Mark never liked mornings.
There was something about the light—it didn't warm him. It pierced him, sharp and uninvited, through the cracked blinds of his bedroom window. The alarm buzzed at 6:30 AM, loud and useless, since he'd barely slept. Again. The nightmares had returned. Not the usual faceless bullies or the feeling of falling — this time, it was teeth. White, gleaming, unnatural. They were in his mouth and in his hands, growing from his skin like thorns.
He swallowed the panic and stared at the ceiling fan spinning lazily above him, trying to ignore the dull ache in his gums.
School was hell, and not just the metaphorical kind. He was a nobody. Or worse — a target. His name was etched into bathroom stalls and locker doors, each letter like a wound: MARK IS A FREAK. But what made it worse wasn't that he believed it — it was that he feared it might be true.
He dressed slowly, hoodie up, eyes down. His mother was humming a song she did not know the lyrics to on the radio with her back to him when he passed her in the kitchen, and she did not inquire about his eye bruising. Or the red stain on his shirt collar from yesterday. Maybe she didn't see it. Maybe she chose not to.
The school bus was five minutes early, as always. The driver never waited. Mark jogged, head down, bag heavy like a body slung over his shoulder. The bus door hissed open with a mechanical sigh.
The moment he stepped on, the tension wrapped around him like a second hoodie.
Someone tripped him. Always. Today, it was Blake — varsity football, favorite of teachers, king of cruelty. The laughter was automatic, rehearsed like a sitcom audience. Mark didn't say anything. He picked up his bag and sat in the one empty seat: next to the girl who never spoke. The one with the scar under her left eye and notebooks full of things she never let anyone see.
She didn't move. She didn't look at him.
At Crestwood High, the hallways were meat grinders — chewing up kids like him and spitting out something less human. He survived it in silence, walking like a ghost through a world that pretended not to see him.
But something did see him.
He felt it before he saw it.
He stood over the basin in the washroom throughout the third period, he was staring at his reflection. Like it was whispering secrets that only he could hear, its bright light flickered and buzzed. His face looked paler than usual. His eyes — darker, ringed with exhaustion, but sharper, like something inside them was waiting to blink awake.
Then he saw it: a shadow over his shoulder. Too tall. Too still. No footsteps.
When he turned, no one was there.
But the mirror... still showed the shape.
His heart skidded sideways in his chest. Cold sweat crawled down his spine. He blinked once. Twice. The shape didn't leave. It leaned closer — a smile forming from pure black.
And then, for the briefest moment, he heard it whisper:
"We've been waiting, Mark."
He ran. Didn't look back. But even after the mirror was gone, the voice clung to his ears like frostbite.
By lunchtime, his gums bled. He wiped his mouth on a napkin, saw crimson, and stuffed it into his hoodie pocket before anyone noticed.
He didn't know it yet, but this was the last day anyone would call him "weak."
And it was the last day of being only human.