I don't really know how long I was out. One moment I was walking out behind the school, and the next I was surrounded. They didn't say anything, they never do. Just fists and kicks... I felt my nose crack, blood ran down my face, warm and thick, and my vision kept fading in and out and everything after that was a blur.
I opened my eyes on the pavement with blood all over my shirt and my nose throbbing like it had exploded. It probably had.
When I came to my senses, the sky was already turning orange and purple, the kind of colors you only see right before the sun disappears.
Everything hurt. My head, my ribs, my face, especially my nose. I didn't even bother checking how bad I looked. I just got up and started walking home. I wasn't crying or angry or anything. I just felt… empty.
What's the point of all this anyway? How long am I supposed to keep enduring this silence, this weight, this invisible storm?
But then suddenly something happened. Something I still don't know how to explain. I was climbing the hill near my street, the same one I'd passed a hundred times before, when I felt the air shift. Like the wind paused for a second and everything got silenced, as if the earth had taken a breath and held it. I paused. Not because I was tired, but because I felt something.
The tiniest spark, like the flicker of a candle in the cold. I looked up and there it was. A thread of light pierced the darkening sky, unraveling the twilight into a day. A glimmer of hope, fallen from the heavens.