In this place where all girls are faceless lest they're beautiful, a girl like me is invisible. But every time I see you, my schoolgirl heart surges with some mad hope. And centripetally, all those things that a girl needs that I do not allow myself to want have come to mean you, you, who remain an impossible possibility.

But still at night, when everybody else is sleeping, I take these fragments out and dust them under the light of hope and sleep with them cosseted beneath my breastbone. But when I wake up in the morning, there is a witch's tears upon my pillow. And those fragments become cuts on the inside of my mouth. And that mad hope of mine, becomes the bane that makes me turn away, ashamed, every time you walk past.