Between Us, Part 6: A Photo Without Permission

Between Us, Part 6: A Photo Without Permission

The Story Begins

Morning in 8.B never began quietly. Someone was looking for a physics notebook, someone else was trying to finish their cocoa before the bell rang, and two boys by the window were arguing about whether they really had a test that day. Nela put her bag under her desk, took out her pencil case, and only then looked at her phone.

Nine new messages lit up the class chat. Among them was a photo of Sára from yesterday’s after-school club. In it, she stood by the drinks machine, leaning back as if she were trying to catch a falling coin. Her eyes were half closed, her mouth was open, and her hair stuck out in such strange directions that perhaps even she would have laughed at it.

But beneath the photo, someone had written: “When you find out you’re being called on tomorrow.” Crying-laughing emojis appeared straight after it.

Nela looked at the picture for longer than she meant to. It was not a disaster. It was not even an awful photo. That was exactly what made her uneasy. It looked like the kind of thing that could easily be passed on, reacted to, and forgotten ten minutes later.

Except Sára had not been there when the photo was shared. She had not chosen it. And she certainly had not sent it to the class chat herself.

“What are you all looking at?” Kaja asked, dropping her colourful backpack onto the chair beside her.

“Nothing,” someone said from the back. “Sára’s just got a new profile picture.”

Kaja took out her phone and scrolled through the messages. She snorted at once. “Okay, this is pretty good.” She added a laughing reaction and sat down without a second thought.

Nela’s thumb hovered over the screen. She did not want to add any reaction. At the same time, she did not want to be the only one who did nothing. Around her, the morning noise blended with notification sounds. Each brief ping sounded worse than the last.

Then the bell rang and the teacher came in carrying a stack of papers. Most phones disappeared beneath desks, but the chat continued quietly.

During the first lesson, Nela managed not to look at her screen for about seven minutes. When she finally turned it over, another twelve messages had appeared.

Filip had written: “The machine refused to give her juice, so she started summoning ghosts.”

A string of reactions appeared beneath it, even from people who were usually quiet. Filip sat two desks away, bent over his notebook. He wore his usual easy smile, as if he had just said something that had saved a boring lesson.

“Did you write that?” Martin whispered beside him.

Filip only shrugged. “It’s not bad. At least everyone woke up.”

Nela lowered her eyes to her notebook. One sentence after another came into her head, but none of them sounded normal enough. She could write that it was unfair. She could ask who had even taken the photo. She could send something simple: leave it alone.

Instead, she turned off her phone.

Between us, things often happened that looked small until you examined them closely. One message. One emoji. One silence pretending it meant nothing.

After the bell, the class spilled into the corridor. Kaja stood by the notice board with two girls, looking at her phone again.

“Denis says he got the photo from someone at the club,” she said. “So I guess everyone has it.”

“That makes it even better,” Filip replied. “Sára’s famous moment.”

When Things Start to Change

Nela stopped by the vending machine, although she did not want anything. She heard a few people laughing, then one boy reading aloud a comment that had just appeared. It all sounded light. As if they were talking about a failed scene in a video, not about someone who might not even know yet.

Adam stood by the door, leaning against the wall. His black backpack was slung over one shoulder, and he kept his phone in his pocket. Ever since he had joined the class, he had been able to seem calm in situations where everyone else looked as if they needed to comment every three seconds.

“Did you see it?” Nela asked before she could stop to wonder why she was asking him in particular.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“And what do you think?”

Adam looked towards Kaja and Filip. “That it probably isn’t so funny when the person isn’t there.”

He said it quietly, without much expression. Then he pushed himself away from the wall as a group of seventh-graders passed them.

Nela wanted to say that was exactly what she thought too. Instead, she only nodded. Even that felt like too little.

At the next break, she sat by the window at the end of the corridor. She took out a notebook covered in stickers: a small yellow moon, a faded strawberry, and the words DON’T FORGET. She opened to a blank page.

First, she wrote: Sára’s photo in the chat.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she added: Everyone is laughing because everyone else is laughing.

Her pen stopped above the paper. Behind her, she heard her classmates’ voices. Someone was asking who had already reacted. Someone else said Sára was not made of sugar. The sentence stabbed Nela somewhere beneath her ribs, although it was not the first time she had heard it. People used it whenever they did not want to think about whether they had hurt someone.

At last, she added one more sentence: When lots of people join in, even a small thing hurts more.

“Is that homework?” Adam asked, stopping beside the desk by the window.

Nela partly covered the notebook with her hand. “No. I’m just writing.”

“Oh.” He did not pry any further. There was something strangely nice about that. “Sára’s apparently in the corridor near the staff rooms,” he added after a moment. “Her cousin messaged her. She’s seen it already.”

Nela looked up. “Really?”

“I think so.”

Just then, the classroom door opened and Filip came out, followed by Kaja. Filip held his phone in front of him, with the chat still open on the screen.

“Listen,” he said more loudly so that the others in the corridor could hear him too, “Denis wants to put it on the school meme account. It would do well there.”

Several people turned around at once. One boy gave an approving whistle.

Kaja smiled, but not as freely as she had that morning. “Maybe that’s a bit much.”

Filip looked at her. “It’s only a photo.”

“So what?” Tamara called from the windowsill. “It’s funny.”

Filip laughed, short and loud. “Exactly. There’s no need to make a big deal out of it.”

His laugh had a strange effect. Filip was the kind of boy people wanted to laugh with, even when they did not know exactly why. When he laughed, two more joined in almost automatically. Kaja looked at her phone and suddenly seemed unsure what to do with her hands.

Nela felt her cheeks burn. She had the feeling that if she said anything now, everyone would turn towards her. Filip would smirk, and someone would say she was taking it way too seriously. Her mouth was dry.

An Important Moment

Then she remembered the sentence in her notebook.

She went back into the classroom before the others. She sat down, put her phone on the desk, and opened the chat. Her fingers trembled so slightly that no one would have noticed unless they had been looking right at them.

She wrote: “I don’t think this photo is okay. Sára probably didn’t agree to it, and it shouldn’t be passed on any further.”

She read the sentence three times. First she wanted to delete “I don’t think”. Then she wanted to delete everything. In the end, she pressed send.

The message appeared among the emojis and pictures so ordinarily that it was almost worse. No one wrote anything straight away.

Classmates began returning from the corridor. Kaja sat down in her place, looked at the chat, and froze. Her finger stopped above the reaction she had added that morning.

“Come on,” Filip said when he read Nela’s message. He was not angry, only taken aback. “I was just joking.”

Nela raised her eyes. Her voice trembled a little, but she answered anyway. “I know. But she probably won’t find it funny.”

For a moment, all that could be heard was the rustle of notebooks. Adam sat at the desk by the wall and quietly took out his pen. He said nothing, but he looked at Nela in a way that made it clear he had heard her.

Kaja cleared her throat. “I added that reaction straight away. I didn’t even think about it.” Then she tapped the screen, and the smiley beside the photo disappeared. “Done.”

The small change was so subtle that it would have been easy to miss. A moment later, Martin removed his reaction too. Then Tamara did the same. Denis wrote nothing, but the photo no longer appeared in any new messages.

Filip placed his phone face down on the desk. His smile had disappeared. “Okay,” he said more quietly. “I’ll tell Denis not to put it on that account. I mean… it won’t go there.”

“You shouldn’t be telling him to put it there,” Kaja said, perhaps more sharply than she meant to. She frowned at herself straight away. “I mean, it just shouldn’t be there.”

Filip nodded. “Yeah.”

A few minutes later, Sára came into the classroom. She wore a grey hoodie, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. Normally, she would greet someone when she arrived, or at least smile at Tamara. This time, she only walked to her desk, put her bag on the floor, and remained standing.

“I saw the chat,” she said.

No one laughed.

Her voice was not loud. That was why it was so easy to hear. She looked at Denis’s empty seat, then at the others. “You could at least have messaged me to tell me it was there.”

Kaja lowered her eyes. Filip rubbed his thumb along the edge of the desk. Nela felt relieved that the photo was no longer spreading, but the relief was not uncomplicated. None of it gave Sára back the morning when people had laughed about her without her.

“I…” Kaja began. She stopped. For the second time, she did not choose a quick joke. “I joined in. It was stupid.”

Sára looked at her but did not answer. She sat down and took out her textbook.

It was not a big reconciliation. Nor was it the end of the unpleasant feeling. The tension remained between the desks like a forgotten scrap of paper that no one wanted to pick up. But when Denis came into the classroom later, he opened the chat, looked at Nela’s messages for a moment, and then deleted the photo.

What Comes Next

After the last lesson, Nela remained seated alone for a little while. The classroom gradually emptied. Outside the window, a car drove past, and someone slammed a door in the corridor.

She opened her notebook to the page with her morning notes. Underneath them, she wrote a new sentence.

“A like is not an apology.”

She closed the notebook, put it in her bag, and only then noticed Adam standing by the door.

“Coming?” he asked.

Nela nodded. “Yeah.”

When they stepped into the corridor, the class chat was unusually quiet. Not completely empty. Just quiet in a way that, for the first time, made it possible to hear what was missing from it.