The Oaktown High cafeteria was a wall of noise. Shouts, laughter, the slam of a tray, the screech of a chair—it was the sound of a thousand lives all clanging against each other.
And at a table in the back corner, Bruce sat, a dead spot in the room.
He'd long since learned how to be invisible. He was tall, but he slouched, folding himself into a smaller shape. He was quiet, but it wasn't shyness. It was an absolute, dense stillness. He was a footnote in his own high school.
Kids called him "Ghost" or "Freak." He was the weird kid raised by the town's resident "witch," Anah, in the old, rickety house out on the edge of the woods. He was the kid whose mother had died in that "weird storm" the day he was born. He was different, and in the brutal, simple ecosystem of high school, "different" meant "target" or "nothing." He preferred "nothing."
Inside him, as always, was the hum.
It was the secret, defining fact of his life. A low, constant, high-voltage vibration that lived deep in his bones. It felt like a wire was strung tight from his skull to his heels, thrumming with an energy that wasn't his. It was a constant, itchy, internal static that fogged his thoughts and made him feel like a visitor in his own skin.
His sketchbook was open. He wasn't drawing people. He was drawing the hum. He sketched intricate, swirling knots, dark and coiled, without realizing he was perfectly recreating the mark on his own shoulder. He drew shadows, trying to capture the way the light seemed to bend around people, as if it were a physical, liquid thing.
He was sketching the world as he felt it, not as he saw it.