The school day passed in a blur of whispered noise. Not from the classrooms or the hallways, but from the endless, unstoppable broadcast inside Mani's own skull. It was a prison of other people's thoughts.
In math class, as Mrs. Kamran droned on about fractions, Mani gripped the sides of his desk, his knuckles white. He wasn't trying to solve the problems on the board. He was trying to solve the problem in his head.
'...if I don't get a B on this test, Dad's gonna kill me...'
'...wonder if Sarah likes me back...'
'...so hungry, why is lunch still two hours away...'
'...boring, boring, so boring, I wish I was outside...'
The thoughts weren't loud, but they were constant, a low-grade static of worry, desire, and boredom. They lapped at the edges of his own mind, making it hard to think, to concentrate. He felt like a cup being filled with a hundred different liquids, all of them spilling over.
He looked at the back of Mark's head three rows up. There was nothing. No smug internal monologue, no plotting. Just a solid, silent wall. Mani felt a bizarre flicker of gratitude. After the incident this morning, Mark had given him a wide berth, his confusion and fear creating a kind of mental buffer zone. It was the only peace Mani had felt all day.
The lunchroom was the worst. It was a tidal wave.
He sat alone at the end of a long table, picking at his food, his head bowed. He didn't need to look up to see the groups of laughing kids. He could hear the hidden currents beneath the surface.
At the popular kids' table, a girl's bright, tinkling laugh was undercut by a sharp, jealous thought: 'She totally bought that shirt after I told her I wanted it. I can't believe her.'
A boy joking with his friends was simultaneously thinking, 'Please don't ask me about my parents. Please don't ask. I can't talk about it.'
A lunch monitor, smiling blandly as she walked past, was mentally counting down the minutes until her shift ended: '...one hour and fourteen minutes. One hour and thirteen minutes...'
It was overwhelming. The sheer weight of so many secret lives pressing in on him made it hard to breathe. He felt like he was drowning in a sea of other people's consciousness. He put his hands over his ears, a useless, childish gesture. The voices didn't care. They were not in his ears; they were in his soul.
This wasn't a superpower. It was a curse. Bali had called his heart a "quiet tune," but how could he ever hear his own tune again with this deafening choir singing everyone else's songs inside his head?
He fled the lunchroom, escaping to the relative quiet of the library. He slipped into a secluded corner between the dusty history stacks, sinking to the floor and pulling his knees to his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to force the voices out, to build a wall in his mind.
'Go away,' he thought, pouring all his will into it. 'Just go away. Be quiet. Please, be quiet.'
For a moment, nothing happened. The murmuring continued—a distant, generalized anxiety from a student at a study carrel, the focused concentration of the librarian re-shelving books.
Then, something shifted.
It was like tuning an old radio. He wasn't shutting it off, but he found a dial. He focused on the hum of the fluorescent lights above him. He focused on the feel of the rough carpet beneath his fingers. He focused on the musty smell of old paper. He focused on his own breathing, in and out, in and out.Slowly, so slowly he almost didn't notice, the external voices began to fade. They didn't vanish, but they receded, becoming a soft, distant murmur, like the sound of traffic from a far-off highway. The crushing pressure in his skull began to ease.He had done it. He had found a volume knob.A wave of exhaustion so profound it felt physical washed over him. He leaned his head back against a shelf of books about the Civil War, his body limp. The effort of blocking out the world had drained him completely.He sat there in the quiet he had fought for, the only sound the faint, rhythmic thump of his own heart. For the first time since Bali had touched him, he felt a sliver of control. The power was a wild animal, but maybe, just maybe, he could learn to put it on a leash.But the relief was short-lived. A new, chilling thought occurred to him. If he could hear the quiet, everyday worries of everyone around him… what else was out there? What darker, more dangerous thoughts were waiting to be heard? The library was safe. The world outside was not.He wasn't just cursed with hearing the voices. He was cursed with the knowledge that he would never truly be alone with his own thoughts again. And he was terrified of what he might hear next.