The Weight of Being Seen
The lecture hall smelled like burnt coffee and expensive perfume, two hundred bodies packed into tiered seating that climbed toward a ceiling stained the color of weak tea. Alice sat in the back row, third seat from the exit, the same seat she'd claimed since the first week of the semester because it offered the clearest sightline to everyone and required no one to notice her in return.
Professor Whitfield clicked through a slide about elasticity of demand, his voice a monotone drizzle that most of the room ignored. In front of Alice, a cluster of girls in matching cream cardigans huddled over someone's phone, their laughter bubbling up in sharp little spikes that cut through the lecture like glass through silk. She didn't need to hear the joke to know it wasn't about economics. Nothing that happened in this room was ever about economics.
She wrote *price elasticity = % change in quantity demanded / % change in price* in handwriting so precise it looked typed, and then she underlined it twice, because precision was the only currency she had that no one could take from her.
Two rows down, Madison Cole leaned sideways to whisper into the ear of the boy beside her, and he laughed…
