The world had always felt too loud, too fast, too much. I had grown used to being alone, retreating into the quiet spaces where no one looked. At school, I drifted through the hallways like a ghost, slipping between conversations without ever being part of them. At home, I curled up in my room, where the silence felt safer than the noise outside. Books became my escape—stories about things that always felt just out of reach.

I didn’t mind being an introvert. I liked the solitude. What I didn’t like was the loneliness. The ache of it sat heavy in my chest, a reminder that I wasn’t like everyone else. No one noticed the girl who always sat alone at lunch, the one who walked with her head down, earbuds in, pretending she didn’t care.

Until someone did.

It started small. A glance held a second too long. A casual greeting in the hallway, unexpected but warm. At first, I thought I imagined it. But then it happened again.

“Hey,” he said one morning as I stood at my locker, arranging my books in the careful order I always did.

I hesitated before looking up. “Hey.”

Caleb. I had seen him around—he fit effortlessly into every space. I couldn’t understand why he was talking to me.

“You like reading, right?”

I blinked. “Yeah.”

“I saw you with The Night Circus last week. That’s one of my favorites.”

My fingers tightened around my book. No one ever noticed details like that about me.

“You don’t talk much, do you?”

I shrugged. “Not really.”

He smiled. “I talk enough for both of us.”

And just like that, he kept showing up. At our lockers. In the library. In the cafeteria, where he sat across from me even when I barely spoke. He never pushed. He just… stayed.

And slowly, I started to believe that maybe I wasn’t invisible after all.