I kept thinking about the night before.
Maya’s red eyes.
The locked bedroom door.
The untouched food.
The way she’d been staring at her phone for weeks.
Something had clearly been wrong.
And somehow, I had missed it.
When I arrived, Principal Patel was waiting for me near the main office.
He didn’t waste time with small talk.
“Thank you for coming.”
“What happened?”
He looked at me for a moment.
“Come with me.”
We walked down the hallway.
The school was unusually quiet.
Students were in class, but I could hear distant voices behind closed doors and the occasional sound of a locker shutting.
Finally, we stopped.
Maya’s locker.
Principal Patel took a breath.
Then he opened it.
I looked inside.
And for several seconds, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
There was a shoebox.
Inside were envelopes.
Dozens of them.
Each one had a student’s name written across the front.
