooperative, evasive. Her stomach rolls. “Mature” and “lying” share the same mask when people already want a reason.
The scholarship review date sits in her inbox like a calendar reminder with teeth, a tidy subject line waiting to close around her name. In the sleepless hours it offers a seductively clear path: stop resisting, hand them a polished apology, a version of herself that fits in their forms. If she becomes the cautionary example willingly, maybe they’ll let her keep the quiet.
Mika holds herself like a line drawn with a ruler: chin level, shoulders squared, hands quiet on the desk. It’s a posture she learned young: if you look steady, adults relax; if adults relax, they ask fewer questions. Now she treats her own body like evidence she can arrange.
In the library before first period she opens each portal twice, then a third time, scanning for the green checkmarks that mean submitted. She clicks into the file previews to make sure the right document attached, that her name is on the header, that nothing auto-saved as “final_FINAL2.” It isn’t about grades anymore. It’s about leaving no gap wide enough for someone to slip a story through.
In group chats she reads her sentences out loud without sound. She deletes “lol.” She replaces periods with commas, then puts the periods back because commas can look unsure. She adds “thank you!” and then removes the exclamation point because enthusiasm can be read as smug. Her thumb hovers over emojis like they’re contraband. When someone replies with a single “k,” her pulse jumps anyway.
Between classes she keeps her eyes trained at a neutral distance. Far enough to avoid meeting someone’s stare, close enough to seem polite. She adjusts the clip in her hair and tells herself it’s for neatness, not because the small ritual gives her something to do with her hands. She takes the long route to avoid the courtyard stage where people cluster and cameras come out for impromptu stories, faces angled toward the light.
Her rule repeats itself like a mantra that’s starting to fray: stay eligible, stay invisible, stay safe. Eligible means no late work, no “attitude,” no misunderstood joke that turns into a screenshot captioned by someone else. Invisible means no lingering in doorways, no laughing too loudly, no being the kind of noticeable that makes a teacher remember your name for the wrong reason. Safe means anticipating the question before it’s asked and already having the calm answer.
By lunchtime her head throbs behind her eyes, and she realizes she’s been holding her breath in shallow increments, as if oxygen is another thing that can be taken away if she uses too much.
By third period, “keeping her head down” isn’t a plan anymore. It’s a sentence she serves herself, quietly, over and over. The hallway still offers the same polite smiles, but they don’t land; they skim her like a hand hovering above a hot stove. Conversations don’t end so much as re-angle: shoulders turning, backpacks shifting to make a small barrier, voices dropping when she gets close.
When phones come out, bodies instinctively pivot, creating a clear lane of empty air around her. Someone she used to trade homework screenshots with pauses mid-step, checks the screen, and pretends they’ve been called from across the corridor. A laugh starts and thins out the moment she reaches the group, like sound can be edited in real time.
Even the gentle ones go careful. A classmate murmurs, “Hey, I’m sorry,” without looking at her, then walks away fast, as if sympathy is another kind of evidence. In the library, a chair scrapes back from her table by inches. No one says her name too loudly. The message is constant and quiet: you can exist, but not too close.
She starts logging herself the way she logs assignments. Mental spreadsheets that follow her from bell to bell. During announcements she chooses a spot where the fluorescent light won’t catch her face and no one can angle a phone past a shoulder and trap her in the frame. At her locker she counts to ten, then eight, then five, because lingering feels like an invitation. She keeps her hands busy, textbook out, binder in, so she won’t fidget in a way someone can narrate as guilt.
Every decision fractures into risk. Eat alone and look pathetic, or sit near people and become content. Ask a question and sound “defensive,” stay quiet and look “caught.” Front row reads thirsty; back row reads shady. Even breathing feels like a tell.
The tighter she holds herself, the less she can feel her own edges. In class her voice comes out smooth, measured; she nods at the right beats, lowers her gaze before anyone can read it as challenge. Meanwhile her mind keeps tally: days until the review, which adults will see her name beside “incident,” how fast “scholarship” becomes “conditional.” Compliance used to buy safety. Now it costs her, coin by coin.
One afternoon she catches herself in the dead gloss of her own phone: hair clipped back, collar straight, expression set to “fine.” A model version, low-risk, unremarkable. It should have felt like armor. Instead it feels like someone’s eraser hovering over her outline. The thought lands cold and clean: if she keeps behaving her way through this, she’ll make it out alive as nothing.
In the middle of another late-night scroll, her eyes stop skimming and start cataloging. It isn’t the volume anymore; it’s the shape. Under every repost of the clip, under every stitched “context” video, the same handful of accounts arrive early (as if they’ve been waiting with their thumbs poised) dropping identical lines: I’m not attacking her, I’m just worried. This isn’t hate, it’s about safety. We should be holding each other to standards.
At first she tells herself it’s normal. People echo each other online. People learn new words and try them on. But the repetition has a clean edge, like copy-paste with the corners sanded down.
She taps through profiles. One is a senior with an empty grid and a bio that reads like a resume. Another is a “study inspo” account that’s never shown a face. A third belongs to someone she recognizes from a club roster: someone who smiled at her last semester in a hallway like they were friends. Their posts are harmless: latte art, color-coded planners, temple festival flyers. None of them look like the kind of person who would throw a stone.
Mika’s headache pulses when she opens the comments again. There they are, clustered in the first ten replies, always. The phrasing shifts just enough to feel human, but the bones stay the same. Concern. Community. Responsibility. Adults.
She scrolls back to the oldest versions of the clip, the ones posted before the caption got sharpened into accusation. The “worried” comments aren’t there at first. They appear after a certain edit: after someone adds a line of text that frames her pause as something else. The accounts descend in a short window, like an alarm went off.
Mika sits up, sheets tangled at her waist, phone light washing her hands pale. She opens her notes app and types the usernames in a column. Under each one, timestamps. Phrases. The order they arrive. It’s not comfort, exactly, but it’s a kind of relief: if this is being managed, then she didn’t hallucinate the turn.
Her thumb hovers over a familiar handle, and her stomach tightens as she recognizes the pattern’s center of gravity.
She tests the suspicion the way she was taught to test everything: break it into parts, run it twice, see if the result stays the same. In bed with her phone angled low so the light won’t leak under her door, she refreshes until her thumb aches. She searches the same three phrases, just worried, for safety, standards, and watches the comment sections populate like a lab culture.
The accounts arrive in tight bursts, never scattered. First a “gentle” question, then a longer paragraph that mentions policy without naming a policy, then the pivot that makes her stomach drop: Someone should loop in an advisor. Not talk to her. Not ask what happened. Always up, toward adults, toward documentation.
She opens the likes (each heart a breadcrumb) and tracks who validates whom. The same names float to the top in the same sequence, as if they’re passing a baton. When she switches to another repost, different caption, different creator, the rhythm repeats with only minor variations, like someone changing numbers in a homework set.
Her headache pulses with each new confirmation. Patterns don’t prove intent. But they do prove planning.
She pulls up the clip again, not to punish herself this time, but to audit it. Finger to screen, she drags the playhead back and forth until the motion stutters. There: half a blink of a jump where the audio doesn’t quite land. A seam.
She opens the oldest repost she can find, the one everyone keeps citing as “the first time” they saw it. The timestamp sits there like a verdict. But the cut they’re reacting to requires an edit that wasn’t available yet. Not unless someone had the file earlier. Not unless the “original” isn’t original.
Mika flips between versions, comparing lengths down to the second. The earliest comments describe a line of text that doesn’t appear until later. Her throat tightens. People aren’t remembering wrong. They’re being handed a memory.
She follows the trail the way she studies for exams: slow, methodical, refusing the panic in her throat. Upload times that don’t line up. The same cropped frame appearing “earlier” than the full clip. A caption that shifts, but keeps the same typo: like a fingerprint. When she finds the edit seam again, now mirrored across accounts, her stomach sinks. This isn’t chaos. It’s choreography.
The shame doesn’t vanish; it just changes shape, edges hardening into something she can hold without it cutting through her. If someone is steering the story, then it isn’t a fog. It’s a route. Routes have turns. Turns have timestamps. Proof lives in order, not volume. She exhales through her teeth and lets the panic spend itself, deciding to stop pleading with the loudest version and start measuring the true one.
Mika waits until the house settles into its thin, careful quiet. The dryer clicking itself off, the TV downstairs finally muted, the familiar pause before her foster parent’s last check of the hallway. Only then does she slide her laptop from her backpack like it’s contraband and set it on the kitchen table, under the cone of the stove light she doesn’t turn on.
She dims the screen until the glow is just a smudge against the dark. The night-light in the hallway makes a soft stripe on the tile, a reminder that someone could wake up and see. She angles the laptop a few degrees inward anyway, shoulders squared, posture neat on a chair that squeaks if she shifts too fast.
New folder. New rules.
She names things the way adults like: blunt, uninteresting, impossible to misread. “Timeline.” “Original Posts.” “Edits.” “Settings.” “Messages.” No sarcasm, no emotion, nothing that sounds like a teenager defending herself. She adds a spreadsheet, because spreadsheets don’t cry.
She starts with the platforms’ own language, download your data, activity log, login history, saving each export twice: once as the raw file, once as a PDF she can open without the site “updating” on her. She screenshots the privacy settings page with the date visible, then takes a second screenshot that includes the URL bar. She’s seen enough adults dismiss a screenshot as “just an image” to know she needs the frame around it.
In “Original Posts,” she drops the oldest versions she can find, each saved with the exact timestamp in the filename. She forces herself to include the ones that make her stomach twist. Evidence doesn’t get to be curated for comfort.
A floorboard pops somewhere. House settling, she tells herself. Her hand still pauses over the trackpad. She listens until her heartbeat stops trying to outrun the silence, then keeps going, adding subfolders like braces holding the whole thing straight: “DM Context,” “Captions,” “Reposts.”
By the time she makes a folder called “For Tomo,” her eyes burn. But the burning isn’t only shame now. It’s focus.
She reruns the week the way she’s learned to rerun practice tests: same steps, same order, no room for the part of her that wants to curl up and disappear. Notification timestamps first (each buzz and banner turned into a line item) then the exports: activity logs, login records, device history. She pulls the revision history where she can, the little buried “edited” markers and version snapshots that show exactly what shifted and when, and she treats each one like a specimen she can’t contaminate with her own panic.
Then she does the part that hurts. She opens the app as if she’s an administrator, as if she’s someone paid to be skeptical, and checks what the platform would display to a scholarship reviewer who already thinks “teen drama” means guilt. Does the timestamp round? Does the caption show the latest version by default? Does a deleted story leave a trace or vanish clean?
She catches the places where her own memory disagrees with the interface, and she doesn’t argue with it. She documents the discrepancy. She makes a note: what she sees, what they’ll see, and what that difference can be used to imply.
When she reaches the pieces that could reveal how she learned certain things, her fingers hover, then move with a different kind of care. She duplicates the files first, labels the copies “SAFE,” and works only on those. Usernames disappear under blunt gray boxes. She crops until the edges are nothing but interface. No profile photos, no corner of a locker, no time stamp that would point to someone else’s phone. One screenshot she knows is radioactive gets replaced with a boring chain of metadata: file name, creation time, edit history, device ID. Enough to prove sequence without betraying source.
For each redaction she adds a caption, one line, like a case note: what this shows, what it doesn’t, why it matters. No apology. No plea. Just structure.
She drafts the message to Tomo, then drafts it again, then again. Each time stripping out anything that could be read as blame or begging. She leaves bullet points: verified timeline, attached exports, what’s redacted and why, what an advisor will try to poke holes in. When it finally sounds like scheduling, she sends the drive link with view-only permissions and one plain line: please don’t forward.
After it’s sent, the hallway stays calibrated against her. Smiles that don’t reach, conversations that pause half a beat when she passes, chairs that somehow fill before she reaches them. No one rushes to correct the story. Still, something inside her unclenches. The goal isn’t to be liked today. It’s to make a timeline that can survive fluorescent lights and adult questions.
The scholarship review stops being something people whisper about in the back of classrooms and becomes a clean, official email in her inbox.
Subject line: Eligibility Check-In. No exclamation point. No warmth. Just a timestamp and a room number that makes her stomach feel too small for her ribs.
Mika reads it once like a student, scanning for requirements. She reads it again like a defendant, searching for traps in the phrasing. The way it pretends nothing is wrong while also implying that something has already been filed.
She doesn’t open social media. She doesn’t click her notifications. Her thumb hovers, then moves with a different kind of purpose.
Screenshot. Crop. Save to a folder named SCHOLARSHIP, dated in all caps like she’s filing for court: REVIEW_03-14. She screenshots the header with the sender’s name and the time stamp too, because rumors blur on purpose and email doesn’t. It feels almost calming to pin the facts to glass.
In the kitchen, her foster parent is rinsing a mug, making the kind of small talk that has an edge to it. “Everything okay at school?” Careful, casual. A question asked like it’s safe.
Mika keeps her voice soft. “Yeah. Just a meeting.” She hates how automatically she edits herself, how her body stays neat even when her thoughts are loud.
Back in her room, she opens a notes app and types the details exactly as written: date, time, location, list of materials. Under it, she adds her own line, Bring: printed timeline, redactions explained, counselor’s email, grades report, club attendance logs if available.
She rereads the note until the words stop sliding around. Logistics, she tells herself. Not fate. Then she sets an alarm for the day before, labeled simply: PRINT.
She builds a quiet routine that looks, from the outside, like nothing at all. In the morning she drinks a full bottle of water before coffee, because dehydration turns her headaches into something sharp enough to steal words from her mouth. At lunch she eats even when her stomach is tight, because shakiness reads like guilt. After school she sets a timer and exports what she can (DM threads, post history, timestamps) into a Drive folder with plain names and duplicated backups, as if redundancy could substitute for safety.
On her phone there’s a note labeled TIMELINE in all caps. She writes in it like she’s taking minutes at a meeting: date, time, who was present, what was said, what was on-screen. No adjectives. No explanations that could be argued with. Only facts she can point to.
She adds rules the way other people add prayers. No scrolling in bed. No searching her own name. No “just checking” after midnight. At 11:[^57] she’s still tempted, thumb hovering over the app icon like a reflex. At 12:[^00] she turns the phone face-down and makes herself breathe.
The fear doesn’t leave. It just lines up. It becomes a list she can finish.
In the hallways Mika moves like she’s following taped lines on the floor. Shoulders back, chin level, hands folded around her phone so they won’t shake. She keeps her face arranged into something teachers read as fine. When someone says her name, she answers with the right amount of softness, the kind that doesn’t invite follow-up. She laughs once, lightly, at a joke she doesn’t hear. She says “sorry” when she isn’t sorry, because apologies are cheaper than explanations.
But the internal math changes. She stops offering little pieces of herself as payment: no extra smiles, no careful oversharing to prove she’s harmless, no hoping that if she’s good enough the story will loosen its grip. Let them look. Let them measure. She will not spend another day auditioning for mercy.
She documents like she’s taking minutes at a meeting, not pleading a case. Date. Time. Platform. Group name. Who posted. Who reacted. What changed. She notes when a message disappears, when a screenshot resurfaces, when someone’s “just checking in” turns into a warning. No adjectives, no guesses. Each entry is written for an adult audience: clean sentences, neutral terms, a record that refuses to be waved off as drama.
Mika stops trying to outrun the story and starts rewriting its boundaries. No apology tour, no frantic clarifying threads: just a clean narrative of intent, context, and conduct, built from what she can prove. If the school insists on measuring her, she decides what gets put on the scale. She sends Tomo a folder link and one quiet request: not protection. Process.
Tomo kept the draft to one page on purpose, like something an adult could staple to a binder and forget about. He sat at his desk with a water bottle sweating onto the corner of his notebook, the glow of his laptop turned low, and rewrote each line until it sounded like it belonged to the school, not like it belonged to him.
“Process Clarification Request,” the heading read, plain, almost sleepy. Under it, three bullet points that were too tidy to argue with. Roster criteria: defined in writing, distributed at the start of each season, so advisors wouldn’t have to mediate the same questions over and over. Appeals: a timeline and a point of contact, so disputes didn’t spill into “miscommunications” that clogged inboxes for weeks. Viral incidents: a standardized verification step, request original links, timestamps, full thread context, before any removal from leadership or program eligibility “to reduce inconsistent documentation and liability exposure.”
He tested the wording the way he tested schedules: what did it do to a person’s breathing? Nothing. That was the point. It didn’t accuse. It didn’t name the clique. It didn’t even say “unfair.” It said “workflow,” “consistency,” “documentation.” It offered administrators a way to feel competent and safe.
Mika read the draft on her phone during a study period, shoulders squared like she could be graded on posture. The sentences looked harmless enough to survive a staff meeting. Still, her throat tightened at the third bullet. Verification. Context. Words that, lately, had felt like privileges.
She texted him one correction, small, surgical: specify “platform settings and edit history when available,” because she knew exactly how meaning could be rearranged without changing a single screenshot. She didn’t add why. She didn’t have to.
Tomo accepted the edit without comment, just a thumbs-up and an updated PDF. Then he changed the file name to something so boring it could disappear in a downloads folder: Process_Request_Clubs.pdf. He printed a stack at home on clean paper, no letterhead, no drama, and slid them into his bag like permission slips. The rebellion, if anyone asked, was paperwork. The kind that looked like care.
Tomo never called it a petition. He treated it like a form that had always existed and everybody had simply forgotten to use. He waited until the loud parts of meetings were over, chairs scraping, snacks getting shoved back into backpacks, then stepped into the margin beside the sign-in clipboard like he belonged there. One hand held the stack flat. The other pointed to a blank line without hovering too long.
“Can I add your name?” he’d ask, voice even, like he was asking for an email for a volunteer list. “It’s just to make roster stuff less messy for advisors. Helps everyone, including officers.”
People glanced at the heading, saw the clean bullets, the careful words that sounded like an admin memo. They didn’t see a fight; they saw a way to stop getting pulled into group chat spirals. Tomo let them keep that framing. He didn’t watch their faces too closely. He didn’t reward the brave with extra eye contact.
Mika, passing through a hallway pinch point with her binder hugged tight, watched him do it three times in ten minutes: near the yearbook room door, outside Student Activities, beside a taiko practice sheet. Each signature landed like a quiet stamp: ordinary, undeniable, logged.
To keep it unpunishable, Tomo doesn’t send one big document that can be labeled a protest. He makes versions that look like they were always meant to exist: Japanese Culture Club, taiko, yearbook, decathlon: each with the same three bullets, each addressed to the right advisor with a line that flatters their workload. Neutral subject lines. “Clarification.” “Criteria.” “Protocol.” Words that sound like filing cabinets.
He staggers the delivery just enough to avoid a group-forward chain, but not enough to lose the pattern. Printed copies for advisors who like paper. PDFs for the ones who live in email. Each club gets its own cover note, polite and bland, and underneath, the identical core language repeated until it becomes hard to pretend it’s a one-off complaint. Across departments, the request turns into a trail.
He set the timing the way he set a volunteer roster: spaced, deliberate, hard to argue with. All the submissions would land inside the same two-day window, not simultaneous enough to look coordinated, close enough to feel like momentum. He waited for the campus “online safety” email (admin-approved concern) then hit send and walked papers to mailboxes. It would read like compliance, not retaliation.
The first reply arrives dressed in courtesy, appreciation, vague reassurance, a gentle suggestion they “keep it informal.” Tomo reads it once, then opens his folder of neutral language and answers like he’s updating a spreadsheet: thank you for the clarification; could you point us to where the written roster criteria is currently posted; if it isn’t, what date can we expect publication. Every soft dodge becomes a line item that has to exist in email.
Tomo forwarded the reply to the coalition thread without commentary that could be screenshotted into a mood. The subject line stayed intact, Re: Clarification, and beneath it he pasted the advisor’s careful paragraph about “keeping things informal” and “trusting student leaders,” the kind of language that sounded warm until you looked for a noun you could hold.
Then, above it, he added a header like he was circulating minutes.
AGENDA ITEM: Process gap. Roster criteria not
written.
ACTION NEEDED: Publication date for criteria.
FOLLOW-UP: Which existing policy governs “viral
incidents” + club eligibility?
Mika read it twice, chest tight, the way she read posts about herself: for edges, for what was implied. Tomo’s bullet points flattened the advisor’s brush-off into something less personal and, somehow, more damning. Not “they don’t care,” but “this doesn’t exist.”
Her thumb hovered over the keyboard and didn’t move. She watched the typing bubbles appear, vanish, reappear: people calculating risk in real time.
Tomo’s next message landed cleanly, no heat.
If you’re willing, add your name to the request. We’re framing this as policy clarification. No accusations, no calling anyone out. Just: where is it written, and if it isn’t, when will it be.
He attached a draft signature block like a form: Name, grade, club(s), a single sentence about why consistent criteria mattered. Optional. “One line is enough,” he wrote. “Keep it boring.”
Boring. Mika almost laughed, except her throat felt scraped raw from holding herself in all week.
She opened the draft. The cursor blinked, patient and unforgiving. She imagined Haruko seeing her name, imagined a counselor calling her foster liaison “just to check in,” imagined Kaito’s careful face when adults started asking questions in that concerned voice.
A new message popped up from Tomo, private this time, like he’d felt the pause.
You can stay off the visible list. If you have documentation, send it to me and I’ll cite it as “student-provided platform records.” No names.
Mika let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d trapped. Her fingers finally moved: not to sign, not yet, but to open her folder of screenshots and timestamps and make them look, for once, like evidence instead of a confession.
The first names arrived like slips of paper pushed under a door. A kendo freshman who was always sprinting from a shift at his dad’s shop signed during lunch, ink smudged where his hand still shook from rushing. A kid from Saturday language school added her name with the same neat handwriting she used for kanji drills, noting, plainly, that her aunt could never tell her why some students “always” got picked for community events. A DECA alternate, the kind who kept showing up in a blazer just to sit in the back, typed a single line about wanting standards that didn’t change depending on who was “trusted.”
None of them wrote about Mika. None of them said clique or gatekeeping. They kept it procedural on purpose, the way you talk when adults might be cc’d: rosters, criteria, consistency, publication dates.
Mika watched the list grow, feeling something unfamiliar under the dread: weight shifting. These weren’t loud kids. These were kids with obligations, with elders, with schedules that didn’t bend. Their signatures made the request look less like a challenge and more like a basic need the school had been ignoring.
In the Yearbook room, the fight turned into file paths. The Yearbook & Media kids opened their archive drives with the same careful hands they used for candid shots and deadline nights, and started pulling what could pass as ordinary documentation: last semester’s Google Forms exports, printed sign-up sheets with staples still in the corner, the “leadership rubric” that had supposedly been explained out loud but never posted. Someone scrolled through old roster announcements and read the timestamps under their breath, like they were checking camera metadata. They didn’t add commentary, didn’t say anyone’s name. They offered to confirm dates, to show where each document lived, to keep a chain-of-custody log the way they did for photo credits: proof without mood. Mika watched, throat tight, as “it’s complicated” became a folder you could open.
The debate kids took the draft like a case brief, sanding down every edge that could be called “attitude.” They broke it into headings (Definitions, Procedure, Appeals) and circled the phrase that kept haunting everyone: viral incident. Then they built questions that cornered without accusing: Where is it written? Who decides? Who can see the report? What’s the timeline to respond? A version you could read aloud, calm as roll call.
Mika doesn’t touch the email thread. Instead she builds the backbone: a packet that reads like a review sheet, sequence over sentiment. Post timestamp. Edit timestamps. The moment a privacy toggle flips. A screenshot of the settings menu, another of the edit history, each labeled in plain language. She black-bars names and DM headers, keeps just enough metadata to show how the phrasing shifted. And how the shifted version spread.
Mika waits, eyes tracking the room the way she tracks a comment thread: who’s speaking over whom, who’s trying to land a joke that rewrites the mood. When the cross-talk finally breaks into smaller, safer murmurs, she lifts her chin a fraction.
“Haruko,” she says. Not loud, not sharp. Just placed.
Her posture is too neat for how little she’s slept. She keeps her shoulders squared like a uniform inspection, hands folded on the table as if they belong to someone else. If she moves too much, she’ll feel how hard her pulse is working. She doesn’t look at Tomo for confirmation; she doesn’t look at Kaito to see if he’s flinching. She looks at Haruko and holds the gaze in a way that isn’t a challenge, exactly: more like refusing to look away first.
“I’m not here to debate intentions,” Mika continues, and her voice stays soft enough that everyone has to choose to listen. “I’m going to describe sequence and access. If anything I say is incorrect, please stop me on the specific point.”
A couple of chairs shift. Someone sets a pen down, too carefully. The advisor’s eyes flick to the packet in front of them.
Mika slides the top page forward just an inch, aligning it with the edge of the table. The motion is tiny, but it makes the paper feel official. She feels the old reflex and presses it flat like a wrinkle.
Her eyes drop to her notes for half a beat, long enough to anchor herself in ink and timestamps instead of faces. Then she looks back up.
“First,” she says, “the public post. The version that went up originally.” She taps the page lightly, not like an accusation, like a citation. “It was posted at 9:[^14] p.m. on Tuesday. That’s in the header here.”
She pauses. Not for drama, but to let the room catch up to the idea that this isn’t a story. It’s a record.
“And then,” Mika adds, “the first edit.”
Mika keeps her eyes on the paper more than the faces. Facts first, in the same order the platform would show them to anyone scrolling. She reads the original post’s timestamp, then the caption as it existed before anyone could claim they “always meant it that way,” and she doesn’t add commentary: just the words, then the time, then the next line on the sheet.
Her fingertip lands beside each entry, a quiet metronome. She angles the packet slightly so the advisor can see the headers without leaning, so nobody has to pretend they remember. The point isn’t to sound convincing. The point is that the information is already convincing on its own.
“First edit,” she says, and she reads the minute and the second. She names what changed. One phrase swapped for another, a sentence tightened until it points somewhere different. Then she flips to the screenshot of the edit history and lets it sit there, unarguable.
She doesn’t say, You did this. She says, “This is the sequence,” and makes it hard for anyone to rewrite it out loud.
She doesn’t accuse; she diagrams. “At 9:[^14],” she says, “the account was public.” Her finger moves to the screenshot of the settings page, the toggle circled in pen. “That means anyone could view it. Anyone could screenshot it. Anyone could save it.” She turns the page. “At 9:[^31], it’s switched to followers-only.” Another circle, another timestamp. “That narrows who could see it after that moment, but it doesn’t erase what was already captured.”
Mika keeps her voice even, like she’s reading directions. “The platform logs edits, but it doesn’t show who made them. It does show when the wording changed, and it shows that the changed version is what the link preview pulls.” She looks up briefly. “So access is measurable. Motive isn’t.”
She draws a line from the screen to the hallway without changing her tone. “On Wednesday,” she says, “the edited wording is the version that started getting shared.” Her finger shifts down the page. “By Friday, the roster update went out. My name moved to ‘pending.’ After that, I stopped receiving volunteer sign-ups, even when I’d already confirmed. And the advisor check-ins changed: suddenly it was ‘concern’ and ‘stability’ language.”
Mika pauses where the timeline narrows into choice. She lifts her gaze (not to plead, not to challenge, just to anchor the room) and sets the paper down flat so it won’t crinkle. “I’m not asking for interpretation,” she says, voice soft but carrying to the advisors at the end of the table. “What written standard did you use to make those decisions, and where is it documented?”
Mika keeps her hands folded on the tabletop, fingers threaded tight enough that her knuckles blanch. If she loosens them, they’ll shake; if they shake, the room will decide what that means. She keeps her shoulders squared, posture borrowed from every assembly where she’s tried to be invisible, and continues in the same careful cadence she used for the timeline: like she’s presenting a lab procedure.
“I can provide a verifiable chain,” she says. The word verifiable lands deliberately, a shield and a dare at once. “But to do that, we have to acknowledge that a private screenshot exists.”
A quiet shift moves through the adults at the far end of the table. Mika doesn’t look at their faces long enough to read it. She watches the edge of her paper instead, the straight line she drew that kept everything orderly.
She adds, before anyone can turn it into a confession, “I’m not talking about speculation or hearsay. I mean an actual captured image. And I can explain how it moved. Who could have seen it at each point, what settings were in place, and when the content was changed.”
Her throat tightens on the word changed. She swallows without breaking pace.
“It’s procedural,” she says, as if she’s correcting a misunderstanding. “There are only so many ways it could have traveled, given the platform’s features. If we list them, we can eliminate what’s impossible.”
She lifts her eyes briefly, just long enough to include the student side of the table without inviting them in. Kaito sits very still, his expression disciplined, unreadable. Tomo’s pen has stopped; his attention feels like a steady hand at her back, not pushing, just present.
Mika looks down again. “I can provide the metadata I have. I can provide the timestamps from my end, and the versions that were visible. I can also provide the sequence of who had access before it went private.” Her voice stays soft, but the last part is edged with the truth she can’t soften.
“And,” she finishes, “I can’t do that without making myself traceable.”
One of the advisors. Sato, the one who always sounded gentle right up until you realized he’d cornered you: tilts his head. “Just to be clear,” he says, pen poised, “where did this originate? And when you say ‘private screenshot,’ who had access? Also. Did you engage with it at any point? Reply, repost, anything that would… escalate?”
Mika keeps her eyes on the timeline, not on his face. “The original post was mine,” she says, and forces her voice to stay even. “It was visible to ‘followers only’ at 9:[^12] p.m. Tuesday. At 9:[^26], I edited one sentence for clarity: the edit is in the platform’s history. The version that circulated isn’t either of those. It matches a screenshot taken between 9:[^12] and 9:[^18], before the edit, and it includes the notification bar, which narrows the device type.”
Her fingers press into the paper. “At 10:[^03], I restricted replies. At 10:[^11], I removed two followers I didn’t recognize. I did not repost it. I didn’t quote it. I responded to one DM at 9:[^40] telling someone I wasn’t accusing anyone.”
She looks up just long enough to make it land. “Everything I’m saying can be verified. It also means you can trace my account activity.”
Yuki moves like she’s closing a laptop. “I think we’re getting tangled,” she says, polite enough to sound helpful. “Maybe we should follow up later, one-on-one, so no one feels put on the spot. A lot of this seems like… miscommunication. People’s feelings were hurt.”
Mika keeps her face neutral. The word feelings is a trap door; step on it and you’re suddenly apologizing for existing. She doesn’t argue tone. She doesn’t defend intent.
She flips to the next line on her chart and speaks only to sequence. “The screenshot appears before the edit,” she says, tapping the time. “It moves from a private view to a club channel. Then it’s captioned differently. That’s the alteration. After that, it’s amplified through two club group chats and one volunteer roster thread.”
She looks at Yuki once: just once. “If we’re discussing action, those are the points that matter.”
Haruko’s voice stays soft, almost apologetic, as she lays down a path the adults already know how to walk: screenshot equals volatility, and volatility requires “standard safety procedure.” She doesn’t accuse; she suggests. She makes it sound like care. Heads begin to nod. Not for truth, but for familiarity. Mika feels the tilt of the room, the old gravity of “responsible” students managing a “situation.”
Kaito shifts in his chair like he’s adjusting for comfort, not choosing a side. His voice stays level. “That timestamp isn’t from the original,” he says, eyes on the handouts, not Haruko. “If it was pulled through the club channel, it would’ve logged in the archive. There’s an auto-note. It doesn’t.” Silence follows, deliberate. Mika watches the adults recalibrate, and Kaito’s jaw tightens as if bracing for his name to be the next file opened.
The room tilts toward paper, not people. An advisor, Mr. Delgado, the one who always says “let’s keep it simple”. Slides his notebook closer and asks, like it’s nothing, for the roster criteria in writing. Not “how do you usually decide,” not “can you explain the process.” In writing. Mika feels the phrase land with a clean, administrative weight, the kind that doesn’t care who’s popular.
Another adult, Ms. Sato from Activities, leans in with a small nod that looks supportive until it sharpens. “And last semester’s version as well,” she adds. “With dates, please. If there were updates, I’d like the sequence.”
Something in the air changes. Phones go face-down as if everyone has silently agreed to stop performing. Laptops appear, not for note-taking theater but for retrieval. Mika watches hands move: Yuki’s quick, practiced; Haruko’s slow, immaculate; Kaito’s careful, as if the wrong click could become an incident report. Tomo doesn’t rush. He just opens his notebook and then his device, already oriented toward documentation the way he’s oriented toward exits.
Mika’s pulse ticks behind her eyes. Files. Expectations. The dangerous part isn’t that they might not have the documents. It’s that everyone assumed they wouldn’t need them. So much of the regime’s power lived in the softness of “we decided,” the fog of “it just happened,” the way a group chat could evaporate into “miscommunication” the second an adult walked in.
An advisor clears his throat again, patient. “If it’s not written anywhere, then we’re going to create it now,” he says. “But first we need to know what was used before.”
Mika keeps her posture neat. She looks at the table, at the blank space where proof is supposed to be, and understands: this is the first time the room is asking for something the clique can’t charm into existence on the spot.
Yuki moves the way she always does when attention sharpens: she slides into usefulness. “I can send everyone the updated list later,” she offers, tone light, already reaching for her phone like the gesture itself is proof of competence. She volunteers to consolidate: she’ll pull the messages, stitch them into one clean document, spare the adults the messy back-and-forth. “There was a lot of confusion in the chat,” she adds, as if confusion is a weather pattern that rolls in and out, no one’s fault.
But the questions don’t follow her hand. They stay pinned to the table, to the idea of a record that exists without her. Mr. Delgado doesn’t ask what the roster is; he asks where it lived. Ms. Sato’s pen taps once. Who drafted the criteria. Who approved it. When it was posted. Whether the post was edited, and by whom. Mika hears the shift: not “explain,” but “show.”
Yuki’s smile holds, but it thins at the edges. “I can check,” she says, and for the first time her efficiency sounds like a delay. The adults’ calm doesn’t budge. Procedure, not personality. Mika feels her own breath settle into that narrow space where denials can’t hide.
Mr. Delgado flips to a fresh page. “For the viral incident response,” he says, voice mild, “I’ll need the moderation logs. What was reported, what was removed, which accounts were warned, and what guidance went out to students.” He says it like he’s asking for attendance. Ms. Sato adds, almost conversational, “And please align it with the district digital citizenship policy.” Policy as weather: inevitable, indifferent.
Mika keeps her hands folded under the table so they won’t shake. She imagines the log entries like footprints she can’t erase, time, action, username, reason.
Yuki’s gaze flicks to her phone, then to the adults. Information is usually something she can rearrange, soften, rephrase. But logs don’t bend. They just sit there with their timestamps, waiting to be opened.
Haruko softens her face into practiced grace, offering apologies shaped like weather, unfortunate, no one’s fault, let’s move forward. She tries to steer consequences back into the social realm: a private check-in, a “gentle reminder,” a reshuffled invite list. But now each kindness has edges. Selective invitations become a timestamped thread. Sudden eligibility rules sit beside the names they protect. “Concern” reads like strategy when the spreadsheet shows who it spares.
When the meeting breaks, no one storms out, no one cries, no one admits anything. That’s what makes it dangerous for them. The clique doesn’t lose its seats; it loses its fog. Influence still exists, but it has to pass through minutes, logs, policy language. Things that can be requested, compared, archived. Even Haruko’s softness feels newly measurable. The room exhales into uncertainty.
Mika steps out of the room and into the corridor’s fluorescent hush, expecting the familiar aftershock but instead there’s only the normal churn of lockers and passing feet, like the building can’t decide what story to tell yet.
The hallway smells faintly of disinfectant and warm paper from the copy room. Someone laughs too loud at the drinking fountain; the sound ricochets, ordinary and careless. A freshman hustles past with a poster tube under one arm, nearly clipping Mika’s shoulder, and mumbles “sorry” without looking up. No pause. No pointed glance. The absence of attention lands heavier than attention ever did.
She keeps her posture tidy, shoulders level, as if the adults are still watching through the door’s narrow window. Her knees feel loose, unreliable, and she times her steps to the bell’s distant countdown so she won’t look like she’s fleeing. A cluster of yearbook kids drift by, arguing about fonts (serif, sans, “don’t make it look like a funeral”) and one of them meets her eyes for half a second before looking away, not in disgust, just in the startled way people look at something they assumed would stay two-dimensional on a screen.
Near the trophy case, Tomo is a calm point in the flow, notebook tucked under his arm. He doesn’t stop her, doesn’t make the hallway into a stage. He only tips his chin, a small acknowledgment that says: you’re still here. Behind him, Kaito stands a step back, hands in his pockets like he’s holding himself together by force. His gaze flicks to Mika, then down, then back up. An apology that doesn’t ask to be forgiven.
Further down, Yuki’s ponytail disappears around a corner with two other students, moving fast, like she’s late for something she can still control. Haruko is nowhere to be seen. For once, the space between people isn’t full of her softness.
Mika’s hand drifts to her own screen out of habit; she checks, then forces it back into her bag, swallowing the itch to refresh. The relief that comes isn’t pride. It’s a thin, steady breath that reaches somewhere under her ribs, like her body is remembering it’s allowed to function without bracing for impact.
Mika’s fingers find her phone like it’s a reflex wired into the tendons, thumb already angling for the app she’s been living inside for days. The screen lights: one new notification, a generic badge, nothing that tells her whether the world is still sharpening itself against her name. She sees the top line of a preview and her stomach tightens on instinct.
No. Not here.
She turns the brightness down without thinking, as if dimming it could make the whole thing less real, and slides the phone back into her bag. The zipper sounds too loud, a tiny, decisive scrape. Her hand stays there for an extra beat, palm pressed to the canvas like she can hold the urge in place, keep it from spilling out into her face.
Her breath comes in shallow, practiced sips, then, unexpectedly, drops lower. Not relief like winning. More like her body recalculating, discovering it doesn’t have to keep tensing for the hit that usually follows a glance, a whisper, a buzz. The air reaches beneath her ribs, thin but steady, and for a moment her shoulders don’t feel like they’re pinned up by pure will.
A couple of students who’d gotten good at looking through her (at the empty air where she stood, at the wall behind her, at anything except her face) hesitate as they pass. It’s not dramatic. Their steps don’t stop so much as stutter, a half-beat of uncertainty in the hallway’s steady current. One of them lifts their eyes first, then the other follows, quick and careful, like checking the temperature of a surface that used to burn.
Mika feels it the way she feels a phone vibrate against her skin: immediate, involuntary. Her throat tightens, waiting for the pivot, the smirk, the silent verdict.
It doesn’t come. They hold eye contact just long enough to make it real, then look away without flinching: no performance, no punishment, only the quiet fact of her being seen.
At the edge of a loose knot of students by the courtyard doors, a sneaker hooks a chair leg and slides it out an inch: nothing announced, nothing performative, just a gap made for her. Mika reads the offer in the angle of the foot, the deliberate refusal to look up. She sits. No murmured thanks, no shrinkage. Her spine stays tall because it’s hers to hold.
The hallway remains what it’s always been (clean lines, posted rules, the same fluorescent certainty) but the current around her adjusts. Voices don’t drop into that familiar, automatic bite; they detour, choosing safer words, glancing once before they commit. Mika keeps her face neutral and listens anyway, cataloging the hesitations. It isn’t kindness, not yet. Just uncertainty. Enough space to breathe without choking.
It starts with an email that looks like every other email: district header, bullet points, the kind of language that pretends to be neutral. Updated leadership selection guidelines. Documentation for volunteer hour approvals. A reminder that “student communication platforms connected to school activities” fall under a code of conduct, with a link to a form: Report moderation concerns.
Mika reads it twice, then a third time, because her eyes keep snagging on the same sentence: Criteria must be written, available, and consistently applied.
Nothing in it says her name. Nothing in it admits what happened. Still, her shoulders loosen as if someone finally turned down the volume on a room she’d been trapped in. Her phone buzzes. A club group chat pings with a screenshot of the email, circled in bright digital ink, followed by a single line and for once the thread doesn’t immediately congeal into side jokes and coded agreement.
At lunch, the Student Activities Hall smells like dry erase markers and over-sweet coffee. Advisors move through the tables like they’re doing casual rounds, but Mika can tell the difference between casual and intentional; she’s spent years watching adults decide what they will and won’t see. Mr. Tanaka stops near the sign-up sheets and asks, lightly, who has access to the master roster. It’s the kind of question that used to be answered with a shrug and a smile. Today, there’s a beat of silence where the old shrug would go.
Mika keeps her posture neat, hands folded around her water bottle so she doesn’t pick at her cuticles. She doesn’t jump into the conversation. She just listens as someone says, “We should probably have two people on it. Like… for accountability.”
It’s not vindication. It’s not an apology. But it’s a hinge turning, small and audible, and for the first time in weeks Mika feels the ground under her feet hold steady.
In the days after the email, Mika watches the same phrases get tested and found thin. In the Japanese Culture Club chat, someone starts, I heard she, and then stops as if they can hear their own voice playing back in a disciplinary meeting. A second message follows, blander: Not sure. Just checking in. The ellipses look like caution tape.
At a planning meeting, “for safety” gets said the way people used to say it (soft, responsible, unarguable) and then, for the first time, it’s followed by an explanation. A hand lifts, hesitant. “What safety issue, specifically?” No one laughs. The advisor doesn’t swoop in to smooth it over. He just writes something down.
Mika keeps her gaze on the table, listening more than speaking, letting the new silence do its work. She can feel the group recalibrating: not empathy, not remorse, but a new awareness that vague words can be traced. People glance at their screens before they hit send, like the phone itself has become a witness. In the gaps, truth has room to stand up straight.
In the hallways and club meetings, Mika starts noticing the new stutter in people’s language. A sentence will lean toward its old shape and then correct itself like a hand pulled back from a hot stove. They reach for safe nouns: “miscommunication,” “context,” “concerns,” words that sound like forms you can file. Screens tilt away when she passes, not dramatically, just enough to pretend the angle is accidental. In group chats, the same students who used to lace messages with winks and half-tags now add punctuation like armor, dropping in “allegedly” and “I wasn’t there” as if disclaimers can wash their hands. It isn’t kindness. It’s self-preservation, and it makes the air feel thinner, sharper, easier to cut yourself on.
Rumor doesn’t stop traveling. It just learns new manners. It slips into “just checking” DMs, into two-person threads with names that look like homework help, into car rides after temple and the soft murmur of parents at Mizuki Market. In public, everything turns procedural: polite acknowledgments, dated screenshots, “per policy” like a shield. The hallways feel staged, like everyone’s practicing how not to be quoted.
The campus settles into a new kind of quiet. Less like peace than like everyone holding their breath. Denial still happens, but it costs time now: a paper trail, a careful wording, a risk calculation. That extra labor changes the texture of speech. People ask before they assume. They watch who vouches for whom. Trust shifts in small, audible edits.
The question starts showing up everywhere, like a thread snagging on the same loose nail: based on what?
It happens in the Student Activities Hall first, where the air always smells faintly of laminator plastic and peppermint gum. A sign-up sheet is passed around for an event committee, and when Yuki (keys on her lanyard, voice bright) says, “We’ll just assign leads later,” someone near the door asks, “Do we have written criteria this time?” The words are soft enough to be mistaken for curiosity. They still land heavy. Pens pause. A chair leg squeaks as somebody shifts, suddenly aware of their own posture.
Mika sits with her hands folded on her notebook like she’s holding herself in place. Her face stays neutral; she’s learned how to make her expression uninteresting. Inside, the question hits like relief and nausea at once. It isn’t about her, not out loud. That’s the point. It’s about the structure: about whether the invisible rules have to say their names.
The question comes back in smaller rooms. In the Yearbook room, when a “temporary” editor position is offered to someone who “has the right vibe,” Tomo asks, mild as a suggestion, “Can we see last year’s rubric? I want it consistent.” In Japanese Culture Club, when Haruko mentions “readiness,” a first-year with a too-tight ponytail says, “Readiness like attendance, or readiness like teacher rec?” No edge, just an honest need to understand.
Adults don’t swoop in. That’s not how this place works. Instead, there’s a new, thin layer of expectation: if you make a decision, you should be able to explain it without looking down at your phone.
Mika watches people learn the habit of answering. She watches Kaito, careful as ever, choose his words twice before speaking, as if realizing credibility can’t just be worn: it has to be accounted for. And when the room goes quiet after a polite question, she notices something she hasn’t felt in weeks: the silence isn’t only for her to endure. It’s shared. It’s a pause that belongs to everyone, and it demands a reason.
The regime doesn’t stop; it recalibrates, the way a hand finds a bruise without meaning to. Doors don’t slam anymore. Instead they close with forms. A lead position becomes “pending advisor approval.” A volunteer slot becomes “limited capacity.” Exclusion arrives dressed as caution: recommendations required, a training module “for consistency,” an email thread that moves just slow enough to miss a deadline.
Mika sees the new language everywhere, the soft-edged words people use when they want something to sound inevitable. Readiness. Fit. Community standards. She has heard them before. Usually right before she’s left holding her own embarrassment like a backpack that’s too heavy to set down.
But now the words have to attach. Someone asks for the rubric. Someone wants the timeline in writing. Someone, politely, requests the link to the policy being referenced. And when there isn’t one, when “fit” can’t be defined without saying a name, the air changes. The detour shows its shape.
It isn’t safety yet. It is friction. It is other eyes noticing the gap. It is the difference between a private target and a visible inconsistency, and for once, the mismatch doesn’t belong only to her.
What the campus gains is procedure with teeth. Not the kind that feels heroic: more like a door that finally has a handle on both sides. A decision can be traced now: to a rubric, a timestamped email, an advisor’s signature. If someone is passed over, they can ask for the standard without having to accuse anyone of cruelty. Appeals can be filed in clean language, and clean language makes adults listen. Patterns can be described as patterns, missed messages, “forgotten” invites, shifting requirements, without forcing a single student to stand up and say, It was me, it was always me. Even the students who never felt targeted begin to orient differently, like they’ve realized there’s a map they can hold, and that the map matters.
What the campus loses is the old ability to say, honestly enough, I didn’t mean it. The harm can’t keep getting filed under misunderstanding when the same “mix-ups” always lock the same people out, when the same screenshots “just happen” to surface at the same time. That pattern turns innocence into something you have to prove, and it makes everyone watch their language like it’s evidence.
A new kind of tension settles into the hallways, thin as dust and just as hard to ignore. Fairness makes footprints visible; every choice looks like a trail someone can follow back. Even kids who used to glide on “good vibes” start moving carefully, watching who’s watching. The shine of being “nice” doesn’t protect you anymore. It just means you’ll be asked, politely, to show your work.
The rubrics arrive the way most change arrives at Seishin Bridge: not with an announcement that admits anything went wrong, but with paper.
A week after the blowup, Mika finds them taped to the Student Activities Hall bulletin board in neat, laminated rows, Officer Selection Criteria, Volunteer Hour Verification, Audition Process (Revised). One page each. Black text, a few bold headers, the school logo at the top like a stamp of legitimacy. At the bottom, an advisor’s name, an email, and a date. A place for a signature that makes it feel less like a suggestion and more like a record.
She stands too close, as if proximity will make the words truer. Points for attendance. Points for completion of assigned tasks. A defined interview window. A line about “timely communication (48-hour response expectation).” Another line about “conflict of interest: disclose family ties.” Mika reads the same sentence three times, her headache pulsing in time with the fluorescent lights. Common sense, finally written down, looks different. Less like a vibe and more like a fence with the posts visible.
Around her, other students hover with the careful air of people pretending not to care. Tomo drifts in and stops at her shoulder, not crowding, just present. “They’re doing it,” he says quietly, like he’s describing weather he’s been tracking.
Mika doesn’t answer right away. Her first instinct is suspicion; rubrics can be rigged as easily as rumors. But there’s a strange relief in seeing the criteria spelled out where anyone can point. No more rules that shift depending on who’s asking. No more “We assumed you knew.” She imagines an email thread with a PDF attached, a timestamp that can’t be smiled away.
An advisor walks past and taps the corner of the Audition Process sheet as if smoothing a wrinkle. “If you have questions,” she says, voice bright, “just follow up in writing.”
In writing. Mika swallows, feeling the phrase settle in her chest like something solid. A handle, finally, on the side of the door she’s always been locked behind.
By the next Monday, the sign-up links look different. No more “DM me if you’re free” floating in a story that disappears in twenty-four hours, no more clipboard passed around like a favor. The new forms live in the same place for everyone, posted on the Activities page, pinned by an advisor, with fields that don’t let you submit without a student ID and a time stamp that lands like a small, impartial thud.
Mika fills one out in the library with her fingers held steady, watching the confirmation email arrive before she can second-guess herself. Receipt. Reference number. A line that says, If you need to update your availability, use this link; changes will be logged.
It’s not dramatic. It’s boring, almost. That’s the point.
In the hallway, she hears someone complain (softly, as if politeness will make it less true) that they “can’t just tweak the roster anymore.” Another voice answers, careful: “There’s a point person now. If something changes, you have to note why.”
The old invisible veto, You never replied, I didn’t see it, I thought you weren’t interested, starts to die of exposure.
Group chats change next, not with drama but with a spreadsheet and a name at the top. Each club’s main thread gets a designated moderator, assigned by an advisor, listed on the Activities page, along with a short set of expectations: post the weekly info in the pinned slot, log roster changes, respond within a set window, escalate harassment to the advisor instead of “handling it.” Once a month there’s a check-in, five minutes in a fluorescent office, where the moderator shows a simple audit trail: who was added, who left, who was removed, and why. The old tricks, silent kicks, “oops, I thought you were in here,” selective announcements sent at 11:[^58] p.m., don’t disappear. They just get heavier to carry.
A new habit settles in, quiet as posture correction: keep receipts, but keep them boring. Mika watches people stop “sending it to the group chat” and start saving it: screenshots filed by date, email threads summarized in plain bullet points, meeting notes titled like homework. Not ammunition, not gossip. Just a record that can be forwarded to an advisor without heat, a folder that says: this happened.
With everything logged, the old power doesn’t vanish: it just learns manners. A roster change sits “pending” for three days. A form gets kicked back for a missing middle initial. Someone files a gentle “just checking on her wellbeing” note that reads like care and lands like threat. But now each sidestep has a timestamp, a sender, a reason field. People start asking, softly, for those reasons out loud.
Mika learns, in the ugliest way, that public innocence is a performance other people grade. The more she types, the more the thread becomes a stage where everyone gets to practice being reasonable at her expense. So she stops. Not as surrender. More like pulling her hands back from a hot pan and deciding to cook differently.
At two in the morning, with her phone dimmed and her foster home quiet enough to hear the refrigerator cycle on, she opens every app she’s ever let touch her life. One by one: privacy settings, tags, mentions, old followers she doesn’t recognize anymore. She turns off the features that were designed to make her reachable. She changes her passwords, adds two-factor authentication, checks logged-in devices like she’s taking attendance. The headache behind her eyes pulses when she hits “download your data,” but she waits anyway, watching the progress bar crawl like a slow apology.
She starts a folder. Not named anything dramatic. “School.” Inside it, subfolders with dates. Screenshots cropped to show timestamps. DMs saved in full, not just the worst line, because context is the difference between “she said” and “this is what happened.” She writes a running note in plain language, the way teachers like it: who, what, where. No adjectives. No speculation. If she isn’t sure, she leaves a blank and marks it with a question mark. The point isn’t to win an argument; it’s to survive an audit.
At school, she keeps her posture neat and her voice soft like always, but her attention shifts. She listens for names, for phrasing that sounds like concern and functions like a warning. When someone “forgets” to include her, she doesn’t confront them in the hallway. She sends a short email later, polite, logistical, impossible to screenshot as crazy. She watches the replies, saves them, and feels something steadier than relief: a thin, quiet control returning to her hands.
In the library media lab, the air always smells faintly of toner and citrus wipes, and Mika uses that steadiness the way other people use confidence. She sits where the monitors throw a soft light over her hands and waits, not inviting anyone, not waving. Still, students start hovering at the edge of her table, freshmen with overstuffed backpacks, a sophomore from Taiko whose name she only half knows, like the rumor has shifted from “don’t get near her” to “she knows how to keep you safe.”
She doesn’t give speeches. She slides her chair over an inch and turns her laptop so they can see, showing them the difference between a DM and an email, the way an advisor reads subject lines like evidence. Neutral words, she tells them. Logistics. Dates.
Outside club meetings, she offers scripts in a low voice while people pretend they’re just waiting for a friend. “Can you send the rubric?” becomes “Could you share the written criteria so I can plan?” “I wasn’t told” becomes “Just checking what the deadline is.” She watches shoulders loosen when the request sounds ordinary: and still demands an answer.
She figures out that a paper trail doesn’t have to look like a threat. It can look like the kind of competence adults reward. After a meeting, she sends a follow-up while the details are still warm: “Thank you for clarifying today. Just to confirm: selection is based on X and Y, and materials are due Friday at 4?” She keeps the tone light, almost grateful, like she’s asking for help being organized.
The replies tell her who expected fog. Some people answer cleanly. Others suddenly soften, suddenly “remember” a missing step, suddenly volunteer the same information they’d held back in person. In group chats, she stops debating and starts summarizing: “Per our conversation. Here’s the plan.” It’s not confrontation. It’s receipts, filed under dates, with her name spelled correctly.
When the scholarship review finally lands on her calendar, Mika shows up with a thin folder and a steadier face than she feels. She doesn’t argue innocence; she narrates sequence, context, impact. Missed sleep, class dips, the way a screenshot can metastasize into “concern.” She calls it risk, not drama. The adults lean in differently. By the end, it’s accommodations, counseling, and a written protocol for reporting harassment.
Mika never turns into a banner anyone can wave. She keeps her posture neat, her voice low, the careful habits that keep caseworkers and counselors from hearing “problem.” But she learns a different kind of quiet: one with edges. She asks for written expectations, not permission. She names boundaries without apology. In DMs and meetings, “I need” becomes a sentence she can finish.
The first changes arrive packaged as “accountability,” neat as a binder label. Advisors ask for written leadership criteria. Volunteer hours need a sign-off form with dates and tasks. Every large group chat gets a named student moderator, someone who’s supposed to keep things “safe” and “on topic.” Posters go up in the Student Activities Hall with bullet points and QR codes. Teachers say words like transparency and equitable access, like saying them out loud is the same as building them.
For a week, the air on campus feels lighter. People stop lowering their voices when Mika passes. A few classmates who used to hover near the clique’s orbit nod at her, cautious but real. A counselor emails her a list of resources and ends with, If anything escalates, please document and tell us. Mika reads it twice, searching for the hidden hook, then saves it to a folder anyway.
But relief doesn’t erase pattern recognition. The same faces that used to control who knew what start volunteering for the new roles, smiling like they’re being helpful. “I can moderate,” someone says in a bright, practiced voice. “I’m online a lot, so it’s no trouble.” In chats, rules appear, no callouts, no negativity, keep it respectful, and suddenly the only messages that get flagged are the ones that ask direct questions.
Mika watches people learn the new script the way they learned last year’s service requirements: quickly, competitively, with the hunger to be seen as good. She watches how “community standards” can mean don’t make us uncomfortable, and how “safety” can mean quiet.
At lunch, she hears Kaito telling a teacher, calm as always, that structure is important because “kids spiral.” The teacher nods, grateful for a reasonable explanation. Across the courtyard, Yuki is already circulating a sign-up sheet with tidy columns. Names fill the top slots first.
Mika keeps her face neutral. She takes screenshots of the new guidelines, saves PDFs, notes timestamps. Accountability, she thinks, can be a tool. It can also be a costume. The difference is in who gets to define “harm,” and who gets thanked for preventing it.
The regime doesn’t argue with the new rules; it volunteers for them, eager hands raised before anyone else can. The criteria arrive as a shared document with clean headings and smiling language, and Mika feels her stomach tighten at the familiar softness: “reliability,” “appropriate tone,” “good fit with community standards.” Nothing you can quote as unfair. Nothing you can point to and make an adult frown.
She reads line by line the way she scans a comment thread at midnight, eyes catching on what isn’t there. No mention of access for students with caregiving responsibilities. No allowance for chronic illness flare-ups. No definition of “tone” beyond “respectful,” which means whoever’s already seen as polite gets to decide what counts as rude.
In the margins of her notebook she makes a quiet translation: reliability means never inconvenient. Fit means already liked. Mature communication means don’t make us nervous.
She doesn’t say it out loud. She highlights phrases, saves versions with timestamps, watches the edit history the way she watches faces in meetings. Neutral words, she thinks, are where bias hides best.
Even with oversight, moderation becomes a softer kind of leverage. Nothing gets outright erased; instead, a question is met with a cheerful “Let’s keep this constructive,” then a link to the guidelines, then three unrelated announcements that push it up the feed. People are asked to “take it to a separate thread,” and the separate thread is where things go to thin out and die. Replies come hours later, polite and slow, until the moment that needed an answer has passed.
Mika watches it happen in real time, her thumb hovering over refresh, her jaw tight from holding back. She starts making her own archive (screenshots, timestamps, exported chats) not as ammunition, but as a way to keep the shape of events from being edited into something safer for everyone else.
“Community standards” isn’t a rule so much as a handoff: shield when you need cover, blade when you need a target. Mika hears it in the soft, adult-friendly phrasing: safety, harmony, protecting the group. It’s how someone becomes “not a good fit,” how a question becomes “escalation,” how a leader becomes “a distraction.” Fear dresses up as care, and that costume makes it harder to name.
She learns to be careful without becoming small. She maps the new containers the way she used to map lunch tables: who drafts the criteria, who “clarifies” them in meetings, whose definition of “mature” becomes policy by default. When she speaks, it’s with questions that require answers, Can you define that? Can we put that in writing?: and she CCs adults who don’t like leaving a paper trail. She stays awake to it, not expecting fairness, just refusing invisibility to be mistaken for safety.
In the community corridor, the eyes don’t vanish. If anything, oversight becomes more efficient. At Mizuki Market, aunties still pause with baskets angled like shields, still let their gaze flick from Mika’s face to her hands, to whatever name tag she might be wearing, to the phone tucked screen-down in her pocket. Questions arrive wrapped in warmth: How is school? You’re keeping busy, right? It’s said like pride, but it lands like an inventory.
Mika feels the old reflex kick up: chin tucked, shoulders rounded, the careful laugh that makes adults relax. The version of her that survives by being easy to approve. She catches it in her throat and lets it dissolve. She keeps her posture neat, not shrinking, not challenging. A line she can hold without trembling.
“School’s fine,” she says, and stops there.
A pause stretches long enough for someone else to step in and fill it, but she doesn’t do it for them. She answers only what’s asked, no extra softness offered up as proof of gratitude or innocence. She doesn’t volunteer the summer program application. She doesn’t explain her schedule like an alibi. She doesn’t add, I’m trying, I’m good, I’m not a problem. Words that have always felt like bracing for impact.
An older man from the temple committee recognizes her and nods, the kind that means he remembers a ledger of volunteer hours. “You’re with Kintsugi, right? Helping out?”
“Yes,” Mika says. “On Saturdays.”
He asks who supervises. She gives a name. He seems satisfied, which is its own kind of danger; approval can turn into ownership fast, in a corridor where everyone knows everyone’s adults.
On the walk back, the afternoon light makes the shop windows glare like screens. Mika’s phone vibrates with a notification she doesn’t open. She doesn’t need to check whether her name is being discussed to feel the shape of it in the air.
She turns the corner anyway, steps steady. Watched doesn’t have to mean caught. Seen doesn’t have to mean defined. She lets that thought sit in her chest, small, stubborn, like a hand on a door she’s learning not to close.
Belonging doesn’t announce itself. It shows up like a small, practical kindness that doesn’t ask to be thanked.
Outside Kintsugi Youth Community Center, the bench that used to read as a place for people with nowhere else to go becomes (quietly) hers to return to. When Mika arrives, someone’s backpack sits at one end, angled like a placeholder, and Tomo lifts two fingers in greeting without making it a scene. No wide smile, no “Are you okay?” in the doorway where anyone could overhear. Just a nod that says: you can sit here if you want.
She sits. The wood is sun-warmed, the air smelling faintly of floor cleaner and the sweet bread from the corridor bakery next door. Her shoulders keep their careful line out of habit, but the space around her body doesn’t feel like a battleground.
Conversation stays neutral on purpose. “We’re short one person for the festival shift,” Tomo says, flipping open his notebook. “And we need more tape. The good kind.”
Mika finds herself answering without rehearsing. “I can bring gaffer’s. My foster mom has some.”
No one flinches at the word. No one reaches for a story. The bench holds.
Online, the tone changes first: not in the big posts, but in the quiet places where people used to come with assumptions sharpened into questions. A DM arrives from a classmate she barely knows, profile picture a yearbook candids smile: Can I ask what happened? If you don’t want to talk, ignore this. The permission inside it makes something in Mika’s ribs unclench.
She rereads it twice anyway, thumb hovering. Then she types a timeline: dates, screenshots mentioned but not attached, what she said and what she didn’t. Clipped. Factual. No apology for existing.
Three dots. Her stomach tightens.
The reply comes: Thanks for explaining. I’m sorry that got twisted. No lecture. No demand to “be mature.” Just an offer: If you need someone to back you up, I can say what I saw. Mika sets the phone down like it’s warm. For once, the screen doesn’t feel like a trap.
The new “transparent” systems start to show their teeth in a useful way. A temple volunteer roster goes out as a shared document. Mika scrolls once, twice. Her name sits there, same font, same line weight. When a side-thread suggests “correcting” it, another student replies, politely, in writing: which policy requires that change?
It isn’t warmth. It isn’t safety. It’s width. An extra inch on either side of her life where she doesn’t have to shrink to be tolerated. Lists have criteria now; chats have logs; deletions leave timestamps. The corridor still buzzes with rumor under polite voices, but the noise can’t fully rewrite her. Mika stands in it, spine straight, name intact, with witnesses.