"Bitter innocence "

Prologue

Every story has a beginning.
Ours began in the noisy walls of a classroom, where laughter echoed louder than reason, and innocence still painted the days.

At first, it was light - the kind of teasing that children mistake for friendship, the kind that makes others laugh but leaves one person stung. For Vanish, Shrish was both a friend and a stranger, someone who knew exactly how to make her laugh... and then, without warning, how to make her cry.

The world called it "fun."
She called it poison.

Somewhere between sixth and seventh grade, the line blurred. His words grew sharper, his presence heavier - like a shadow she could never shake off. If she ignored him, he only came closer. If she fought back, his eyes glimmered as though her anger was the prize he had been waiting for.

And yet, buried beneath his cruelty, there was something else. Something unspoken. Something dangerous.

Perhaps it was obsession. Perhaps it was love.
Perhaps it was the kind of love that ruins both people in the end.

Because what Shrish and Vanish shared was never simple. It was a storm - one that began with laughter but promised to end in silence. A silence so final it would hurt more than all the teasing, more than all the shouting, more than all the broken rakhis and unanswered questions.

This is not a love story.
This is a story of how love twists, how hate clings, and how two names - whispered together in a school corridor - can carry scars for a lifetime.

This is the story of Vanish and Shrish.
A story that was doomed from the moment it began.