I stared so hard my eyes started burning.
We didn’t even have a good phone.
My mother’s screen was cracked across one corner and the battery swelled hot if she used maps too long.
But strangers are fast.
They can build a whole wrong life out of one blurry picture and a sentence they like the sound of.
Noah had wandered over by then.
“Is that my stars?” he asked.
I locked the screen too late.
He saw my face before the dark.
“What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said.
Which is one of the first lies kids learn from adults.
He looked from me to Mrs. Holloway.
“Why do y’all look like the heater broke again?”
That almost made Mrs. Holloway cry.
My mother came out of the bathroom toweling off her hair.
She saw Mrs. Holloway, then me, then the phone in my hand.
It took maybe two seconds.
Maybe less.
She didn’t ask for context.
She just whispered, “No.”
It was the kind of no that comes from somewhere old.
Not a decision.
A reflex.
A scar.
She grabbed the phone from me and read until her face went blank in that dangerous way tired people have when they are trying not to break in front of children.
Then she sat down at the table.
Not hard, like she had the morning she first saw the lamp.
