Chapter 53: The Shape of a Rumor
The first time I heard it, it came like a whisper carried between lockers.
I wasn't even meant to hear it — not really.
"She gave her a love letter, I swear. My cousin saw it with her own eyes."
"That Oriana girl? She's always been weird."
"Not weird. Just… intense. It's probably just a phase."
Laughter. A pause. The sound of footsteps walking away.
I stood frozen in front of my locker, books clutched to my chest, heart suddenly louder than the morning bell.
They didn't say my name.
But they didn't have to.
The halls that morning felt longer than usual, stretched thin like paper in the rain. I passed classmates who looked a little too quickly away. Some smiled. Some didn't. But all of them knew something.
By third period, even the teacher's glances had changed — soft, careful, like they were trying to see without staring.
Oriana met me by the library staircase.
She didn't need to ask.
"I heard it too," she said quietly.
We walked to the old courtyard where no one ever went — where fallen leaves made soft brown carpets and the birds were louder than people.
She took my hand.
"Are you okay?"
I nodded. "You?"
Her grip tightened slightly. "I knew it might happen. I just thought… we'd have more time."
It started small. A look. A pause in conversation. A scribble on the edge of a desk.
Then came the questions.
From girls who never used to speak to me. From boys who laughed too loudly behind their hands. From a teacher who asked me to stay after class, not to scold, but to suggest "discretion."
The word left a taste in my mouth like spoiled fruit.
Discretion.
As if love needed to apologize.
As if kindness between two girls was something dangerous unless it was invisible.
After school, I went home in silence.
My mother watched me over dinner but said nothing.
I wanted to tell her.
I wanted to say, They've started talking. They're trying to turn something beautiful into something twisted. They're trying to make her small and me ashamed.
But instead, I just said: "It was a long day."
She reached over and touched my hand.
"I'm here," she said.
And somehow, that was enough.
The next day, Oriana wasn't in her first class.
Nor her second.
Panic twisted in me slowly, like a vine.
By lunch, I found her on the rooftop garden behind the old science wing — the one students weren't supposed to go to, but always found anyway.
She sat with her knees pulled to her chest, ribbon still tied in her hair.
"I just needed a little quiet," she said, looking up as I approached.
"I was worried."
"I know."
I sat beside her, and for a while, we watched a bee move lazily from flower to flower.
"They're saying I corrupted you," she said.
I looked at her sharply. "What?"
"I heard it in the hallway. Someone said you were normal before I came into your life."
The words felt like knives. Not sharp. Just cold.
Oriana's eyes didn't water. But something in them dimmed slightly.
"I didn't want this to hurt you," she said.
"You didn't hurt me," I whispered. "They did."
She looked at me. "Maybe it would be easier if we just… stepped back. Just until it quiets down."
"Is that what you want?"
"No."
"Then I won't."
The days passed.
The whispers didn't.
They grew quieter, but only because they'd settled like dust — not gone, just always there.
But something else grew too.
A kind of quiet bravery.
A few students started sitting closer to us again. A girl in the art club gave us both matching stickers with stars on them. A boy who used to tease Oriana handed her a book and said, "You might like this one."
Small things.
Unasked for.
But not unnoticed.
One morning, we came to school wearing our ribbons again.
Green for me.
White for her.
And someone in the corridor whispered, not cruelly, but curiously: "They still haven't let go?"
No.
We hadn't.
And we wouldn't.
That afternoon, we sat under the rain tree near the edge of the campus, the same one where we'd once read poems before we dared call it love.
"I keep thinking," Oriana said, tracing patterns into the dirt with a twig, "about all the girls who came before us. Who loved quietly. Who never got to say it out loud."
She looked at me.
"We're not them," she said.
"But we carry them," I answered.
She smiled faintly. "Then maybe that's why it hurts — not just for us. But for them."
We sat in the silence that followed, holding hands like roots.
Deep. Twined. Growing still.
Then came something unexpected.
A note.
Left inside my locker, folded into a paper crane.
I almost threw it away without opening it, afraid it would be more cruelty wrapped in origami.
But I opened it anyway.
It said:
You're not alone.
Some of us are just quieter. But we see you.
Thank you for not folding.
No name.
No clue.
But it filled me with something warm and fierce.
I showed it to Oriana during study period.
Her eyes welled with quiet, glassy tears.
Then she whispered: "Maybe we're starting something."
And so we wrote back.
Not in words.
But in being.
In walking down the halls with ribbon still in our hair. In leaving poems tucked into library books. In planting a cutting of lavender in the courtyard and writing no explanation. In kindness. In holding hands when it felt brave.
And slowly, the world began to shift.
Not completely.
But enough.
One week later, Oriana received a letter from her mother.
It wasn't long.
It wasn't angry.
It simply said:
I've heard things.
I'm not sure how I feel yet.
But I hope you are still the girl who writes poems in the margins of her notebooks.
And if you are, then maybe I can learn how to listen again.
Oriana read it in my room, sitting cross-legged on my bed.
When she finished, she folded it and held it to her chest.
"She didn't say my name," she whispered.
"But she didn't say stop."
That night, as the sky turned blue with stars, I held Oriana's hand outside the school gates.
No one was watching.
But even if they were, we would've held on anyway.
Because the rumor had tried to shrink us.
But we had turned it into something else.
Something with roots.
Something with bloom.
And when she looked at me under the lantern light still left from the festival, she smiled like the story was just beginning again.