Chapter 1: Before the Boys Existed
There is a particular kind of loneliness that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with drama or ceremony. It is simply always there - a low, constant hum beneath everything, like the sound a building makes that you only notice when it stops. She had never known silence. She had never known the hum to stop. By the time she was old enough to name it, lonely had become so woven into the fabric of her that she couldn’t tell where she ended and it began.
She went to an all-girls Catholic school, which people seemed to think meant safety. Order. A kind of quiet holiness. What it actually meant was a different kind of cruelty - the specific, suffocating kind that girls are capable of when there is no one watching and nowhere to go. There was nowhere to go. That was the thing no one ever understood. She was trapped inside pristine white walls and pressed uniforms and the smell of incense, and every single day felt like drowning slowly in shallow water.
She found the bathroom early on.
Not the bathrooms by the classrooms - those were too exposed, too easy to be walked in on, too close to everything she was trying to escape. The one at the end of the corridor. The stall third from the left. She learned which lock held properly. She learned what time the cleaner came through. She made a small, private science of invisibility.
During break, she went there. During free periods, she went there. She would sit on the closed lid of the toilet with her knees pulled up, the too-bright fluorescent light humming overhead, and she would eat whatever she had brought - if she had brought anything at all - or she would drink an energy drink and feel the sweetness of it turn chemical on her tongue, and she would wait for time to pass. Sometimes she cried. Not dramatically. Just the quiet leaking kind, the kind that happens when a body has been holding too much for too long and it simply has to go somewhere. She let it go in the third stall from the left. She wiped her face. She waited.
In her head she went elsewhere.
She was good at this - constructing lives that were not hers, futures that felt like fiction but were the only place anything made sense. A bedroom with a window that let in light. A table with food on it and someone who meant it when they asked how she was. Somewhere that felt like being wanted rather than merely tolerated. She built these places carefully, the way other girls collected things - trading cards, lip glosses, the small currencies of belonging she had no access to. She collected imagined versions of herself. A girl who was not invisible. A girl whose presence was not an inconvenience to the people responsible for her.
Outside the stall, she could hear the school going on without her. Laughter in waves. The particular pitch of girls who have found each other, who move in clusters and speak in a language of shared references she had never been given a dictionary for. She didn’t hate them for it. Hate requires a kind of energy she had already spent. She just listened, and felt the distance between herself and all of it as a physical thing - dense and solid, like pressing a hand flat against cold glass.
She wasn’t used to it. That is the important thing to understand, and the thing that people always seemed to get wrong. They looked at her and saw someone who had adapted. Someone who had learned to be alone and therefore was fine with being alone. She was not fine. She had simply learned to keep going regardless of not being fine, which is an entirely different thing. Every day hurt. Not less as time went on - just differently. The pain changed shape the way water changes shape: it filled whatever container it found itself in, and the container kept getting larger, and she kept filling it.
She wanted the suffering to end.
Not in the way that gets said carefully, with resources and hotlines. She wanted it the way a person trapped in a burning room wants the door to open - just that, just the door, just the simple release of being somewhere that was not this. She wanted a life that felt like it had been made for her. She couldn’t picture what that looked like exactly. But she could feel the shape of its absence every single morning when she woke up in the life she had been given instead.
She was soft, back then. Underneath everything - underneath the learned silence and the bathroom stall and the energy drinks and the years of being told in a thousand different ways that she was too much or not enough - there was something in her that remained, stubbornly, tender. She felt everything. She felt it the way some people hear music: not just as sound but as something that entered the body and moved through it. A kind thought from a stranger could undo her. A kind word, offered genuinely, would sit with her for weeks, turned over and over like something she was afraid to believe was real.
She was eight years old when she found the internet.
She was looking for the door.
