CROWN WITHOUT A KINGDOM

POV: Wren

The note has been on my back for eleven minutes.

I know because I checked my phone at 7:43 when I left the bus, and the janitor pulled me aside at 7:54, and in between those eleven minutes, approximately one hundred and thirty Hartfield Prep students saw it before Idido.

He doesn't say anything. Mr. Diallo, the janitor. He just touches my shoulder, waits for me to stop walking, and peels something off the back of my hoodie with the careful hands of someone who has done this before. Someone who has seen this before. He folds it before I can read it and drops it in his cart.

"Head up," he says quietly. That's all.

But I already heard the laughter.

I already saw the phone come out.

I turn around. The hallway is full, loud, first-day-of-school electric. And at least a dozen people are looking at me with that specific look. The one that means they saw it. The one that means they are deciding if I am worth feeling sorry for or just worth laughing at.

I smile.

Not because I am okay. But if you cry at Hartfield, they take a video of that, too.

I walk to the nearest bathroom, lock myself in the last stall, and lean against the wall. My heart is pounding like I ran a race I didn't sign up for. I breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth, the way my mom taught me when panic used to swallow me whole in middle school.

You are smart, she always says. Smart outlasts everything.

I believe her. I have to.

I look down at Mr. Diallo's cart through the gap under the stall. He unfolded the note. I can see it sitting on top of a pile of crumpled paper.

CAUTION: OVERSIZED LOAD.

Bold letters. Printed, not handwritten. Which means somebody planned this. Somebody woke up this morning, opened their laptop, typed those words, changed the font size to make it bigger, printed it, and brought it to school specifically for me.

The first day. Before Ihade said a single word to anyone.

I have been here before. Different school, same script. The difference is that at Hartfield Prep, everybody has a phone with a good camera and ten thousand followers.

I flushed the toilet even though I didn't use it. I wash my hands. I look at myself in the mirror.

Brown skin. Natural hair stuffed under a grey hoodie. Eyes that are too tired for seventeen. I look like someone who already knows how this year is going to go.

I point at my reflection.

One more year, I tell her. Scholarship. Graduation. Out.

She nods back. We have an agreement.

Second period is English Literature, and I am three minutes late because I got lost, which means every head turns when I open the door. Thirty pairs of eyes. I feel each one like a finger poking a bruise.

The teacher, Ms. Obi, points to the only empty seat without making a thing of it. I slide in. The girl next to me has perfect box braids and is drawing a tiny sun in the margin of her notebook. She doesn't look up. The boy behind me smells like expensive cologne and is already asleep.

I open my book and try to disappear.

It works for about four minutes.

Then I hear it. A whisper. Then a giggle. Then the whisper again, louder this time, shaped like my name,e even though nobody here knows my name yet.

I don't turn around.

Ms. Obi is writing on the board and hasn't noticed. Or she has noticed and is choosing not to engage, which is a kind of cruelty teachers don't know they're doing.

The girl with the braids, the one drawing the sun, slides her notebook toward me without looking up.

Don't turn around, she has written. It's what they want.

I stare at those words.

Then I write underneath: I know.

She writes: I'm Zola.

I write: Wren.

She finally looks at me. She has sharp eyes and a small smile, as if she is keeping a secret.

She writes one more thing: You walked in here like you owned the room. They hate that.

I didn't feel like I owned anything. But I decide right then that Zola is the first good thing about Hartfield Prep.

Lunch is loud and geography. Where you sit is who you are. I already know I am a corner-of-the-room, head-down, eat-fast kind of person. I find a table near the window and pull out my book.

That's when I see him.

He walks in with three other guys, all of them big, all of them loud, all of them carrying the specific energy of people who have never once worried about where to sit. The whole cafeteria shifts when they enter, the way a room shifts when the temperature changes.

He is tall. Golden hair. The kind of face that gets people elected or cast in movies. And I know him because I have already seen him today.

He is the one from the hallway.

The one who looked at me.

The one who walked away.

He sits at the centre table, laughing at something one of his friends said. He hasn't seen me. I am invisible again, which is how I want it.

But then his friend says something,g and he turns, scanning the room the way popular people do, checking their territory. His eyes move across the cafeteria.

They land on me.

He recognizes me. I can tell because his jaw tightens. He saw what happened this morning. He knows he walked past.

I hold his gaze this time. Three seconds. Four.

He looks away first.

Good, I think. Remember that feeling.

I am almost at the bus stop when my phone rings. Mom. I pick up.

"He,y baby," she says. She sounds nervous and happy at the same time, which is a combination that has never meant anything good. "So, Gerard is cooking dinner tonight. He wants us all to eat together."

"Okay," I say slowly.

"And Wren." She pauses. Long enough that I stop walking. "He has a son. Two sons, actually. They're going to be there tonight."

The air leaves my lungs.

"Mom."

"His older son goes to Hartfield," she says. "Isn't that a nice coincidence?"

I already know. I already know before she says the name.

But when she says it, when she says Callum Voss, and I hear that name out loud for the first time, my whole body goes cold.

Because Callum Voss is the boy from the hallway.

The one who saw the sign on my back and walked away.

And tonight I am eating dinner at his house.