Chapter 6: The Court of Public Opinion
By noon, the comments section had devolved into a war zone. Emma sat beside me on the couch, scrolling with the masochistic obsession of someone trying to find a single drop of reason in an ocean of anonymous rage.
Some comments were kind. Thank you for saying this. I was that kid. A few even offered to send grocery money via Venmo.
But most were cruel. Get a job. Stop blaming everyone else for your poor choices. If you can’t afford food, you shouldn’t be in college. And the most American response of all: a moral lecture about personal responsibility from someone who had clearly never missed a meal in their life.
Lucas walked into the room then, his presence silencing the digital noise. He stood by the doorway, shoulders hunched, already wearing the blame like a shroud. “I should go,” he said quietly, his voice raspy.
“What? No,” Emma said, shooting to her feet.
Lucas didn’t look at her. He looked at me. “I didn’t mean to cause all this.”
There it was again. The apology. The instinct to disappear. The deeply ingrained belief that the problem wasn’t the hunger, but the hungry.
“Lucas,” I said, standing up slowly. “Come sit down.”
“I’m fine,” he lied, his eyes darting to the phone in Emma’s hand.
“No,” I said, my voice sharper than I intended. “You’re not fine. And you don’t have to pretend to be fine in this house.”
