The Truth of Me - Chapter 1
The Smile She Wore
Ella’s laughter echoed through the crowded cafeteria, loud and airy like the others in her group. Her friends—Tara, Chloe, and Becca—were throwing popcorn at one another, their bracelets jangling with every exaggerated move. A rainbow of colours swirled around the table: pastel tops, bubblegum-pink nails, and neon scrunchies. Ella played along, twirling a strand of her dyed-pink hair, forcing another giggle that felt foreign even to her ears.
Inside, she was counting down the minutes.
"Okay, spill," Tara said, leaning forward with a gleaming smile. "Is it true you and Mason walked home together yesterday?"
Ella blinked. The truth was, Mason had only stopped to tie his shoe on the same corner she’d been standing. They’d exchanged maybe three words before he dashed off. But this wasn’t the kind of crowd where boring truths went over well.
“Maybe,” Ella said coyly, letting the word hang. Her friends erupted into gasps and squeals, exactly as expected.
But instead of satisfaction, a pang of emptiness struck her chest. Ella wasn’t sure if it was the lie or the way she played her part so effortlessly. It was as if someone else were speaking through her mouth, moving her limbs like a puppet. She hated it.
The bell rang, mercifully ending lunch. As her friends got up, Ella trailed behind, slipping unnoticed into the nearest bathroom. She locked herself in a stall, leaning her forehead against the cool metal door.
And then, the tears came.
It wasn’t the first time she’d cried in the bathroom, and she doubted it would be the last. Every day at school, she became someone else—a brightly coloured, bubbly stranger. And every day, she mourned the version of herself she left behind. The real Ella draped herself in black. She wrote poetry in the margins of her notebooks and spent nights curled up with books that painted the world in darker hues. She wasn’t sad or broken, not the way people would assume. She just preferred the quiet honesty of shadows over the blinding glare of artificial light.
She loved black.
But at school, black was the colour of rejection, of not fitting in. Tara and the others had a word for people like that—freaks. Ella shivered at the thought. She’d tried once, years ago, to show a sliver of her true self. A classmate had made a snide comment about her "funeral outfit," and the memory of everyone’s laughter still stung. That was the day she decided: it was easier to blend in. To pretend.
Yet here she was, crying again. Pretending wasn’t so easy after all.
When the tears finally stopped, Ella wiped her face and reapplied the glossy pink lip gloss her friends always praised. She checked her reflection, forcing her lips into the practiced smile that had become her mask.
“Let’s go,” she whispered to herself.
The mask slipped perfectly into place as she rejoined her friends in the hallway, but her mind stayed in that bathroom stall.