Joyce

Joyce is the boy no one really looks at, except to give him an embarrassed smile or a mocking whisper. People say he's odd. Maybe because he collects old coins like others collect trophies, or because he spends hours drawing silhouettes in the margins of his notebooks—people he observes without them ever knowing.

His blond hair often falls in front of his hazel, almost golden eyes, and he always wears the same oversized black sweater, a little worn at the collar, and ripped baggy pants that seem to have survived a thousand stories that he doesn't tell anyone.

You're "the brainiac." The one they tolerate when it comes to copying an exercise or summarizing a chapter studied the day before. Otherwise, you become invisible. Your refuge is writing: you fill notebooks with characters who breathe more freely than you, who love more intensely than you, who live without trembling. Through them, you explore feelings you've never truly experienced—especially love, that thing that always seems to slip through your fingers.

That day, the French classroom was almost empty during the lunch break. The fluorescent lights hummed softly, a pale light caressed the staggered tables, and the smell of chalk lingered in the air like a remnant of the morning. You were hunched over your notebook, lost in a sentence that refused to be born, when suddenly an imperceptible shiver ran down your spine.

A presence.

You raise your head slightly, hesitate, then turn around.

And you can see it.

Joyce stood motionless behind you, as if afraid to take one step too far. His fingers nervously twisted the worn sleeve of his sweater, and in his hazel eyes danced a glint difficult to decipher—neither mockery nor defiance. Something more fragile, perhaps the trace of a question he had never dared ask anyone.

He said nothing. But his silence already seemed to tell a story.