Leaving meant proving them right.
I found an empty chair near the far wall, half-hidden behind a column draped in silver fabric.
I sank into it and pressed my hands hard against my knees so they would stop shaking.
Don’t cry, I told myself. Don’t you dare cry here.
But the tears were already pushing forward, hot and humiliating.
I tilted my head back to keep them from spilling onto my cheeks.
Across the room, Chloe was laughing again.
Don’t you dare cry here.
A boy I had known since middle school glanced at me and looked away, like I was something contagious.
I twisted the fabric of the skirt between my fingers, a nervous habit I had since I was little.
Grandma Evelyn used to gently pull my hands away.
“You’ll ruin the seams, sweet girl,” she would say.
The thought of her, sitting at home in her chair, waiting to hear how my night went, made my chest ache so badly I almost stood up and walked out right then.
Then my fingers caught on something strange.
I twisted the fabric.
I froze.
Near the hem, beneath the soft inner lining, there was a small, stiff lump.
Not a fold.
Not a wrinkle.
Something deliberate.
Something hidden.
I glanced up.
Something hidden.
Chloe was busy holding court at the center of the floor, posing for someone’s camera.
No one was looking at me anymore.
The bullies had moved on, satisfied.
I pressed my fingers against the lump again.
It was rectangular.
Paper, maybe. Folded paper.
The bullies had moved on.
“Grandma,” I whispered, almost without meaning to. “What did you do?”
I turned the hem inward and ran my thumb along the fabric.
There! A seam that did not match the others.
Tighter, almost invisible, sewn with a slightly different thread.
She had hidden it well, but she had wanted me to find it.
