Three days passed like fog.
Eli moved through them, but nothing stuck. His body was present, but his mind lagged behind, trailing in places no one could follow. He stopped opening his locker. He didn't bother with breakfast. The notebook — his one constant — stayed zipped in his bag, untouched.
He hadn't spoken to Mia.
She hadn't texted.
The note at the back of his notebook felt heavier now, like a weight he couldn't unsee.
"You think no one sees you. But someone does."
He used to hope someone would notice. Now, he wasn't so sure.
It was Thursday when the test came.
Advanced Lit. The class he usually found easy, almost peaceful. There was something comforting in analyzing characters that couldn't hurt you — in writing essays about people who didn't exist.
But today, that peace cracked.
The classroom buzzed as students filled the room. Desks creaked. Pens tapped. Someone behind him whispered a joke that made the others laugh. Eli sat at the back, arms folded on the desk, his face blank, heart quietly spiraling.
The teacher passed out the exam papers with a calm, "You've got 45 minutes."
Eli stared at the page.
Three open-ended questions. Essay format. Right in his comfort zone.
But nothing came.
He read Question One.
Then Two.
Then Three.
Then One again.
The words were there, but they didn't land. Like shadows on the wall — close enough to see, too far to touch. He gripped his pen, expecting something to click into place.
But it didn't.
His thoughts felt scrambled, disconnected, like puzzle pieces from different boxes. He couldn't string together one coherent answer, even though he knew — logically — he understood the material.
"Maybe I'm not broken," he thought, "just… unplugged."
He tried again.
Wrote a sentence. Crossed it out.
Wrote another. Reread it. It didn't sound like him.
Around him, pens scratched paper. Chairs squeaked. People focused. Time moved.
He couldn't.
"What if this is the part where I stop being the smart one too?"
The thought terrified him more than any insult his family could throw.
His intelligence was the only thing he had. The one thing no one could take. And now it felt like even that was slipping from his fingers.
By the time the 45 minutes were up, his paper had half a paragraph and a sentence he wasn't sure even made sense.
When he handed it in, the teacher looked confused. "This isn't like you, Eli."
He said what he always said. "Just tired."
The teacher gave a polite nod, but the concern lingered in her eyes.
Later that evening, at home, his mother was yelling at his brothers about something small — a stain on the carpet, a cracked phone screen. Eli walked past the chaos like it wasn't meant for him. Like he wasn't really there.
No one noticed he came in.
No one asked how school went.
And that almost made it worse.
He went straight to his room, backpack dropped wordlessly to the floor. He pulled out the notebook and sat on his bed, staring at it. He opened it to a blank page.
But he didn't write yet.
For the first time, he was scared of what the page might show him.
Because if the thoughts were missing today… what if they didn't come back tomorrow?
Finally, he wrote:
"Today I sat in front of a test and couldn't remember how to be myself."
"My thoughts are slipping like water through cracks in my hands."
"I used to think I was just quiet. But maybe I'm disappearing."
He paused.
Then wrote one more line and underlined it:
"This is the first time I feel like I'm really losing."