Before the Static

Prologue

The first Monday of September arrived with the town already pretending summer had never happened. Buses groaned along wet roads packed with pupils in fresh uniforms, younger children dragged bags that looked too large for their shoulders, and clusters of new Sixth Form students stopped beneath shop awnings to take photographs in clothes they had spent the previous night pretending not to care about. Across town, registration would be starting soon, followed by new timetables, unfamiliar classrooms and all the awkwardness of everyone suddenly being allowed to dress like themselves. Leo Drayton should have been among them, but he sat on the edge of his bed in yesterday's T-shirt and trackies with his elbows resting against his knees. His phone lay unlocked beside him, its brightness slowly dimming around a message he had refused to open properly.

The preview from the Sixth Form office was enough to tell him what it wanted.

Sixth Form office: This is a reminder that Sixth Form registration is this morning; please report to the Sixth Form office when you arrive. 

Leo had read the line often enough for the words to lose their meaning, yet he still could not swipe the notification away. Maisie should have been receiving the same reminder somewhere across town, probably complaining that everyone looked ridiculous without uniform after spending five years desperate to get rid of it. He could hear the version of her who would have found something sarcastic to say about Year 12 before they had even made it through the doors.

His phone vibrated again, and Mum appeared across the screen before he could lock it. "Are you dressed yet?" Leo rubbed both hands over his face and stared at the damp grey light collecting around the bedroom window. "I'm not going in today." On the other end of the call, the background noise disappeared beneath a silence that told him she had expected the answer and hoped not to hear it.

His mum did not fill the pause immediately, which somehow made it worse. "You don't have to make today easy, but staying in that room isn't going to stop today happening." Leo pressed his thumb hard against the corner of the phone until the case bit into his skin. "It starts without her either way." The sentence left a sour weight behind it because that was the part nobody seemed capable of understanding: everything had already started without Maisie.

Since Maisie died, people had learned to use her name differently. Teachers lowered their voices before saying it, parents tilted their heads with that strained expression adults used when they wanted to look devastated without asking anything difficult, and former classmates turned solemn whenever somebody mentioned her within earshot. The school had produced carefully approved language about student wellbeing, academic pressure and support being available, each phrase polished until there was nothing inside it sharp enough to blame anyone. Leo had heard adults discuss how terrible GCSE stress could become as though examinations explained an entire person. Every neat explanation made him remember something messy that did not fit.

The tribute posts had been worse. Black-and-white photographs of Maisie appeared beneath paragraphs from people who described her as beautiful, kind, hilarious, brilliant and deeply loved, even when Leo could barely remember those same people speaking to her during the final months of Year 11. Some wrote that they wished she had known how many people cared, while others reposted generic messages about checking on your friends and being kind because nobody knew what somebody else was carrying. Leo recognised names beneath those posts from common-room sofas, crowded corridors and groups that had gone quiet whenever Maisie walked too close. He had watched her shoulders draw inward around some of them long before anyone decided her photograph deserved a heart beneath it. He could not decide whether their grief made him angrier because it was false or because some of it probably was not.

He opened his conversation with Maisie even though he had promised himself the night before that he would stop doing that first thing in the morning. One message from months ago still read,