Time passed—each day bleeding into the next like ink spilled on fragile paper.
Moments blurred, voices dulled, and faces became harder to tell apart.
I wore mine, each one thinner, more brittle.
And when I stepped into my final year of middle school, I didn't bring strength.
I brought armor.
I hadn't looked into a mirror in weeks.
Not out of fear.
But because I already knew it wouldn't know me either.
The group had changed.
New smiles. New shadows.
New masks to learn and wear.
We existed in the fiction of normalcy.
Pretending the walls weren't cracking.
Pretending the air didn't feel heavier every day.
Then came the new classroom teacher.
And with her—something darker.
She didn't need to shout.
She didn't need to threaten.
She just… decided.
She decided who was worth looking at.
Who was worth believing.
Who would be broken first.
And it was me.
Each morning, her gaze found me.
Heavy. Deliberate. Surgical.
She dissected my silence.
She weaponized my presence.
I wasn't just her target—
I was her lesson to the others.
"This is what happens when I don't like you."
At first, I tried to ignore it.
Then, I started to wonder if maybe she was right.
Maybe there was something wrong with me.
I began to shrink, even inside my mask.
Then the rupture came.
A boy—one of us—stole her phone.
And what he sent was not just a message.
It was filth, venom, a digital scar meant to humiliate.
A grotesque message. Private photos.
Not a prank.
An execution.
The school reeled.
Whispers became screams behind closed doors.
The principal locked down the situation.
But no truth emerged.
Until they called me.
I walked into the principal's office,
And she—the teacher—stormed toward me like a blade.
I didn't know why.
Not yet.
Another teacher held her back, but the damage had been done.
Then came the question.
So cold.
So rehearsed.
"Did you send them?"
It wasn't a question.
It was a verdict draped in politeness.
They had already decided.
I didn't flinch.
I didn't plead.
Because I knew: if I bled, they would tear me apart.
So I wore my eighth face.
It wasn't anger.
It wasn't fear.
It was a stillness that frightened even me.
The stillness of a mind that had stopped hoping.
Of a soul that no longer looked for rescue.
"No," I said.
My voice was dust.
Emotionless.
Lifeless.
Because that's what they wanted—
To see something human they could burn.
But I gave them nothing.
And they hated it.
The next day, they called my parents.
Only my mother came.
My father didn't have the time.
Maybe he sensed what I already knew—
That this wasn't about justice.
It was about someone to blame.
I stood behind her as the teacher's words sliced the air.
She lied with elegance.
She turned shadows into certainty.
She tried to bury me alive under shame that wasn't mine.
And I… said nothing.
Because even defending myself felt pointless.
Because I wasn't sure if I had anything left worth defending.
But my mother—
She listened, unmoved.
Her silence wasn't passive.
It was focused.
Razor-sharp.
Then it happened.
A quiet knock.
A staff member leaned in and whispered something into the teacher's ear.
Not a dramatic confession. Not new evidence.
Just… a slip. A rumor traced back to someone else.
A mistake not meant to save me—
but it did.
Accidentally. Mechanically. Indifferently.
Truth arrived not as justice, but as afterthought.
The teacher froze.
Her expression faltered.
The principal spoke like someone crawling out of a grave.
"We were wrong," he said, voice laced with discomfort.
"It was someone else."
My mother rose.
"You blamed my son," she said quietly,
"But it was your child who did this."
The teacher's breath caught.
Her mask cracked.
"You tried to shatter him to protect your own shame."
My mother's voice was cold—beautifully cold.
"The cruelty you fed your son—that's what returned to devour you."
She turned and walked out.
No grand gestures.
Just truth.
Simple. Devastating.
And I followed.
Heavier than ever.
I didn't feel relief.
Or justice.
Just the quiet weight of erosion.
That night, I stared at the ceiling again.
The silence wasn't peaceful.
It was suffocating.
The kind of silence that presses into your chest until you forget how to breathe.
I wanted to scream.
But I didn't remember how.
I wanted to cry.
But there was nothing left to spill.
I had worn the eighth face.
And in doing so, something inside me had collapsed.
Not my innocence.
That had died long ago.
What collapsed…
was the belief that there was a face beneath the mask.
That I was still someone real.
I remembered the mirror—
the one I used to study for proof of self.
But now I knew.
Even the mirror lies.
Even it doesn't recognize me anymore.
I was becoming what they always feared.
Not a monster.
Not a victim.
Something worse.
A hollow.
A shape without a soul.
A silence that walks.
And maybe, just maybe—
there wouldn't be a ninth face.
Because masks only matter
when someone's still underneath them.