The Boy Nobody Saved a Chair For

The pen felt cool and smooth against his thumb as the class talked around him. Dinesh had wanted to say that he was there too, but the words stayed behind his teeth, so he turned to the margin of his notebook instead. He drew a boy with no outline at all, a boy the teacher walked past and the group forgot to save a chair for. Because the invisible boy looked lonely, Dinesh gave him a small cape made of notebook lines. He had watched the ironed interview shirt hang on the door that morning, so he knew what it felt like to get ready for something that never came. Then he slid the page toward Ananya, who was sorting her pencils by colour. She stopped, looked at the drawing, and pressed a strip of masking tape onto the blank boy's chest so he would hold on the page. "There," she said. "Now he stays."