The Invisible Girl
The cafeteria at Lincoln High smells like tater tots and industrial disinfectant, a combination Emma has never quite gotten used to even after a year and a half of eating lunch within these cinderblock walls. She holds her tray the way she holds most things in her life—too carefully, both hands gripping the edges like it might slip away from her if she doesn't concentrate hard enough. Today, of all days, concentration fails her.
It happens in the space of a single breath.
Her sneaker, the left one, the one with the sole peeling slightly at the toe because her mom keeps saying they'll get new ones "next paycheck," catches on the leg of an overturned chair someone left jutting into the aisle. Emma feels her body lurch forward before her brain even registers the word *falling*. The tray tips. Time does that strange, elastic thing it does in moments of disaster, stretching out just long enough for her to see the chocolate milk carton twist through the air, for the spaghetti to detach itself from its foam container in one long, obscene rope, for the entire mess to arc downward and splatter across the floor directly beside the table where Ashley Kim and her friends are sitting.
Not…