The school bell rang with a shrill finality, marking the end of another day that looked exactly like the one before it. Rows of fluorescent lights hummed overhead, illuminating the marble-tiled corridors of Eastbridge High—prestigious, elite, and utterly indifferent to the invisible girl who walked its halls.
Briella Hart moved through the crowd like a shadow dressed in pastel pink. Her glossy curls bounced softly with each step, a stark contrast to the fierce storm of rejection letters she kept hidden in her bag. With her books hugged tightly to her chest and earbuds playing a soft instrumental track she'd labeled "Writing Mood," she drowned out the chaos of high school life.
She wasn't unpopular—no, that would at least be something. Briella was unnoticed. A whisper in a world that only screamed.
She wasn't just another dreamer. She was driven, armed with an imagination far larger than the walls of her school. By fifteen, she had written four full novels, sent queries to twenty publishers, and received twenty-two rejections—including two that bothered to reject her twice. Her rejection binder was thicker than her textbooks.
But she didn't stop. Couldn't.
There was a fire in her that no cold silence could put out. Her dream was crisp, sharp-edged, and unapologetically big: to become a published novelist. Not just online. Not just on Wattpad or a blog that her mother liked on Facebook. She wanted her books in bookstores, on shelves, with covers that bore her name in raised foil.
Today, her rejection count had hit fifty-seven.
"Another one?" asked Lacey, her best friend and resident realist, as they sat under the cherry blossom tree outside the main building. "Do they see your age and just assume you're writing diary entries?"
Briella gave a half-hearted laugh. "Probably. Or they think a fifteen-year-old has nothing worth saying."
"Idiots," Lacey muttered. "All of them. One day, you're gonna shove your book in their hands and say read it and weep."
Briella smiled, though her fingers tightened around her leather-bound notebook—the current manuscript she was working on. Her safe space.
The breeze caught a few pages, ruffling them gently like a hand turning through memories.
"I've decided something," she said. "Even if I'm invisible now, one day… I'll be impossible to ignore."
She didn't know that day was closer than she thought.
---
The Creative Writing Club met every Tuesday in Room 3B, a sun-drenched corner classroom that had once been a storage space. Only a handful of students ever showed up—some to write, most to escape math homework.
Briella arrived early, as usual. She sat by the window, opening her notebook to the last chapter she'd been working on—a fantasy about a girl who met a stranger that could read everything she'd ever written, even the words she'd crossed out in fear.
Her pen hovered.
Then the door opened.
And time hiccuped.
The sound of the hallway melted behind the silhouette in the doorway. He stood tall—too tall for high school, almost like he'd stepped off a film set. His presence was cold, collected, magnetic in a way that made every other boy in the room feel like a prop.
Black dress shirt. Silver cufflinks. Tailored pants.
He didn't belong here.
"Who's that?" someone whispered.
"Lucien Thorne," the teacher announced. "A transfer."
His name rolled off the tongue like a line from a thriller novel.
Lucien scanned the room with a gaze that sliced through people like paper. Then, as if by magnetic pull, his eyes locked on Briella.
He walked past the empty chairs.
And sat beside her.
Not near her. Beside her.
The world shrunk.
Briella tried not to look. Her pulse betrayed her, pounding behind her ears.
"You're in my seat," she whispered.
Lucien didn't look at her. "Then I suppose it's yours in title only."
She blinked. That wasn't arrogance. That was… detachment. Like he wasn't trying to be rude—he simply didn't care about the rules everyone else followed.
His gaze fell to her open notebook. Before she could slide it away, his fingers brushed the page.
"Do you always write with this much fear?" he asked.
She gasped. "Excuse me?"
Lucien looked up, and for the first time she noticed the hollowness behind his pale grey eyes. "You cross out the best parts. You're scared of being too good. Afraid someone might actually notice."
Briella's breath caught.
No one had ever said that.
No one had ever seen that.
"Do you write?" she asked.
"No," he said, leaning back lazily. "But I read people. And you, Briella Hart, are a scream dressed as a whisper."
He stood before the teacher could finish calling roll, walked to the door, and paused.
"I'll return your notebook," he added over his shoulder. "When I've finished reading it."
And just like that, he was gone.
Taking her stories.
And maybe, just maybe, her silence with him.