"You look like you crawled out of a dumpster." The voice hit Joy before she reached the quad—a flat, amused edge that belonged to three kids gathered under the student council banner. Someone laughed. A phone flicked up. Joy kept walking. The concrete under her shoes felt thin, like paper. Her backpack strap dug into her shoulder. She tasted metal and toothpaste and the kind of fatigue that doesn't respond to sleep. "Seriously," another boy said. "It's like—what happened to you?" Whispers spread like spilled water. Heads tilted. Two people stepped out of the way and aimed their phones. A girl in a sorority jacket mouthed the word "trash" with perfect, tiny teeth-revealing malice. A freshman pointed and giggled; a professor passed with a polite, tight smile and pretended not to see. "Joy?" someone called, soft and stunned. The sound should have been relief. Instead it landed like curious glass. She saw Eliot before he reached her. Not because he stood out—he never had to. He was always exactly where light found him first: under the student council banner, the banner he'd hung himself last fall for the "Leadership Week" photo dump. His hair was clean. His jacket smelled like cologne and confidence. A crowd made a space for him like tides make room around a rock. "Eliot," she said. He looked at her the way you look at something broken that cost too much to fix. For a beat there was nothing