Friday crawled by like an animal that refused to be caught.
The hands of the clock moved, but for Lina, everything stood still. She heard the teachers talking, saw the chalk darting across the blackboard, but not a single word truly reached her.
Only one line from Giulia's deleted message hammered in her head, over and over, like an echo:
"Tonight. Same hall."
Giulia was just like always.
She grinned, joked, drew little monsters that hopped across the margins of her notebook with pencil and color.
She giggled at Jonas's quips, rolled her eyes at Ms. Haller's assignments, and no one—absolutely no one—would have thought anything was different.
Only Lina saw it.
The tiny twitch in Giulia's mouth when her phone vibrated.
The restless tapping of her foot under the table.
The brief, much too quick looking away whenever someone mentioned the word "fights."
Lina laughed at the right places, nodded, talked.
But inside, she was a knot of fear.
