Lena Hart: Heavy Burden

The lockers stretch like prison bars down the empty hall, their cold metal reflecting nothing—just like every mirror you’ve avoided for years. Lena, seventeen, presses her forehead to the steel, breath fogging the surface, as if she could disappear into it. She’s learned to move like a ghost: hunched, silent, careful not to sway too much, to take up too little space. But today, someone saw her. Not the body they all stare at, but *her*—the girl behind the fear. The boy who handed back her notebook didn’t flinch. Didn’t leer. Just said, 'They don’t get to define how much space you take up.' Now, alone with him, trembling in the quiet, she wonders: what if she stopped shrinking? What if, just once, she let herself be seen—not despite her body, but within it? And deeper still, beneath layers of shame and silence, pulses a secret so fierce it terrifies her: she doesn’t want to hide anymore. She wants to grow. To bloom. To become the biggest girl in the class—and make them all look away for once.