Chapter Text
Buffy stopped on the curb, at the edge of the student drop-off. Her knees locked, calves tense. She made herself step forward, arms tight around her backpack. Her ponytail—she’d redone it three times that morning—was the only thing under control.
The entrance loomed: double doors smudged with fingerprints, banners overhead shouting WELCOME TO SUNNYDALE HIGH and GO RAZORBACKS. Students streamed through in knots and clumps, chattering, jostling.
The hallway hit her with its humidity and sound. Locker doors banged open and shut, a solid metallic rhythm under the machine-gun of overlapping voices. Cologne and gum and the staleness of old books. Buffy tightened her grip and braced for impact.
First period: Room 103. She’d memorized the map, traced the path with her finger in the car. Left at the trophy case, past the vending machines. She veered right, hugging the cinderblock wall. Freshmen pressed up against their lockers, some laughing with calculated ease, others texting with heads ducked low. She dodged a trio of football players—jerseys over collared shirts—who filled the corridor like a slow-moving barricade. One caught her elbow. She spun, overcorrected, and nearly faceplanted into the directory sign.
“Whoa, you good?” The linebacker type grinned without waiting for an answer, already turning to talk to his friends.
Buffy mumbled “fine” but the word died in the blur of faces. She kept moving. Her schedule, folded and refolded, sweated out of her hand. It fluttered to the tile.
She crouched, instantly aware of how exposed she was: backpack sliding up her neck, knees in a graceless squat. The air churned with footsteps—Nikes, scuffed Vans, boots that looked too heavy for California. A pair of black high-tops skidded, the toe missing her knuckle by a breath.
Buffy froze, then snatched the paper and straightened fast. Her neck was hot. The girl in the high-tops never looked back.
Her fingers trembled as she smoothed the schedule, reading the words she already knew. The bell—she hadn’t heard it, but everyone else had—brought a flood of bodies down the far end of the hallway. She checked the map. Trophy case, vending machines, left.
Second floor. Stairs packed tight, everyone moving like a single, disgruntled organism. Buffy tried to blend, let herself be carried, but at the top someone pushed from behind and she stumbled, palms to the linoleum.
Laughter. It prickled along her skin, and she didn’t need to turn to know it was about her.
She found Room 103 and hesitated outside the door. Through the little window, the class was already seated. The teacher—tall, white button-down, glasses hanging on a lanyard—wrote something on the board. Buffy’s stomach cinched. She turned the knob.
The hinge whined. Thirty heads snapped up in unison.
She took the last two steps inside, schedule clamped so hard her nails creased the paper. The silence was worse than noise. She kept her eyes on the floor until she heard, “You must be our new student.”
She looked up. The teacher’s smile was brittle, more a bared-teeth grimace than anything welcoming.
“Buffy Summers,” she managed. Her voice hitched, cracked halfway through the last syllable.
“Buffy,” the teacher repeated, eyebrows arching. “Interesting name.” He checked his roll sheet, frowned. “Where are you transferring from?”
“Uh. Los Angeles.” She heard it come out small and sharp, half-whisper, half-confession.
A titter rippled from the far side of the room. Buffy glanced over. Four girls in identical pastel sweaters, hair ironed flat, perfectly outlined eyes. The one in front, a redhead with high cheekbones, leaned over and stage-whispered something that made the two behind her snort. The third girl just looked at Buffy, steady, lips pressed thin.
The teacher cleared his throat. “Well, Miss Summers. Welcome to Sunnydale. I’m Mr. Shepherd. Take a seat by the window. We’re on page forty-two.”
Buffy moved, every step loud in the unnatural hush. Her desk was in the direct line of sight of the pastel quartet. She sat. Her backpack thumped against the plastic chair, too heavy, too loud. She ducked her head, letting her ponytail shield her face, and opened the battered English textbook. The words on the page blurred instantly.
The teacher resumed reading aloud. Buffy could feel the glances, the curiosity and calculation. She pretended to follow along, flipped a page when everyone else did.
Halfway through the period, she looked up. The third girl in the pastel gang was still watching her. Not mean, exactly. Just blank, like Buffy was a riddle she wasn’t interested in solving.
She blinked, looked away, and pressed her knees together under the desk. Her hands finally stopped shaking, but her stomach felt like it was full of gravel.
When the bell rang, she shot up, shoved her books into the backpack, and tried to be the first out. She wasn’t fast enough. The redhead’s elbow knocked into her as she edged past, and Buffy caught, “LA trash,” said in a breathy, singsong voice.
She kept walking. If she’d looked back, she might have seen the other girl finally smile, just a little.
By lunch, she’d already started counting the hours until she could go home.
——
Buffy timed her entrance for exactly two minutes after the bell. Not too early, not so late that every table was already claimed. The air inside was twice as loud as the halls—trays banging, forks scraping, the collective shout of a hundred teens. The line for hot lunch wound from the counter to the loading dock doors; she bypassed it, slid into the dry sandwich line, grabbed a turkey wrap and a paper carton of milk. Her fingers left sweaty prints on the plastic tray.
She stood at the threshold, blinking. The room was decent-sized but somehow felt cramped, with scuffed linoleum and patchy light from windows that needed washing. Tables clustered in loose rows, some pushed slightly out of alignment, creating uneven pathways between the small, nervous territories.
Dead center: the jocks, all broad shoulders and letterman jackets, laughing with their mouths open like they were paid for decibels per second. Closest to the door, the drama club, already in costume—velvet jackets, trilby hats, one girl in an actual cape. Science kids held down a stretch by the windows, laptops and calculators out even as they ate. Freshmen clung to the perimeter, huddled in defensive packs.
Buffy didn’t see anyone from her morning classes. She scanned for a friendly face, or at least a neutral one, but the only available table was a two-seater bolted to the far corner.
She walked it like a tightrope. Someone snickered as she passed—she couldn’t tell which group, but it landed anyway. She sat, smoothed her skirt, lined up her sandwich and milk with surgical precision. She took a bite, chewed, swallowed, repeated. The taste barely registered.
She tried to read, opening her battered paperback to where a folded gum wrapper marked her spot. The words swam. She pretended anyway, flipping the page every couple of minutes, hoping the illusion of busyness would keep her invisible.
It didn’t.
Two tables over, a group of girls held court on a raised platform. There were six of them, every one perfect: hair, nails, posture. Their laughter spiked above the background, each joke a missile fired and detonated in sequence.
At their center was Faith—Buffy recognized her from the hallway collision that morning, the black high-tops that had nearly crushed her fingers. She was everything the others weren't: dark hair chopped ragged, lipstick so black it glimmered. Leather jacket draped over her shoulders despite the eighty-degree heat, she leaned back with one booted foot hooked over the table's edge, spinning a lanyard between her fingers like a hypnotist's watch.
Girls and boys drifted by, pausing for a word or a laugh, sometimes just to get close. Faith said something and the others bent in to hear, then scattered it back out in low, fast whispers. She didn’t have to shout. She just was.
Buffy tried not to stare, but it was like avoiding the sun. Faith’s eyes were dark, unreadable from this distance, but when she swept the room her gaze caught Buffy's and held.
Buffy froze. The next breath caught behind her ribs. She looked down, fumbled with the sandwich, dropped a shred of lettuce onto her tray.
When she risked another glance, Faith was talking to the platinum-blonde girl on her left. Faith had called the girl “Harmony”. Then she shifted, pointed with her chin, and all six girls twisted as one to look straight at Buffy.
They held it. Four, five seconds, unblinking. Then Faith said something too low to catch, and the entire table erupted—howling, high-fiving, slapping hands on the Formica.
Buffy’s face burned. She wiped her mouth, tried to hide behind her hair, but knew it was hopeless. Her palms sweated, even her shins prickled. She flipped the page of her book, not seeing it, then closed the cover and tucked it under her tray. She counted the chewed, mangled ends of her sandwich. She couldn’t remember swallowing any of it.
A group of band kids set up shop at the next table. Buffy hoped they would be a buffer, but they ignored her, talked over her head. Someone cranked the vending machine so hard it squealed. Two more football players, the ones from the hallway, swaggered past and pointed at Faith’s table, mouthing something that made the girls there shriek and stomp their feet.
Buffy checked her watch. Nineteen minutes left.
She tried to eat a grape. It burst between her teeth, sour and unripe. She swallowed anyway.
Across the tables, Faith watched. It was casual, lazy, but Buffy felt it. She picked at her lunch, hyper-aware of every gesture, every rustle of her skirt. Every time she looked up, the table of girls was waiting, like they expected her to do something funny again.
The crowd thinned as people finished. Buffy walked to the trash, dumped everything, then made for the exit. As she passed Faith’s table, one of the girls tripped her foot out and snagged Buffy’s ankle. Not enough to make her fall, just a sharp reminder.
Faith said, “Watch yourself, LA,” soft and smooth, not mean, but it stuck.
Buffy kept moving. She didn’t look back. She made it to the end of the hall, past the bathroom and out the side doors.
She stood in the shadow of the gym, breathing hard. The grass was yellow, brittle under her sneakers. She pressed her hands to her face, willing the flush to cool off.
She wished she were invisible, or at least someone else.
The bell rang for end of lunch. She checked her schedule, found the next class, and headed back in.
Tomorrow would be worse. She knew it already.