The week after breaking curfew, Jayden walked like a shadow through the halls.
Head down. Hands in his pockets.
He wasn't suspended anymore, but he felt like he was still being punished — by teachers' stares, by whispers, by the way the world always seemed to tilt against him.
The only thing that kept him from folding into himself completely was the folded paper in his back pocket.
Tasha's drawing.
He carried it everywhere, smoothed it out when it creased, kept it close like armor.
---
Art Room Afternoons
He started showing up to the art room more.
Sometimes Tasha was there, sometimes not, but just being in the space gave him a strange sense of quiet.
The smell of graphite, the scrape of pencils, the way light filtered through the dusty blinds — it felt like the one corner of the school that wasn't set against him.
When she was there, they didn't always talk.
She'd sketch, he'd sketch, and the silence between them felt easy. Like they didn't have to perform for each other.
One afternoon, she slid a piece of paper across the desk. On it was a heart — not perfect, not symmetrical, but shaded deep and dark.
"Paper heart," she said, smirking.
Jayden frowned. "Why?"
"Because it bends, it crumples, but it doesn't disappear."
He stared at it, confused and moved in ways he didn't want to admit.
Without thinking, he tore a scrap from his sketchbook, drew one back — his rough, jagged lines forming a crooked heart — and slid it to her.
It wasn't pretty, but she smiled like it was worth something.
---
The Group Home Walls
Back at the group home, Ms. Delaney noticed the shift.
"You've been drawing more," she said one evening during check-in.
Jayden shrugged. "Keeps me out of trouble."
She smiled. "Or keeps trouble out of you."
But the other boys noticed too. One of them, Terrence, snatched his sketchbook while Jayden was in the common room.
"What you hiding in here, Scrap?"
Jayden's heart lurched.
Before Terrence could flip a page, Jayden lunged, snatching it back. His voice came out sharp, angrier than he meant:
"Don't touch my stuff."
The room went quiet. Everyone stared.
Terrence raised his hands. "Damn, chill. Just playing."
But Jayden wasn't playing. His chest was tight, fists balled. He knew if he stayed another second, he'd swing. So he stormed upstairs, locking the door behind him.
He sat on the bed, breathing hard, staring at the sketchbook in his lap.
It wasn't just paper. It was his life — the one thing he had control over. The one place he could be honest.
And the thought of anyone else seeing it — especially the pages with Tasha's face — scared him more than anything.
---
Late-Night Confession
A few days later, he met Tasha again on the swings. The air was colder now, their breaths coming out in faint clouds.
She was quiet at first, kicking at the dirt. Then she asked, "Why do you guard your sketchbook like it's gold?"
He hesitated, staring at the ground. "'Cause it's all I got. Everything else—" He stopped, throat tight. "Everything else gets taken."
Tasha didn't say anything right away. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out her own notebook.
She flipped it open and held it out. Pages full of poems, messy handwriting curling across the lines.
"Now we're even," she said softly.
Jayden blinked. "You trust me like that?"
She smiled. "Yeah. Don't make me regret it."
He looked at her, really looked at her.
For once, he didn't feel like just another case file or problem kid.
He felt… seen.
And that scared him almost as much as it comforted him.
---
That night, lying in bed, he opened his sketchbook and turned to a blank page.
Instead of drawing, he wrote. Just one sentence, messy and crooked across the paper:
Maybe paper hearts don't tear so easy.
He didn't know what it meant yet. But for the first time in years, the words felt like they belonged to him.
---
Would you like me to keep Chapter 13 focused on Jayden and Tasha's fragile connection — maybe their first real argument, where his fear of abandonment makes him push her away — or shift back toward his daily struggles at the group home/school and how those keep threatening the fragile bond?