Turn 6 of 26

You see the other 29 walk to room 123. You walk in there with them and you notice they are sitting in the same place as they were in 114 with silence. You sit in the same seat in silence. You don’t notice while waiting that your skin turns pale white like the others. The freckles form on your face just like them. without question, you take your stuff out just like everyone else.

Ruth doesn't say goodbye at the stairwell. She simply turns, and you follow — your feet again, carrying you down a corridor you've never walked, into a room marked 123 where the other twenty-nine are filing in and sitting down in exactly the seats they occupied in 114. Same rows. Same gaps. Ruth takes the desk to your right and looks at you with mild, patient expectation, and you sit down because there is nowhere else in the world to sit.

The room is silent. No teacher yet, no phones, no whispering — just thirty girls with folded hands and centered pencils, waiting the way objects wait on a shelf. You take your things out without deciding to: notebook squared to the desk edge, pencil laid parallel, glasses adjusted on your face. Your hands do it smoothly, gratefully, like a maid who loves her work.

It's while you're waiting that the itch starts — faint, everywhere, like static under your skin. You scratch your forearm without looking, and the skin there is lighter than you remember, pale as printer paper, the freckles you never had spreading across it in slow constellations. They climb your arms, your neck, and bloom across your cheeks and nose in the same pattern you've been staring at on Megan's face all morning. You don't notice. You're watching the door, waiting for whatever comes through it, your posture straight, your hands folded.

Ruth glances at you, then away, satisfied — the way you'd glance at a cake rising in the oven. Beside your desk, your reflection sits ghosted in the window glass: a heavyset pale girl with ginger pigtails and taped glasses, freckled like all the rest. The girl in the glass is you now, and you look straight through her.

Somewhere down the hall, footsteps approach the room 123 door, unhurried and familiar, and thirty spines straighten in unison — yours included.