The Westbridge High cafeteria always smelled like stale bleach and cheap cheese pizza.
I usually sat there alone during the second-to-last lunch shift.
It gave me forty uninterrupted minutes to finish my charcoal sketches before third period.
The corner table was chipped and stained with years of permanent marker graffiti.
It was the only place in the entire room where nobody ever bothered to look at me.
I kept my sketchbook zipped inside my canvas backpack whenever I walked through the crowded main hallways.
Drawing people from a distance was just a quiet way for me to make sense of the loud, confusing social hierarchy around me.
Chloe sat two rows ahead of me in AP Literature and always wore clothes that smelled faintly of expensive vanilla perfume.
She was the kind of person who could clear an entire hallway just by rolling her eyes at someone's shoes.
Marcus sat at her table and spent most of lunch tossing balled-up napkins at the freshmen near the vending machines.
I never spoke to either of them because existing outside their radar felt like the safest way to survive junior year.
Mr. Harrison, our art teacher, had told me the week before that my shading technique was starting to look genuinely professional.
I spent three hours the previous night working on a detailed portrait of the sunlight falling across the old brick courtyard wall.
The graphite lines were crisp and careful, mapped out with a ruler and a newly sharpened HB pencil.
I opened the book on the laminate table and propped my apple against the salt shaker to keep the page flat.
The ambient noise of five hundred teenagers chewing, shouting, and laughing echoed off the concrete pillars.
I dipped my cotton blending stump into a smudge of charcoal dust near the bottom corner of the paper.
Footsteps stopped right beside my chair before I even had time to look up from the page.
Chloe set her strawberry yogurt cup down right on top of page forty-two without even asking.
"Is this the freak diary where you draw everyone crying?" she asked, her voice carrying easily over the noisy clatter of thirty surrounding plastic trays.
I felt my stomach drop straight down into my sneakers as a dozen heads turned in our direction.
I reached out my hand to pull the spiral-bound book back across the scuffed laminate table.
Before my fingertips could even brush the cardboard cover, Chloe flipped the entire book upside down and dumped the contents of her half-eaten yogurt directly into the middle spread.
A thick dollop of bright pink dairy slid right across my graphite portrait of the courtyard oak tree.
"Oops, my hand just slipped," she laughed, looking sideways at Marcus who was already pulling out his phone to record the mess.
The pink yogurt soaked instantly into the porous sketchbook paper, turning the delicate grey pencil marks into a muddy, unrecognizable smear.
The table went completely silent except for the dull hum of the old fluorescent lights overhead.
My face felt violently hot while everyone around us just stared without saying a word to help me clean it up.
Marcus leaned forward with his phone raised high enough to capture the dripping edges of the cardboard spine.
"Should we post this on the junior class story or keep it as modern art?" he asked, grinning broadly at the girls sitting across from him.
I couldn't find a single word to say because my throat felt completely blocked by dry panic.
