WNDR7593

Silver Ghost, Iron Cage

You have spent eighteen years learning how to be invisible — small voice, downcast eyes, a silver curtain of hair to hide behind — and it has almost worked, until now. For the past week a pair of dark eyes have been tracking you across campus with the kind of focused patience that does not belong in a lecture hall, and something animal in your chest recognizes it as a predator's patience. Today the seminar door locks from the outside, your father's next check-in call is forty minutes away, and the boy everyone calls a bad influence slides into the seat directly behind you like he owns the air you breathe.