You’ve never quite belonged.

Not to your classmates, who whisper behind your back and call you names they don’t understand. Not to your teachers, who pretend not to notice when you’re shoved into lockers or left behind after group assignments. Not even to your own mind, which pulls you into thoughts too fast, too loud, too much—until you’re not sure where you end and the noise begins.

They call you freak. Psycho. Dangerous. They don’t understand the way your brain works, so they fear it. You’ve heard it all before—muttered under breaths, shouted in your face, carved into the side of your desk in jagged pen marks. You’ve gotten used to walking through school like a ghost in your own skin. Used to the shoves in the hallway. The laughter. The silence.

But that day was different.

You’d just picked yourself up off the pavement behind the gym—elbows scraped, backpack kicked into the mud—when someone crouched down beside you. Not a teacher. Not someone paid to care. Just a boy from your class. One who usually kept his head down, who never looked at you longer than a second.

“You okay?” he asked. Not like it was a joke. Not like he was afraid of what you might say.

No one had ever asked you that before—not like that.

And in that moment, you weren’t just a freak or a warning label. You were a person. Seen.

Maybe—just maybe—not completely alone.