It started with a piece of paper by my locker. White, narrowly printed, with a line I knew all too well: 'I don't sleep when the world is silent, because silence asks too much'. My words. My file that I kept on my laptop in a folder that I didn't tell anyone about. The corridor of Wislawa Szymborska High School smelled of chalk and wet jackets. The afternoon rain trickled down the glass like overly long commas. A few people were already standing by the paper and reading, suspiciously quietly. I noticed glances, those brief ones, like the flutter of a crow: from the text, to me, and back again. I tore off the printout and rolled it in my hand until it was a crumpled ball. Later I saw another one, by the biology room. And another, above the attendance log. They were marked in the same fine print, no signature, no dog-ear marks of the author. Just my run-on sentences, worn out of tone, but still mine. In the evening, Tymon texted me, for the first time since the holidays, since our silence had stretched like a rubber band receptacle, ready to snap painfully at the slightest movement. "I've been reading. Is this yours?" - popped up on the screen in a green cloud. I wrote back after a long moment: 'I don't know what you saw'. And then he sent a picture: the taffy of our gymnasium, the ceiling refracted with scaffolding of lights, and an overhead projector on which someone had set up the announcement: ECHO OF THE NIGHT - OPEN PRESENTATION, 21:45. "It's tonight!" - he called to me before I had time to write that it was some kind of sick joke. I could hear in his voice that old, fierce calm with which he tamed even the worst tests. - "A poster fell through my film club door. It doesn't have a signature, but it's not a coincidence. If it's your lyrics, someone will use it. I can open from the back. Meet me at twenty-one behind the auditorium. Take a sweatshirt. It's always cold there." For half an hour I lay on the bed, measuring the ceiling with my eyes, as if I were going to find some answer there in the form of a mathematics formula. "Maybe it's not about me" - reason whispered. But the ball of paper in my rucksack was a reminder, with each step across the wet tiles, that nothing was that simple. Mum asked from the kitchen: "Are you going back to school? It's still raining after all." I just nodded, lacing up my shoes, promising myself I'd be back before anything started, before anything started without the possibility of going back. The square behind the gymnasium was darker than usual. The lights over the pitch were barely glowing amber and the maple leaves were making helpless figure eights in the air. Tymon was already waiting, tucked into a dark, oversized jacket. I saw him clutching a bunch of keys in his hand. - 'I thought you weren't coming,' he said, without looking me in the eye, as if it was a table setting that had to be done carefully, without bottling up the emotion. - 'I did come,' I replied, and in that one word fit everything we hadn't said to each other over the past months: my stubbornness, his disappointment, our clumsy apologies. - Let me see. We passed the metal door from the back room, which always jams on the thirteenth miniscule movement of the key. Tymon hit it immediately, as if he was doing it for the hundredth time. We walked down a narrow corridor where the walls remembered as many tournaments as sweat, and the smell of rubber pavement hit me with a wave of memories. In the far side of the building, a cleaner was vacuuming rhythmically, like a metronome that someone had left on. We entered the hall. Darkness hung from the ceiling, only to be played out by a fan of pale light coming from the overhead projector. In the middle of the dance floor stood a folding stand, still assembled. On the screen flicked the title and countdown: 00:08:17. Someone had set it up, someone had left it up. None of us liked 'someone'. - Don't you want to report it to the teachers? - whispered Tymon, as if the walls had ears. - 'I know, I sound like a school radio station, but whatever it is, it might be.... well, not right. - Before anyone gets here, it will go live,' I replied. - I'm not going to be watched like a nature exhibition. Subcutaneously I was furious. The rage had the colour of a warning on a traffic light: one more moment and you have to run. We approached the technical table. Lying on it was a list of connections, a pen with the school's logo on it and a memory stick, as red as a blob after biting my lips. I touched it and then the projector sizzled and the first sentence appeared on the screen: 'I swallow my tears so no one can hear them rain'. My throat became dry as if after five kilometres without water. - This is yours - Tymon didn't ask. - 'I've never shown it to anyone,' I whispered, and that sentence splashed like porcelain against the dance floor. - 'I don't know where that came from...' - I broke off as the speakers on the walls experienced their own awakening. First a hum, then a quiet crack, like a zipper coming undone, and then - my voice. Mine, without doubt, with everything I recognise in it: the soft hoarseness of illness, that laugh that turns into a whisper mid-sentence. - Stop it - I said to the equipment, to the air, to whomever. I threw myself at the laptop someone had left open on the realiser's table. I froze. There was still my file on the desktop: MAJA_beliefs.docx. Renamed: ECHO_MAJA. The cursor moved, although I didn't touch it. It was as if someone's hand was in front of me, only invisible. Icons started disappearing from the toolbar, one by one. At the top of the window flashed: user: guest. - Someone is controlling this remotely - Tymon walked around the table, looked at the cables, as if there was an answer in the cables. - We'll unplug it. - Before he had time to reach for the plug at the skirting board, the screen was flooded with white, and then more lines appeared, this time not from the lines, but from the transcript of the conversation. I recognised the date and time from two years ago. A conversation with him. After he left our theatre group because he couldn't stand the words I threw around like drunken anger. My breath hung in my chest, heavy as a key ring. - We don't have time for this,' I whispered more to myself. - It needs to be turned off. - I'm going to the balcony - Tymon pointed to the gallery above the hall where the lighting mixer stood. - 'Maybe it's coming from there. I'll turn off the power. - Don't disappear - I snapped out too quickly, suddenly. I had never asked him for anything since that summer. He nodded, something like a promise passed between us and disappeared into the darkness. He ran up the stairs and I stayed at the table, listening to my voice on the speakers say things I no longer wanted to remember, like: "I was afraid then that if I told the truth, everyone would see that I was smaller than I pretended to be." My fingers were like cotton wool, sticky from the pressure. I unplugged the memory stick. Nothing. I cut the power to the strip. The projector display blinked, like an eyelid over an uncomfortable question, and went back to work, and my voice, no longer from the projector but from the speakers against the wall, said clearly: - Hi, Maya. I froze. It wasn't a quote. It sounded as if someone was speaking to me now, very close to me, as if they were standing just behind the stage curtain and could see my profile, my clenched jaws, my hand on the cable, which suddenly seemed ridiculously small. - Tymon? - I called out, without conviction. All that answered me from the ceiling was a quiet thud, maybe a shoe against a metal edge, maybe something else. The yellow light of the escape lamp drew thin rectangles on the dance floor, each shadow looking like a letter I couldn't read. - 'Hi, Maya,' it repeated, this time with a slight laugh. - Finally, here we all are. I looked around. No one in the stands. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that a new window had appeared on the screen: a folder with the name PRIVATE. Inside, thumbnails of files I knew all too well: photos from last year's trip, a file with a silly song I'd recorded for myself in December, and a document with a failed letter to my dad that I hadn't sent. - 'If you can hear me, stop,' I said to this absent presence, trying to sound as hard as your knees harden when you fall. - This is not yours. - Or maybe we should just talk,' the voice replied, already without the pretense of my sound. It was unfamiliar but strangely familiar, like an echo of the corridor you walk down every day. - You yourself wanted someone to finally hear you. I felt anger rising in me, but underneath it was something else: fear not of what others would hear, but of what I would hear about myself. I looked at the clock above the hall gate: 00:02:49 The countdown was still going. - Relic of the fluorescent lights on the balcony - I heard a whisper from above. Tymon. Relief went down my spine like a warm shiver. - I'm about to switch off. - Don't move,' said the voice. And then something clicked in the power supply, something small, quick, like the blink of an eye. The lights dimmed by a shade and the lights in the corridor beyond the door went out. In the semi-darkness, the screen flared even brighter, blinding, forcing you to look. A text appeared in the middle, not a poem, not a note, just a simple sentence: 'Get on stage, alone'. - Don't do it," Tymon piped up, more emphatically than he ever spoke to me. I heard him walk down the metal steps, hurriedly. There was a noise in the sound system, as if someone had moved the microphone very close to the diaphragm. - 'Come in, Maya,' repeated the voice. - Or we'll fire the whole thing up. The whole thing. I imagined what 'the whole thing' meant. Those files, those sentences, the things he keeps all in folders because it's easier to have an apparent order over them than to let them out into the world. The slab of the dance floor hummed under my steps like a snare drum. I made one, then another. I felt how the ground was at once the same as it had always been and as foreign as a city on a map you see for the first time. - Stop! - Tymon was already downstairs. He ran onto the stage from the other side, we clashed gazes halfway down. There was so much in his eyes that I hadn't considered when I decided I could manage on my own. Then something rustled on the curtain. The heavy maroon fabric moved where the curtain didn't touch the floor. Instinctively we both looked. A small light flashed between the folds, red as sudden shame. The sound from the speakers grew to a short, low tone from which the air trembled, and on the screen the counter jumped faster, as if someone had sped up time. 00:00:09. 00:00:08. 00:00:07. I reached out to push the fabric away. I could feel the roughness of the fabric under my fingers, the needles of dust escaping, and the coolness of the sheet somewhere underneath. The door of the back room slammed shut with a bang, as if a draught had arms. - Maya, no! - Tymon shouted as my fingers dug into the fold of the curtain, and the speakers, just above our heads, played pianissimo three notes, like a signal to enter. The screen at the same moment displayed something new: an email header, the recipient's address, the subject line: "To all". And before I had time to catch my breath, the counter disappeared and an unforgiving white glare descended on the room.