Every day, there was a new Sharpie mark on Lily’s locker.
"Loser."
"Ugly."
"Try harder, freak."
And every day, she scrubbed them off with sanitizer wipes, head down, silent.
Maya, the queen bee of Jefferson High, made sure of that silence—mocking laughter in the halls, whispered taunts in class, and a smile that could cut glass.
But last week, something changed.
Lily found a note tucked inside her locker, written in neat cursive on old paper:
"They only have power if you believe them. Find the journal. 3rd floor storage room. Trust yourself."
She thought it was a prank.
Until she checked.
The 3rd floor storage room was supposed to be locked. But that day, it wasn’t. Inside, beneath a pile of dusty art supplies, she found an old composition notebook. Inside were pages written by a girl named Eliza. Doodles. Rants. And familiar pain.
Maya wasn't always queen.
Before her, Eliza ruled the school. Until she disappeared.
The last entry read: “They can silence me. But someone will hear me one day.”
Goosebumps prickled Lily’s arms. Eliza’s handwriting was shaky, desperate.
So today, when Lily saw “WASTE OF SPACE” scrawled across her locker, she didn’t reach for the wipes.
She reached for her own Sharpie.
Beneath Maya’s words, she wrote:
"Still here. And so was she."
Then she turned, walked right up to Maya’s table, and said—loudly—
“You’re not scary. Just loud. And I’m done pretending I don’t exist.”
The cafeteria went silent.
Maya paled.
Because that last line? It was Eliza’s. Word for word.
And Maya remembered exactly who Eliza was.
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