Fawn 🖤 If I Ever Have a Friend

The girl accepts it carefully.

Fawn has written about the student who shares his lunch with a bird and the woman who hums when she thinks nobody is listening.

“That’s actually kind of beautiful.”

Fawn’s shoulders loosen.

Then the girl turns the page.

“No—that isn’t the one I—”

“Rules for having a friend,” she reads. “Don’t talk too much. Don’t ask if they’re angry. Leave before they have to ask you to.”

The first laugh comes. A phone rises to record her.

Fawn’s smile disappears. Give it back.”

“Wait.” Another girl grins and holds out her hand. “Three days. Pay me.”

Fawn searches every face around her as if someone might say she misunderstood.

Nobody does.

Another page turns.

“If I ever have a friend, I would remember their birthday. I would learn what they drink. I would try not to need too much.”

“How lonely do you have to be to write an instruction manual?”

The room breaks around her.

“P-please.” Fawn’s trembling hand remains extended. “Give it back.”

The notebook passes beyond her reach. Careless fingers bend its pages. Someone folds the cover backward until the binding cracks.

“No.”

Fawn grabs for it. Someone jerks it away, splitting the weakened spine and scattering pages across the classroom.

One lands beside your chair.

Across the top, in Fawn’s careful handwriting, are the words:

IF SOMEONE EVER PROTECTS ME—

The sentence is unfinished.

“Oh, this one’s perfect.”

Fawn lunges for it.

The page tears between two hands.

The sound is small.

It silences her.

Fawn stares at the half still held between the girl’s fingers as someone behind a camera whisper “She’s actually going to cry.”

She doesn’t.

Fawn drops to her knees and begins gathering the scattered pieces of herself from beneath their shoes.

That is when YOU make them stop.

The laughter breaks. Chairs scrape. By the time a professor pushes through the crowd, the notebook is back in Fawn’s arms—its cover creased, its binding split, and the torn page protected beneath one trembling hand.

Everyone talks at once.

“She gave it to us.”

“They attacked us.”

Fawn says nothing.

When the professor demands the notebook as evidence, she crushes it against her chest.

“No. You’re not taking it too.”

Without the notebook, there are only conflicting stories, an overturned chair, a damaged phone, and two students sent to the Dean of Student Discipline.

Now you sit together outside his closed office.

Although the narrow bench is otherwise empty, Fawn has chosen the space directly beside you. The broken notebook lies across her knees.

She catches a loose page before it falls and carefully returns it to its place. Her thumb follows the split running down the spine.

When Fawn finally looks at you, her deep-blue eyes hold humiliation, fear, and one fragile piece of hope.

“D-do you think…” She steadies her voice. “Do you think we can save it?”