Chapter 1
I walked along the sidewalk, slowly, unhurriedly. My backpack felt heavier than usual, but there were always worse days. Soon I would be in front of the school, and though I didn’t feel the slightest bit of enthusiasm, I walked out of sheer inertia. I knew what awaited me there, just as I knew what awaited me upon leaving: a house that was once a rose garden but was now a thicket of thorns, where my mother was never there and my aunt greeted me with her habitual harshness. With that outlook, my “snail’s pace” was only a desperate attempt to delay the encounter with yet another undesirable place.
Upon reaching the classroom, a chill ran down my spine. My usual seat was occupied by a silhouette of billowing smoke. It wasn’t a clear person, but a dense, grayish blur floating over my chair. What could I do? I had no voice to complain. I looked down and searched for the last seat in the row, praying no one would notice me, feeling the gazes of others piercing me like needles.
As I sat down, I noticed the boy next to me glancing at my papers. When I looked at him directly, he apologized with a quick gesture and turned his gaze back to the front. He was easy to identify: he always wore a green scarf, vibrant and lush, which stood out even in the suffocating summer heat.
The bell rang, and for two hours, the world was reduced to numbers. I focused on math. I knew the teacher was going through a family tragedy, and strangely, his pain made me feel more connected to his class. Perhaps because I, too, was carrying things that didn’t belong to me.
When class ended, the “smoke” group materialized in front of my desk. I froze as they dropped several crumpled papers onto my table. They weren’t simple notes; they were their guilt, their lies, their waste. They smiled with a tranquility that stole my breath and walked away. I tucked those papers into my backpack, feeling the weight sink into my shoulders, and decided it was time to run away.
Before I could cross the door, the boy with the scarf—my “leafy green peer”—stopped me. “Running away won’t be enough,” he told me with a calmness that irritated me. I ignored him, but his phrase became lodged in my head, repeating on a loop over the following months.
Time passed. My life became a cycle of listening, hiding, and enduring. The “lush boy” became my only anchor; we talked more often, and his presence made me dream of a green forest where the air was clean. But at school, the smoke grew thicker. My classmates went too far, depositing increasingly disgusting secrets into my backpack. I was the only one who remembered what they preferred to forget. I was the dumping ground for their consciences.
“Does this make me disgusting too?” I asked myself sometimes. “Am I just a piece of ash?”
Today, the back pain was unbearable. When I arrived, I saw the boy with the scarf holding a... new backpack? “Why does he need two?” I wondered. He approached and, with an enigmatic smile, said: “I think from today on, you’ll be able to go wherever you want.”
We entered the classroom. When the smoke group tried to approach me to hand over my daily burden, something inside me snapped. I was revolted. I had spent so much time surrounded by green in my conversations with that boy that I could no longer tolerate the toxicity of the gray. My mind screamed a single phrase:
—I don’t want to be anyone’s chimney anymore!
I tried to rip the backpack off my shoulders to throw it at them, to cry for help, to run toward the forest. In my desperation, the straps gave way and the backpack slipped down my arms with a savage bluntness, burning my skin.
The impact didn’t sound like fabric hitting the floor. It sounded like a cataclysm.
We were all left stunned. Where the backpack fell, the classroom floor disappeared. A deep, black hole had opened up, seeming to reach the very center of the earth, swallowing months of secrets, ashes, and crumpled papers.
I looked at the void, then at my “smoke” classmates, who now seemed smaller and more faded. I moved my shoulders and felt a lightness that made me float. There was no more burden. No more debts belonging to others.
Without a word, I walked out of the classroom. The boy in green looked at me from the doorway, nodding. For the first time in a long while, I wasn’t afraid to go home. I had a lot of things to talk about with my mom.
