Chapter 34 Still Here
Elias POV
I wake up before my alarm on purpose.
Not because I am anxious. Not because something is pressing down on my chest or crawling up my throat. I wake up early because I want a few minutes before the world gets its hands on me. Before the notifications. Before the stares. Before the whole campus decides what yesterday means.
My phone is face-down on the desk. I leave it there.
Ivy is still asleep, one arm hanging off the side of her bed, her hair spread across the pillow like she fell from a great height. She looks peaceful. I envy her that for exactly two seconds, then I get up.
The mirror is honest this morning. My eyes look a little heavy. There is a softness around my mouth that was not there a month ago, like something tense has finally let go. I study my own face the way I used to study Noah from across the quad, looking for information. What I find is simpler than I expect.
I look like myself.
That is enough.
I take my time getting dressed. The red skirt is hanging on the back of my chair, the same one I wore yesterday, and I choose it again without really thinking about it. It is not a statement. It is not armor. It is just the skirt I want to wear, the same way I always have. I pair it with a dark top and a jacket that slips off one shoulder before I have even stepped out the door.
I pick up my phone on the way out.
Two hundred and twelve notifications.
I stare at the number for a moment. Some of them are from people I know. A lot of them are from people I do not. I scroll through a few. There are comments under the photo someone posted of me and Noah walking together, comments I do not read past the first line. I close the app.
I am not performing for any of them.
The hallway outside our dorm smells like someone's burnt toast and the remains of last night's rain coming through the window at the far end. Ordinary morning. The kind that does not care about photographs or campus gossip or whether the golden boy of Ridgeway finally stopped pretending.
I push through the door and step outside.
The air is cool. The quad is starting to fill up, students crossing in clusters, a few cyclists cutting down the side path. I join the flow of it and walk without hurrying. I am not going to make myself small today. I am not going to duck my head or pick a different route or time my movements around where Noah might be or where the people talking about us are most likely to gather.
I have never done that. I am not starting now.
The first thing I notice is how the stares are different.
People have always looked at me. Since first year, since the first time I crossed this quad in a skirt with my chin up and my boots loud on the stone, people have looked. Curious. Cautious. Sometimes admiring. Sometimes not. I have made my peace with all of it. I know how to move through it.
But today the stares have weight to them. They are loaded with something extra, something recent. A few people whisper to each other as I pass and do not bother to hide it very well. A girl near the fountain does a double take, then quickly looks at her phone. Two guys from what I think is the soccer team go quiet when I walk by.
I do not slow down.
I keep my face easy, my shoulders loose, my stride exactly what it always is. Because this is the thing people expect you to do when you have been talked about overnight. They expect you to shrink. They expect you to recalibrate, to come out the next morning a little more careful, a little more wrapped up, a little less yourself.
I am not giving them that.
Halfway to the arts building, I check my messages properly for the first time.
There are texts from three people I barely know, which I ignore. There is a long voice note from my cousin that I save for later. There are six messages from Ivy sent between midnight and two in the morning, all increasingly chaotic, all basically saying the same thing: I saw the photo, are you okay, call me, also I am proud of you, also what are you wearing tomorrow, also sleep well.
I smile at my phone like an idiot for a second.
Then I look up and feel it. That shift in the air. The weight of collective attention, settling over the quad like weather.
Someone behind me says my name. Not to me. To whoever they are walking with.
Then someone else says Noah's.
The two names together, in someone else's mouth, in a tone I cannot quite read from this distance. Not cruel. Not kind. Just knowing. Like we have become a fact about the campus that people are still deciding what to do with.
I breathe in slowly.
I breathe out.
I keep walking.
This is the part no one sees when they talk about visibility. They see the outfit. They see the confidence. They see the person who does not apologize for taking up space. What they do not see is the particular kind of effort it takes to keep your face calm when your name is currency in someone else's conversation. What they do not see is the way you have to consciously choose, every single morning, to exist out loud.
I choose it.
Again.
The same as every day before this one, and probably every day after.
By the time I reach the steps of the arts building the stares have not stopped, but they feel a little less sharp. Like I have walked through the first wave of it and come out the other side mostly intact. My phone buzzes once more in my pocket. I do not check it.
I already know what it is not going to say.
Noah has not messaged me this morning.
I sit with that for a moment. Let it exist without spinning it into something bigger than it is. He is probably already at practice. Or in the locker room. Or walking through his own version of this morning, which I can only imagine from the outside, carrying things I cannot fully see.
I think about his face yesterday when he reached for my hand.
No hesitation. No checking who was watching.
Just contact. Just truth.
Whatever this morning brings, that was real. Whatever the campus decides to do with us, that was real. And I am going to walk into this building, sit down in my first class, answer questions and take notes and drink terrible coffee from the machine in the hallway, and I am going to do it exactly as I am.
Red skirt. Chin up.
Still here.