The hallway air in Northwood Middle School hummed with the low-grade anxiety of a beehive about to swarm. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sickly, jaundiced glow that made everyone look slightly unwell. For Audrey, the sound wasn't just ambient noise. It was the soundtrack to her unraveling. Each hum seemed to vibrate deep within her skull, mirroring the whispers that clung to her like spiderwebs spun from malicious intent.
"Did you hear? She cut herself again."
"She lies about everything. About that camp. About... everything."
The voices weren't always loud, not always directed at her face. Mostly, they drifted from knots of students gathered by lockers, carried on the stale air circulating through the vents. But Audrey heard them. Every word felt like a tiny, insidious prick, confirming the new, terrifying reality Mia was building around her, brick by invisible brick.
It had started subtly after they returned from the failed camp placement. Mia, her adopted sister, had spun a narrative of Audrey's fragile mental state, twisting her resistance into evidence of delusion. Now, back in the sterile normality of school, Mia was cementing that narrative, twisting Audrey's trauma into convenient lies.
Mia's whispers, delivered with the sweetness of poisoned candy, slithered through the faculty lounge and into the ears of Audrey's peers. "Audrey fantasizes about that camp," Mia would say in soft, concerned murmurs, perfect for an audience of weary teachers. "She says they tortured her there—but you saw it, right? The brochures? It's nice. Therapeutic. It's sad, really, how she hallucinates things."
To the students, Mia would deliver the whispers with a breathy, conspiratorial air: "She hallucinates. Once, she swore her imaginary friend Lena was real. Right in front of me. Poor thing."
The effect was immediate and devastating. Classmates who had once smiled at her now edged away as she approached, carrying their lunch trays like shields. Conversations would die mid-sentence. Faces turned blank when she entered a room. The silence was louder than any shouting. A folded piece of paper landed softly on her desk in History class. Audrey unfolded it to find a single word scrawled in messy handwriting: "Freak." Her stomach twisted, but she kept her face blank, folded the paper carefully, and tucked it into her pocket. She would not give them the satisfaction of seeing her break.
The school counselor, a woman with kind eyes and an air of perpetual exhaustion, offered only sympathetic nods—but always to Mia. When Audrey tried to explain the truth about the camp, the counselor's eyes would glaze slightly, her pity settling in like fog. "Audrey, I understand you've been through a difficult time," she would say softly. "But sometimes our minds play tricks on us when we're under stress. Your sister is very concerned about you."
It was like speaking to a wall made of professional doubt and Mia's carefully crafted lies.
Audrey's world narrowed. It compressed into sharp sensory details: the click of Mia's pen tapping on a notebook, the shift of eyes when she entered a room, the suffocating weight of unspoken judgment. Paranoia wasn't just a feeling. It was the air she breathed.
In this suffocating environment, Mrs. Hayes's English classroom felt like an oasis. It smelled of old books and coffee, a scent that grounded Audrey in a way the antiseptic fear of the nurse's office or the cold, silent air of home never could. Sunlight streamed through the large window, catching motes of dust dancing in the air, a stark contrast to the shadowed corners of Audrey's mind.
Mrs. Hayes was different. She watched. Not with pity, not with judgment, but with a quiet intensity, like a lighthouse keeper scanning a turbulent sea. She didn't just see Audrey—she noticed her.
The signs were there, etched into Audrey's schoolwork. Her essays, once neat and structured, had grown frantic. Ink blotted like spilled tears on the page. Assignments meant to discuss literary themes became thinly veiled allegories of her own life. One essay began, "The camp had windows, but they showed only sky. Here, the walls breathe, their silence louder than chains." Mrs. Hayes wrote only two words at the bottom: "See me."
She noticed other things too. How Audrey flinched violently when the bell rang. How her hands trembled, especially in the mornings. How she ate as if the food might vanish. How her eyes constantly scanned the classroom, not for threats, but as if searching for something she'd lost.
Mrs. Hayes never asked direct questions about the camp. Instead, she handed Audrey literature. During a lesson on unreliable narrators, she deliberately dropped a worn copy of The Yellow Wallpaper onto Audrey's desk. Their eyes met briefly. In Mrs. Hayes's gaze, Audrey didn't see pity. She saw understanding. Audrey pocketed the book, the weight of it comforting.
At home, the Joneses continued their performance of care. On the kitchen counter sat orange bottles labeled "Mood Stabilizers," prescribed after Audrey's return, supposedly to help her "adjust." Audrey knew they were placebos—vitamins disguised as medicine. Mia watched her take them each morning and night, a satisfied smirk always on her lips.
But Mia was never content with simple manipulation. One evening, while Audrey was in the bathroom, Mia unscrewed the lid of the nighttime bottle and, from a small plastic bag, slipped in crushed caffeine pills, ground to resemble the vitamins. A slow, quiet sabotage.
That night, Audrey swallowed the pill as usual and lay in bed, expecting the placebo's usual hollow comfort. Instead, her heart began to race. Her nerves sparked like live wires. The shadows on the walls twisted into grotesque shapes, Mia's smile blooming within them. Sleep was impossible. Her thoughts tangled and tumbled, paranoia spiraling. Was that a noise downstairs? Was Mia watching her through the crack under the door?
The next day blurred. The fluorescent lights seemed harsher, the buzzing louder. The whispers felt closer. Audrey's hands shook as she tried to eat lunch, but her stomach turned. The vanilla scent of Mrs. Hayes's lotion as she graded papers grounded her briefly, but the calm was fleeting.
The next night, the caffeine hit harder. Her heart thundered. Sweat slicked her palms. Her tongue felt thick and metallic from where she had bitten it to stay tethered to reality. Mia's giggles echoed faintly from downstairs, or perhaps from Audrey's own frayed mind. Sleep never came.
Seventy-two hours without true rest. The world warped. The buzzing of the lights drowned everything. Her legs felt heavy. Her footsteps faltered.
And then the floor tilted.
The locker-lined corridor spun. The lights blurred. The buzzing vanished into silence. Audrey's knees buckled, her vision narrowed, and she collapsed.
A tangle of footsteps rushed toward her. Mia's voice, soft and dripping with false concern, pierced the fog. "Audrey! Oh darling, are you alright?" Mia knelt beside her, already spinning the story. "See? I told the nurse. She forgets to take her meds. It's her mental health. She needs to be more careful."
Mia's sweet, practiced performance played perfectly to the small gathering crowd.
Even in the haze, Audrey refused to break. Something inside her held fast. As they led her to the nurse's office, she scrubbed her face with cold water, grounding herself in the sharp shock. She repeated the camp's address like a prayer. 142 Willow Creek Road. 142 Willow Creek Road.
Under her sleeve, she wrote on her wrist: "3 meals. A bed. No belts." Simple, undeniable truths. Facts Mia couldn't twist.
As Mia fluttered around the nurse's office, offering syrupy platitudes about Audrey's "irresponsibility," Mrs. Hayes appeared in the doorway. She didn't speak. She simply watched. When Mia was distracted, Mrs. Hayes walked past Audrey's cot and, with a small, subtle movement, dropped a folded piece of paper into Audrey's bag.
Later, alone, Audrey retrieved it. Mrs. Hayes's handwriting was neat and steady.
"My classroom. 3 PM. Alone."
A shiver ran down Audrey's spine. Not of fear. Of something else. Something that felt like hope.
As Audrey's body had hit the linoleum, her last thought had not been panic.
It had been the camp's dining hall. The smell of butter on fresh bread.
A reminder that not all hunger was punishment.