It started with a hallway.
The one behind the theater, with mirrors covering the length of one side—leftover from when the school briefly hosted dance classes. Most students avoided it. The lights flickered. The air felt colder.
Lian didn't mean to end up there after school. He had just wandered again, the way he often did lately. He liked the feeling of walking through a place emptied of purpose. Like the school shed its skin once the bell rang.
The mirrors greeted him silently.
At first, all he saw was himself—bag slung over one shoulder, face half in shadow.
But as he stood longer, something flickered behind his reflection.
A fox?
No. A monkey.
Then an owl.
Then nothing.
He stepped closer, heart thumping.
The mirror wasn't showing him anyone else. Just… versions of himself.
Each reflection shimmered with a different animal clinging to his shoulders, coiled around his ankles, perched in his eyes.
He stared. The owl looked thoughtful. The monkey restless. The rabbit scared. The lion angry. The moth... trembling in the light.
He reached out and touched the glass.
His hand met cold surface, nothing more.
Then he heard the door creak open behind him.
He spun around, heart jumping, but no one was there.
When he turned back to the mirror, the animals were gone.
Just him again.
Small. Uncertain. Real.
In the days after, Lian stopped drawing.
Not because he couldn't.
Because it didn't feel necessary.
At lunch, when Jordan laughed too loudly, Lian smiled without glancing for ears or fur.
When Ms. Kwan scolded him for daydreaming during a quiz, he didn't picture scales or claws. He just apologized. And meant it.
Even the janitor noticed.
"You're walking quieter these days," he said.
Lian blinked. "I am?"
The man smiled. "Not your feet. Your mind."
At night, Lian lay on his bed, lights off, sketchbook open beside him. Pages and pages filled with animals, annotations, shifting shapes.
He picked it up.
Tore out a page.
Then another.
Not angrily. Not regretfully.
Just… ready.
The sound was soft, each tear like a breath.
When he reached the last page, he stopped.
On it, he'd once drawn a boy surrounded by a swirl of beasts—dozens of them, like a storm orbiting a single, small figure.
He stared at it for a long time, then wrote beneath it in pencil:
They were never mine to hold. Only mine to notice.
He closed the book.
Left it on the shelf.
And slept.