THE ALLEY
Some rejections are just redirections in disguise
The message arrived the way they always did.
Through someone who knew someone.
Signed by no one.
They came after long stretches of silence, appearing like ordinary things.
This one was no different.
But she felt its weight before she opened it.
Building 7. Smith Road.
1 p.m. tomorrow.
She didn’t question it.
She never had.
Each message carried a direction she didn’t yet understand, but somehow obeyed.
A year earlier, on the same day, she’d been called to the main office at school.
A slip of paper.
Four words: Be at the Depot.
11 o’clock. No reminders.
The Depot was an abandoned lot the color of rust.
She didn’t know why she went.
Only that she did.
A woman waited for her.
Not that much older than she was.
Calm in a way that felt rehearsed.
She handed over a packet.
Twelve pages of questions.
She was seventeen.
Her whole history fit in half a paragraph.
She hid the packet under her jacket and returned to class.
No one noticed a thing.
The next message sent her on a three hour bus ride to a building that had once been something, a factory maybe, or a school.
Silence lived there now.
Inside, she followed the instructions exactly.
Stairs.
Double doors.
First room on the right.
Eleven others sat in rows.
One chair waited for her.
A man entered.
He didn’t smile.
“Today will be long,” he said.
It was.
Four hours of questions, repetitive, strange, moral in ways that scraped against the skin.
Four hundred of them.
The silence was unbearable.
A woman touched her shoulder.
“Come with me.”
Another empty room.
Two chairs.
A conversation that felt too intimate for two strangers.
She surprised herself with what she said.
and what she didn’t.
When the day ended, they all left in silence.
She stepped outside and felt disoriented by the normal world—traffic, chatter, the smell of food carts.
How could the two realities touch?
Then two months of nothing.
No messages.
No explanations.
Until today.
She arrived early.
Waited.
Watched shadows move across the sidewalk.
At exactly 1:00, a young man walked toward her.
His smile didn’t reach his eyes.
“You weren’t chosen.”
She swallowed.
“Why?”
He shrugged and started to walk away.
A beat passed, and he turned his head, whispering,
“You can’t talk about this. Not to anyone. It won’t be good for you.”
He stepped back into the crowd
and disappeared
as if he’d never been there at all.
She stood alone in the quiet.
A year of secrecy, lies, and trying to belong collapsed into a single sentence.
But underneath the sting, something else stirred.
A truth she wasn’t ready to name but couldn’t ignore.
They hadn’t rejected her.
They had revealed her.
She wasn’t meant to follow.
She was meant to lead.
