Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 32

Well grief doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up, dressed as silence and sudden breathlessness. It crawls into the seams of your day and presses its weight into you when no one’s looking. And somehow, you keep walking.

I was heading toward Room 109 when a voice stopped me.

“Hey....” I turned.

It was a boy I didn’t recognize. Wiry frame, glasses slipping down his nose, his voice quiet like he was afraid of interrupting something. His eyes searched mine for a flicker of recognition, but there was none. I didn’t know him.

“You’re… James’s girlfriend, right?”

The word hung there... girlfriend... still warm with memory, yet already beginning to fade at the edges. I didn’t answer. I just stood there, spine tight, waiting.

“I just wanted to say that… he’s a good person.”

That made me flinch. Not outwardly. Just in that way where your soul blinks. He looked down, fingers tightening around the straps of his backpack like he needed to hold onto something.

“I was bullied in 7th grade. Really bad. Some of our classmates used to take my lunch money, shove me toward the toilets, even locked me inside the janitor’s supply drawers once. It was stupid. And cruel. And no one cared.”

His voice shook, but only a little... like he’d told this story too many times in his head to be undone by it now.

“But James…” He let out a breath. “He defended me. One day he caught them shoving me into a trash bin behind the gym. And he… he hit them. Beat them black and blue. Took all of them on. No one expected that.”

My throat went dry. I could hear my pulse in my ears.

“He got suspended,” he continued. “Everyone thought it was just some angry outburst. They never asked what led to it. And even when I tried to explain, no one really listened. Or believed me.”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, eyes suddenly bright with something fragile.

“I just thought you might want to know.”

And then, just like that, he turned and walked away. No request for thanks. No need for validation. Just truth, offered gently, like a candle in the dark.

I stood there, surrounded by fluorescent lights and plastic bulletin boards, and felt something ruptured inside me, softly, like paper tearing. The kind of tear that doesn’t make a sound but leaves you changed.

James. The boy they warned me about. The boy they told me to run away from. And yet over and over, I kept finding him in stories like this, quiet, hidden stories that never made it into the version people liked to tell.

Is it because goodness isn’t loud? Is it the bruise you earn by standing up for someone? The silence you keep to protect them? The stories you never force anyone to believe?

Maybe...

Isn't love, too, is that way? Not in the things shouted, but in the things quietly endured?

I blinked, my fingers curling tighter around my books. And for the first time in a long while, I felt the weight of everything I didn’t know pressing down on me... not to break me, but to ask:

What else have I misunderstood?

The stories came slowly, like morning light slipping beneath a curtain. One by one. Uninvited, unannounced. And yet they arrived like quiet answers to questions I hadn’t known how to ask.

“He gave me lunch one day when he heard that I forgot my allowance,” said a girl whose name I didn’t know. She said it shyly, like it didn’t matter. But it did.