Gemotions

The email notification pinged, and Leo’s stomach did a flip. Ms. Chen, his art teacher, was now connected on his BeReal. He hadn’t thought she’d even *know* what BeReal was. He’d been posting his less-than-stellar sketches, the ones that were meant to be therapeutic but ended up looking like a toddler's tantrum on paper.

He refused to meet her eyes in class. He began doodling in his notebook during her lectures, drawing increasingly absurd caricatures of her, filling the margins with tiny, furious lines. The more he drew, the more his knuckles whitened.