Between Us, Part 2: The Message Nobody Was Meant to See

Between Us, Part 2: The Message Nobody Was Meant to See

The Story Begins

The 8.B class chat was busy after school, as it usually was. Someone asked about the physics homework, Filip sent a photo from the changing room with one sock sticking out beneath his trousers, and laughing emojis began piling up underneath. Nela sat by the bus window, her backpack on her knees and her phone propped against the sleeve of her hoodie.

The bus had just stopped at the next stop when a new notification flashed on her screen.

Kaja: “Hey, I don’t want you to tell anyone. When people ask me in class, I act as if I’m fine, but I honestly don’t know where to sit without looking weird. And I’m glad you texted me yesterday.”

Adam’s name appeared beneath the message.

Nela stopped moving. Her finger hovered over the screen, as if she, too, might ruin something by moving too quickly.

At first, nothing happened. Then a few small words appeared in the chat: “read.” Then more. And more.

A few seconds later, Kaja’s message appeared.

“NO. That wasn’t meant to go there.”

Another message followed straight away.

“Wrong chat. Seriously, wrong chat. Don’t read it.”

But the messages had already been read. And once you have seen something, you cannot pretend you have not just because someone writes in capital letters.

Nela noticed that Adam was online. The green dot beside his name glowed calmly, almost uncomfortably calmly. Then it disappeared.

The bus pulled away. Wet pavements and people in hoodies flashed past the window, but Nela could see only the chat. She wanted to write something simple. Something like: Leave it alone. But the sentence immediately felt too serious in her head. Too noticeable.

Meanwhile, the first reaction appeared beneath Kaja’s apology. Just eyes. Then a face with a hand over its mouth.

Nela locked her phone and immediately unlocked it again.

The next morning, the hallway outside the classroom was unusually noisy. Not because anyone was shouting. Quite the opposite. Voices stayed low, broke off, and started up again whenever someone else walked past.

Two boys from 8.B stood by the lockers, looking at the same phone. When they saw Nela, they fell quiet so quickly that it was more noticeable than ordinary laughter.

“So?” Kaja asked, appearing beside her.

She wore a colourful hoodie, but her face was paler than usual. Her short red hair stuck out at the sides, as if she had nervously run her fingers through it more times that morning than she meant to.

“Nothing,” Nela said.

“Sure. Nothing.” Kaja leaned against a locker. “I only sent a message by mistake that nobody was meant to read. Totally normal Monday.”

Filip came over from the other end of the hallway. A sports bag hung from his shoulder, and he acted as if nothing strange was happening.

“Well, at least everyone knows Adam is human now,” he announced. “Big discovery of the week.”

Kaja looked at him so sharply that he stopped smiling.

“What?” He raised his hands. “I was only trying to… I don’t know. Make it less of a thing.”

“By bringing it up again?”

“I didn’t bring it up. I just…” Filip stopped. “Okay. Maybe I did.”

Just then, Adam appeared at the classroom door. His black backpack hung over one shoulder, and his other hand was tucked into the pocket of his hoodie. He looked calm, but Nela noticed that he did not meet anyone’s eyes. He walked past the group by the lockers and did not even turn when someone quickly hid a phone behind a notebook.

When Things Start to Change

Kaja stepped after him.

“Adam,” she said.

The boy stopped, but did not turn around at once.

“I’m sorry,” she added. “I wanted to send you a photo of the homework and… I just opened the wrong chat. I wasn’t thinking.”

At last, Adam turned. “Okay.”

That single word did not sound angry. It sounded tired.

“I really didn’t mean to,” Kaja went on quickly. “I wanted to delete it straight away, but people had already seen it. I know it doesn’t help when I say that, but…”

“It doesn’t help,” Adam said quietly.

Kaja pressed her lips together. For a moment, she looked as though she might explode, but instead she nodded.

“Fine. It doesn’t help.”

Then she went into the classroom before he did.

Nela stayed in the hallway with Filip. A bell rang between them. Not the school bell, but a notification from someone’s phone.

“I didn’t mean to be nasty,” Filip said more quietly.

“I know,” Nela replied.

“It just gets even weirder when everyone goes quiet.”

Nela looked towards the classroom. “Maybe it feels weird because it is weird.”

Filip stared at her for a moment, as if he expected her to laugh. But Nela did not smile. In the end, he only shrugged and went inside.

After the second lesson, Nela stayed in the classroom while most of her classmates went out for a snack. An open notebook with stickers on its corners lay on the desk in front of her. Yesterday, she had written only one sentence in it: A message can be short, but the feeling it leaves lasts longer.

Today she added: The worst part is not that people read it. The worst part is that they act as if it is not about a real person.

“Are you writing about it?” Adam asked.

He stood by the last desk, with his history notebook lying on the table in front of him. Nela instinctively closed her notebook a little.

“Not exactly,” she said.

“That means yes.”

“It’s more that I write things down when I don’t know what to do with them.”

Adam nodded. He sat sideways on a chair, with his back to the board.

Someone shouted in the hallway outside, followed by laughter. Nela flinched, even though it might have had nothing to do with them.

“Yesterday, you texted me that you didn’t want anyone to know,” she said carefully. “Did you mean you don’t feel comfortable here?”

Adam ran a finger along the edge of the desk. “I didn’t mean I don’t feel comfortable. That sounds… I don’t know. Like something you’d say to a counsellor.”

“So what did you mean?”

He was quiet for a moment. “When everyone else knows where to sit, who to talk to and what to laugh at, I still don’t. Then I look weird because I don’t know where to stand during breaks.”

Nela did not know what to say. That was why it felt honest.

“I don’t think you look weird,” she said at last.

Adam looked at her. “That’s nice, but now the whole class probably knows.”

At that moment, another message appeared in the class chat. Nela opened it, and her stomach tightened.

Someone had written: “So Kaja is Adam’s secret therapist?”

One laughing emoji appeared beneath it. Then another. There were not many, but they were enough to stop the sentence seeming like an ordinary joke.

Kaja replied almost immediately.

An Important Moment

“Stop it already. Seriously. This is not material for your comments.”

Nela pictured her typing quickly and frowning at the screen. Kaja’s tone was sharp, but this time she did not have to argue for it. Everyone knew why she was writing.

No reply came. Three dots appeared in the chat, then vanished. They appeared again and vanished once more.

Filip sent a picture of a sloth hanging from a branch and wrote beneath it: “I suggest everyone takes a break from the internet before we start discussing who lent whose eraser to whom.”

A few people reacted with laughter. At first glance, it looked as if the tension had dissolved. But Nela saw Adam place his phone face down.

“Was that meant to be a joke?” he asked without anger.

“I guess,” she said.

“And did it help?”

Nela looked at the empty place by the window where Kaja had been sitting an hour earlier. “I don’t know.”

But she knew that Filip’s picture had given everyone permission to act as if nothing had happened. Maybe that was what he wanted. Maybe he simply did not want things to feel awkward. But sometimes people laugh because they do not want to sit with discomfort for even a moment.

When Nela opened the chat again, the space beneath the last message was empty. She had a sentence ready. She deleted it. Then she typed another.

Leave it alone already.

She deleted that too. It sounded as if she were begging for kindness.

Adam said nothing beside her. He did not need to. This time, his silence was worse than any further message in the chat.

Nela remembered the previous week, when the new seating plan had changed the class more than the adults would have expected. Back then, she had only written down who sat where and who acted as if they did not care. Now she felt as though she were once again only watching something shift, even though perhaps a small push in the other direction would be enough.

Her fingers trembled a little as she typed:

“Let’s stop talking about it. That message was not meant for the whole class chat.”

She read it three times. It was not brilliant. It was not even funny. That was exactly why she thought it might sound awkward.

Then she pressed send.

Nothing happened. The light above the board kept buzzing. Someone slammed a door in the hallway. Adam’s phone vibrated against the desk.

A moment later, Kaja reacted to Nela’s message with a simple thumbs-up.

Filip wrote: “Yeah. She’s right.”

He did not add a picture or another comment. Just that sentence.

Then a classmate who had not written anything at all until then said: “I saw it too, but I don’t want to keep talking about it.”

Another classmate sent: “Okay, sorry.”

It was not perfect. Someone still said nothing, and some people may simply have switched to another chat. Even so, the feeling that everyone was waiting for the next clever comment disappeared from the screen.

Adam picked up his phone. He read the messages, then looked at them for a long moment. At last, he breathed out through his nose, almost silently.

“Thanks,” he said.

Nela shrugged, although her cheeks felt hot. “I only wrote one sentence.”

“Still.”

After school, the classroom was half empty. Chairs scraped across the floor, someone had forgotten a hoodie on the radiator, and soft afternoon light already shone outside. Kaja packed her things in unusual silence. When Adam passed her desk, he stopped for a moment.

What Comes Next

“I’m still angry,” he said.

“I understand,” she replied.

“But I know you didn’t do it on purpose.”

Kaja nodded. “It was still my fault.”

Adam swung his backpack over his shoulder. “Yeah.”

It was not a movie-style reconciliation. Nobody hugged, and nobody said everything was fine. But when he left, Kaja took a normal breath for the first time all day.

Nela was the last to remain at her desk. She opened her notebook, found an empty space beneath her morning notes, and wrote:

Privacy does not disappear just because something beeps in a chat. Sometimes an ordinary sentence saves it before the crowd begins to laugh.

The phone beside her hand lit up once more. Adam’s name appeared in the class chat, with three small dots beside it.

Nela watched them for a moment. Then she closed her notebook, but did not lock her phone.