CHAPTER 12 — BOOK IV
Stay
(HSC Year — an active moment)
At eighteen, Fayrani had learned the particular cruelty of HSC year: how stress made people mean in ways they later called “just joking.”
It happened on a Tuesday, which was the worst kind of day for it—ordinary, predictable, low on drama until someone decided to manufacture some.
They were in the library during a study period. The air smelled like printer toner and old carpet. Everyone moved with a brittle focus, half in panic, half pretending they weren’t.
A boy two tables over—Imran—was sitting with his laptop open and a stack of notes so neat it looked defensive. He wasn’t loud. He never was.
That was probably why the others chose him.
Two girls walked past, slowing just enough to let their whispers land.
“He’s so… you know,” one of them murmured, not bothering to lower her voice properly.
Her friend smirked. “Yeah. The way he talks. The way he sits.”
They laughed—softly, like they expected the library to approve.
Imran’s shoulders tightened. His eyes stayed on his screen as if he could stare hard enough to make them disappear.
Fayrani’s pen paused.
At seventeen, she would have looked away and hated herself for it later.
At eighteen, something in her moved forward before fear could negotiate.
She stood up calmly, walked over, and stopped beside their table.
The girls looked up, startled—caught in the act of being unkind without an audience that agreed.
Fayrani smiled lightly.
“Hey,” she said, as if they were friends. “Can you not do that?”
One girl blinked. “Do what?”
Fayrani’s expression stayed pleasant, which made it worse for them—because anger could be dismissed, but politeness was harder to fight.
“The commentary,” Fayrani said. “The performance. It’s boring.”
The other girl scoffed, defensive. “We’re just talking.”
“Mm,” Fayrani replied. “Talking about someone isn’t the same as talking.”
They glanced at each other, recalculating.
The first girl lifted her chin. “Why do you care?”
Fayrani’s answer came without effort.
“Because you’re trying to make him smaller so you can feel bigger,” she said. “And it’s not working.”
Silence.
Imran didn’t look up, but Fayrani saw his hand tighten around his pen.
The girls’ faces flushed with the humiliation of being named accurately.
“You think you’re so righteous,” one of them muttered.
Fayrani shrugged.
“I’m not righteous,” she said. “I’m just not cruel.”
She turned slightly then—just enough to include Imran without forcing him into the spotlight.
“You okay?” she asked, quietly.
Imran hesitated, then nodded once, small and controlled.
Fayrani nodded back as if that was enough.
Because it was.
She returned to her seat without triumph, without drama, without checking whether anyone had witnessed it.
Half the library had.
That wasn’t why she did it.
As she sat down, she felt her heart beating hard—not from fear, but from something else.
From the strange relief of acting like the person she had been trying to become.
Later, when her phone buzzed with a message from a friend—that was savage—Fayrani didn’t reply.
She looked back at her notes, then at the blank space at the top of her page, and wrote one line she didn’t fully understand until she finished it:
Stay, even when it’s easier not to.
And for the first time all year, the weight in her chest felt lighter.
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