It wasn’t anything dramatic.
No shouts.
No pointing fingers.
Just a shift in the air. A rearranging of background noise.
One morning, walking to second period, Nickie passed a group of girls near the vending machine.
They stopped talking when she walked by.
Not slowly. Not like they drifted off.
It was sudden. Clean. Like a needle scratching off vinyl.
Nickie glanced back.
They didn’t look at her. Not directly.
One girl started fiddling with a bracelet.
Another opened a pack of gum like it had personally wronged her.
Weird.
She chalked it up to coincidence.
But it happened again the next day. Different group. Same abrupt silence.
Then there was the stairwell.
A couple of girls were sitting on the bottom steps: two juniors she didn’t know well. They were laughing. Not obnoxiously. Just the usual pre-class nonsense.
Then she turned the corner.
The laughter died instantly.
One of them glanced up at her. Then quickly away.
No sneers. No comments. Just a small, oddly still silence, like someone holding their breath.
By the time she passed, the laughter started again. Different now. Lower. Muffled.
Nickie blinked.
Okay.
She checked her reflection in the window outside Chem. No spinach. No shirt stains. No “kick me” signs taped to her back. She looked like… her.
So what the hell?
She told herself it was probably nothing.
Maybe people were just being weird this week. Mercury in retrograde or whatever. Midterms. Bad coffee. TikTok trends.
’Am I losing it? No. I know when I’m being watched.’
Once she started noticing it, she kept noticing it.
A girl pretending not to stare.
Another one she didn’t know whispering something the second she passed.
Another one vaguely familiar glancing at her, frowning, then turning away like she was embarrassed to be caught looking.
None of it made sense.
She hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t said anything.
As far as she could tell, she was still flying comfortably under the radar.
So why the hell did it feel like someone had written her name on a whiteboard somewhere?
The Shift
By the end of the week, the silence wasn’t silent anymore.
It turned into whispering.
Fast. Sloppy.
The kind that picked up the second Nickie passed, like a switch was flipped. Like someone had cued a live broadcast.
She walked down the math wing and heard it: hissing behind locker doors, half-laughed words swallowed before they could be traced back.
Glances no longer darted away.
They lingered.
Some sharpened.
Some stared like they were carving her name into a blacklist.
By the cafeteria, one girl didn’t bother hiding it. She looked Nickie up and down like she’d stepped in something wet and didn’t want it on her shoes.
Nickie blinked.
‘Seriously?’
Then came the shoulder bump.
It wasn’t an accident.
She knew an accident.
This one came with precision and intention.
Someone walking a little too close, making no effort to shift, the kind of bump that said, “move.”
Nickie stumbled a half step but kept walking.
She didn’t flinch. Didn’t react.
But her fingers curled a little tighter around the strap of her bag.
Home
Nickie sat on the edge of her bed, uniform still on, bag still dropped where it landed.
Her cat Claudia was eyeing her suspiciously, trying to figure out if it was safe to jump onto her.
Nickie’s body was still buzzing with it. Not fear. Not exactly.
Just confusion. Frustration. Something crawling.
This wasn’t the regular background noise of high school. This felt like something aimed.
“Maybe you know why, Claud?” She asked out loud while absently playing with the cat’s ears.
She ran through every memory of the week like film reels: fast-forwarding through locker stops, class switches, walks to the courtyard.
When had the stares started? The silences? The weirdness?
Then…
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She remembered it.
A few days ago, a girl bumped into Adam during recess. Not a big deal. She barely touched him.
But Adam flinched like he’d been hit and froze mid-step, jaw tight.
The girl had apologized. Fast. Flustered.
Then vanished into the crowd.
Adam sighed, and Nickie got to him moments later, watching him brush it off and returning to his usual scowl.
But later that day, Nickie saw her again, backed into a corner near the library, surrounded by a few of the same glitter-pen girls from the vending machine.
They hadn’t touched her. But the look they gave her…
It wasn’t nice.
Nickie’s stomach turned.
She sat up straighter.
Started piecing it together.
‘Wait. Was I getting looks when Adam was with me?’
She replayed the walk to class earlier that day.
Yes. Definitely. The whispers had started when Adam was beside her.
‘Did the bump happen after we separated?’
Yeah. He’d turned down another hallway. She’d gone on alone.
Her pulse started to thrum.
So that means…
‘Fuck.’
He Won’t Stay | Nickie’s POV
From that moment, whenever I walked through those hallways, I paid attention.
Not the casual kind. Not the “oh, maybe I’m imagining this” kind.
I mean sharp.
Predator-level sharp.
Eyes like scalpels. Ears tuned like drumheads.
I started cataloguing.
The girl with the French braid and the judgmental nostrils?
She posted up by the locker bay near math class, pretending to scroll while absolutely not scrolling.
The tall one from Adam’s class who always fake-sipped from an empty water bottle?
She timed her exit from the bathroom perfectly to bump into me at the corner. Nat, I think someone called her.
Cute.
Meanwhile, two others (glitter pen twins) stood near the vending machine doing that thing where they “whisper” just loud enough to know it’s about me but not loud enough to get called on it.
Honestly, I admired the coordination. If they ever applied that kind of focus to literally anything else, one of them might solve cold fusion.
I didn’t react. Not once.
Didn’t flinch. Didn’t slow. Didn’t look their way.
Especially not when Adam was next to me.
Because here’s the thing: I made a decision.
He doesn’t need to know.
He’s already juggling enough.
He’s finally making it to school every day like it’s a personal dare.
He’s breathing through panic instead of bailing on the building.
He actually (unbelievably) asked me to help him study for a test.
He’s clutching a fragile sort of normal, and I’m not about to smash it by dumping my hallway drama on his head.
The last thing he needs is another reason to worry.
Or a fight that lands him in the principal’s office.
So I smiled when he talked.
Matched his pace.
When he glanced at my boots and said: “Hey, drummer girl… you look like you’re about to ace a math test and kick someone through a speaker cabinet. pretty sure the uniform code didn’t mean combat-ready.” I snorted and fired back:
“Yeah, well, I like my grades clean and my enemies concussed.”
“Guess so. Remind me not to stand between you and either.”
And I ignored the hyenas like they didn’t exist.
Because they don’t.
Not to me.
They’re background static. Gnats. The kind of petty that gets smaller the more you stare at it.
I’ve handled worse.
Much worse.
They have absolutely no idea.
But then she passed me.
The one they called Paige.
Always surrounded by girls who laughed too hard on cue.
Redhead. Perfect posture. Face like a porcelain knife.
She didn’t bump me. Didn’t smirk.
Just leaned in, slow and deliberate, and whispered soft as a scalpel:
“He won’t stay.”
That stopped me.
Not physically. But something inside me locked up.
Like the floor dropped out from under my ribs and left everything hollow.
I could feel cold sweat on the back of my neck.
‘Holy fuck.’
That wasn’t drama.
That wasn’t schoolyard bullshit.
It was a threat, dressed like prophecy.
And it wasn’t like the other girls.
Like that one who hovered outside Adam’s classroom.
Gatekeeping, performing protection, weaving a quiet little story about loyalty.
That was about narrative.
About control.
But Paige?
Paige didn’t care about stories. She wasn’t curating some tragic myth.
She looked at me like I was already guilty. Like she’d seen me coming long before I arrived.
Her whisper wasn’t a warning.
It was a verdict.
This wasn’t about status. Or image.
This was about erasure. Preemptive. Surgical.
And for the first time, I felt it in my bones.
I wasn’t just being pushed out.
I was being hunted.
And why?
Because they’d do anything to keep me away from him.
“Nickie.”
Adam touched my arm lightly. “Hey. I called your name like three times. Everything okay?”
I blinked. Shit.
I didn’t mean for Adam to notice anything.
“Sorry,” I said, forcing a small smile. “Was thinking about something.”
He studied me for a second, then gave a quiet nod.
Didn’t press. Didn’t poke.
Then he kept talking like nothing happened.
“So, about today… Do you mind if we do band practice right after school? Unless you’re busy or something.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll just reschedule my plans to brood in an alley and glare at pigeons.”
He smirked. “They’ll understand. I need your rage and vaguely violent drumming.”
“Rude,” I said. “My drumming is extremely violent, thank you.”
Adam smirked. “Right. Sorry. I meant elegantly destructive.”
“Better,” I nodded. “Now say it with reverence.”
He gave me a dramatic bow mid-step. “Oh mighty destroyer of snares, lead us.”
I snorted. “You’re such a bass goblin.”
“Flattery,” he said, “will get you an extra chorus.”
I felt the tinge of fear from earlier disintegrate, replaced by something warm. I tried to hide a smile.
Unexpectedly, Adam was the one who made it feel like everything was normal again.