Fani gathered her long hair into the tight tether of a black elastic, ensuring no stray strands would fracture her field of vision later.
In the small, clouded mirror of her bedroom, she studied her reflection. Her skin possessed a scrubbed, translucent quality that threw the faint shadows beneath her eyes into sharp relief. She practiced a smile, coaxing the twin dimples at the corners of her mouth to appear.
Those dimples were a masterful deception; they led people to believe in a core of perennial cheerfulness, when in reality, they were merely anatomical accidents—indentations of flesh that had no kinship with her actual spirit.
Fani harbored a quiet loathing for tardiness. To be late was to invite the Gaze; and the Gaze always birthed a Thousand Questions. Arriving early was her ritual of armor-building—a time to claim her geography, regulate her breathing, and ensure her self-sufficiency was absolute.
Lecture Hall 3B was a hollow shell when she entered. The floor felt unnervingly cold, the air thick with the scent of chalk and institutional indifference. The desks stood in rigid, military rows, as if they held a preordained knowledge of exactly where a person belonged.
Fani navigated her wheelchair to the spot she knew by heart. It wasn't a choice born of comfort, but of calculated invisibility. It was the place where she was least likely to be caught in the crosshairs of someone else's attention. There, she anchored herself and waited.
She waited for the room to ignite with life. For the bodies to fill the voids. For the day to pass without leaving a scar. Most of her life was built upon the fragile scaffolding of that single hope.
As the tide of students began to pour in, Fani kept her chin tucked. She checked the zipper on her bag twice; she had no desire to spill her life onto the floor. She refused to give anyone a reason to look at her longer than the brief, mandatory second it took to register an obstacle.
The Gaze was inevitable. It came in distinct flavors: the clinical curiosity, the suffocating weight of pity, or the most common of all—the aggressive act of looking through her. She had become an expert in the nuances of being ignored. The latter was the most frequent; a collective, silent agreement to treat her presence as a glitch in the room's aesthetics.
She chose silence. Not for a lack of things to say, but because silence was the only sanctuary that didn't require an entrance fee.
The professor drifted in, and the lecture commenced. Fani took notes with a frantic, rhythmic precision. Her posture was never truly relaxed; she held herself with a constant, isometric tension, as if sitting on a ledge that might give way at any moment.
When the dismissal bell finally rang, Fani's exit strategy began. She settled her bag on her lap and scanned the path ahead for clear water. She despised asking for clearance. She refused to be a burden, even if the weight of that refusal was hers alone to carry.
The hallway outside sloped at a deceptive angle. It wasn't steep, yet it was enough to turn the simple act of movement into a precarious negotiation. Fani adjusted her grip and let herself glide, slow and deliberate.
She felt it again—the prickle of eyes on her back.
Students surged past her. Some slowed for a heartbeat before accelerating, as if her stillness were a contagion they could outrun. Others took wide, theatrical detours, creating a vacuum of space around her. Fani felt no anger. Anger was an expensive emotion, and she had learned long ago to practice a strict economy of the heart.
That afternoon, she navigated the corridor alone, as she always did. And as always, the world continued its frantic spin, untroubled by her transit.
At the rear parking lot, she came to a halt. She sent a brief, utilitarian text to her brother, who was—predictably—late. His reply arrived with the same hollow promptness as the day before, and the day before that.
Fani waited.
The act of waiting wasn't the burden. The burden was the exhausting performance of pretending she wasn't waiting for something more.
She opened the book on her lap—an old copy of Layar Terkembang—but the prose was mere static. Her ears were tuned to the symphony of the world around her: the rhythmic slap of sneakers on pavement, the bright jagged bursts of laughter, the throaty growl of engines igniting.
Two students sauntered past, their voices trailing like smoke.
"Doesn't she get tired of it?"
"Who knows. Maybe she's still waiting for her self-esteem to find its way back."
Fani stared at the page. Her finger traced a line of text she couldn't internalize. She pretended the words reached her. She was a virtuoso of pretense. Yet, something tightened in her chest—a long-drawn elastic band reaching its breaking point. She drew a thin, shallow breath.
The sky bruised into a deep, sunset orange.
Fani looked up for a moment. She allowed herself the brief, dangerous luxury of imagining someone sitting beside her. Not to interrogate her, nor to offer the heavy shroud of sympathy. Just to exist in the same pocket of air. Then, the image evaporated. She offered herself a small, bitter smile. High hopes were merely long falls in disguise.
The following morning, Hall 3B reclaimed its usual chaos. Fani returned to her station at the front-left corner. Her brother had deposited her there with a hurried, distracted air before vanishing back into his own life.
She began to organize her things, braced for the monotony of the familiar. She was wrong.
Her bag slipped as she reached for a notebook. It didn't make a loud sound, but in the brittle atmosphere of the classroom, it sounded like a gavel. Pens and papers scattered across the tiles like white leaves. Fani leaned forward, her fingers straining toward the debris.
A pair of shoes stopped inches from her hand.
"Oops. My bad."
The tone was light, airy, and sharp as a razor. As the student pushed past, his hip clipped the frame of her wheelchair, sending a jarring vibration through her spine. A ripple of low, jagged laughter followed in his wake.
Fani froze. Her hand remained suspended in the air for a second before dropping back to her lap. She waited. She knew the script: eventually, the laughter would burn out, and she would be allowed to disappear back into the background.
Then, someone knelt in front of her. Fani looked up.
The girl from the very back row was there. For the first time in as long as she could remember, Fani felt the weight of a gaze that was actually seeing her. The girl's face was a mask of unnerving calm.
She retrieved a copy of Literature and Social Trauma from the floor and held it out. A silent offering.
Fani took the book, her fingers betraying a slight, involuntary tremor.
"Some people never quite learn the mechanics of being human." The voice wasn't raised, yet it seemed to occupy all the empty spaces in the room.
Fani found herself momentarily hollowed out, unsure of how to occupy this new reality. She simply watched the girl, trying to etch the geometry of her face into her memory. For the first time, someone wasn't talking about her; they were standing with her.
The lecture resumed. The world reset its gears. But the air in Fani's lungs felt different.
She stole a glance toward the back. The girl had already retreated into her book, as if she hadn't just shattered the room's unspoken laws. It wasn't a grand, cinematic shift. It was something smaller, more intimate.
A faint warmth began to stir in the cold spaces of her chest—the sensation of a window being unlatched in a room that had been sealed for years.