There’s a ten year old girl, long unbrushed brown hair in a private school uniform running late for lunch from gym class. She’s alone. There are eight buttons on her white oxford shirt. This is her third month in a real school after being homeschooled for her entire life, her seventh move to her fifth state, Ohio this time. Her sister, Liz, just two grades below her in third was recently teased for not knowing the word fart.

For some reason, this girl definitely knows the word fart and probably, looking back, should have told Liz about it, but they don’t use that word at home. She can only do so much, this older sister and, if she spent all her time thinking about the words that Liz didn’t know, she was sure to miss something. How was she supposed to know what would hurt them and what they’d remember?

Anyway, she’s running down the hall. The floors are so clean they squeak under her feet as she passes homeroom. Then English. There’s the smell of violets as she swings past a wired art installation, welded self-portraits, hers hanging at the very end of the hall around the corner with other ones that just aren’t there yet.

She’ll remember that smell when she buys a white rose for a boy named William Schum on Valentine’s day that year. At this point, she doesn’t have a crush on him. She will soon. The other girls, the ones with brushed yellow hair, will talk about her and point and say I can’t believe she sent him a crush flower only boys send those, but he’ll tag her on the playground during a game a day later and she won’t wash her shoulder for a week.

Unfortunately, she won’t have anyone, but her mom and Liz to tell at the time but that also means no one else can betray her secret. A bright side, perhaps.

Closer now, she hangs a left to the big double doors of the cafe. Compared to the rest of classrooms at Wellington, the cafeteria is starker: all white walls, all white tables, mostly white students in white shirts - this doesn’t change much depending on the room. Based on that alone, she should fit in, pale enough to blend into the eggshell wall. The tray slides onto the metal railing and she grabs chicken tenders and a salad.

She turns to find a few people she knows. It’s still too early for her to have friends — or at least that’s what she keeps telling herself —but there’s a seat open next to this girl she sat on the bus with once named Cam and, she’s late, so she sits down. Bites into a chicken tender, the steam curling and burning salt into her tongue. The plastic seat is uncomfortable and too big so she perches on the edge instead, like a bird hovering on the lip of a bath.

No one says anything, which, she tells herself,  is fine. They don’t need to say anything or greet her, she’s just happy she’s not alone. The white room pulses with white quiet.

Fingers smeared in grease, she looks up to see a boy sitting across from her. Matt from Social Studies. His hand is clapped over his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, turning sideways and the girl next to her, Cam, gasps.

“Your shirt is open.”

Cam tries to pretend she isn’t laughing even though she is and the pretending makes it worse. Everyone at the table is sort of looking at her and looking away and she doesn’t need to look down to confirm. In fact, she can feel a light breeze against her skin. She tucks her arms tightly around her, not even bothering to fumble the buttons because she knows that’ll just make it worse.

“No bra,” someone whispers, and there’s louder giggles now and her face goes up, oil spill set on fire. The heat is unbearable.

Her body does her the favor of moving because in her head, she’ll stay frozen at the table for the next decade. The bathroom door slams behind her. Leaning against cool metal, she fumbles with the six buttons she missed. Her skin becomes pins and needles instead of feet and fingertips.

No one comes to get her, but eventually she makes it out of the bathroom. Makes it through the months of people saying she did it on purpose, that she’s loose even though she feels stretched thin across her own bones when she walks the halls now.

The principal will call her parents and she’ll think about fractions and how they splinter, two in eight, one in four when they talk to her about it. Odds she’ll remember when she thinks about her first boyfriend not hearing her no, and then later an anonymous tinder match, his hand around her throat.

Odds that she heard first about girls and buttons.

Just buttons and girls.

-Salena Casha

Salena Casha's work has appeared in over 50 publications in the last decade. You can find her most recently published pieces at trampset, Pithead Chapel, CLOVES, and Bending Genres. She survives New England winters on black coffee and good beer. Follow her on twitter @salaylay_c