Chapter3
1172 Words
The thing about starting over is that you have to figure out which parts of yourself you’re bringing with you.
I walk into Westfield High on a Tuesday in late October carrying my olive duffel which I immediately switch to one shoulder because I don’t want to look like I’m about to deploy and I do the thing I always do in new spaces, which is stop at the entrance and quickly scan the room before I enter it.
Main hallway. Wide, fluorescent, the particular institutional beige of a building that was last renovated in the nineties. Student population approximately two hundred in this corridor, half of them on their phones, the other half distributed between lockers and conversations and the early-morning lethargy of teenagers who would rather be asleep. No wolves — or rather, no wolves I can smell from the doorway. If there’s a pack presence here it’s not dominant. That’s unusual for a city school but not unprecedented. Some neighborhoods run neutral.
I go inside.
The office is to the left. I collect my schedule and my locker combination from a woman named Mrs. Chen who has the warmth of someone who has processed a lot of transfer students and stopped being surprised by any of them. She gives me a map. She says there’s a buddy system for new students. I say I’ll be fine. She says my buddy is a senior named Jasper Holt. I say I’m really fine. She hands me Jasper Holt’s phone number anyway.
I put it in my pocket and do not look at it.
My first three classes are in the north wing. I find them without the map. I sit near the back in each one — not the very back, which reads as either anxious or hostile, but the second-to-last row, left of center where the exits are visible and sight lines are clear. Teacher accessible if needed, which it won’t be.
I am a straight-A student at a school that no longer has my records. I’m going to have to rebuild that and I’m already calculating how long it will take. Six weeks for teachers to form impressions. Three for grades to clarify. By January I’ll have re-established myself. I can do this in my sleep.
I do not think about Creston Academy. I do not think about the people there. I do not think about Caden, or the way he stood at the center of the clearing and dismantled six years of certainty in four words. I am at Westfield now and Westfield is a new room and I am going to fill it correctly.
By lunch I have observed the following: two teachers who pay close attention (AP English, Coach Marsh for PE), one teacher who probably doesn’t know half the students’ names (Calc), one student who has been watching me with the bright-eyed curiosity of someone about to make a social move, and one student who has been watching me with something quieter and harder to read.
The bright-eyed one finds me at lunch.
I choose a table at the far left of the cafeteria — corner-adjacent, back to the wall, facing the room. I open my book. I have a sandwich from Mira’s kitchen and a clear view of both exits.
He materializes from the lunch line and stops at my table with a tray and an expression of genuine, slightly unnerving goodwill.
“You’re the new girl.”
“The table’s taken.”
He looks at the four empty seats. He looks at me. “By who?”
“Me.”
He ignores the hint and sits down anyway.
He is tall — a few inches over six feet — with warm brown skin and short natural curls and hazel eyes that look at me the way people look at things they find genuinely interesting, which is to say he looks at me the way I look at a difficult book: with appetite. He smells human — clean, no wolf, nothing threatening. He smells like the kind of human who runs.
“I’m Jasper. I’m apparently your buddy.”
“I don’t need one.”
“Cool, I can just be regular company then.” He opens his carton of orange juice. “How’s your first day going?”
I turn a page. “Fine.”
“Find everything okay?”
“Yes.”
“Teachers seem alright?”
“Some of them.”
He is quiet for a moment. Then, “You’re going to make me work for this, aren’t you?”
“I’m trying to make you understand that I don’t require company and you can redirect your buddy-system energy toward someone who actually needs it.”
“Sure. What are you reading?”
I show him the cover because it’s faster than not showing him.
“Oh, I read that. The ending is—”
“Don’t.”
He mimes closing his mouth. He goes back to his lunch. I go back to my book. There is forty minutes of lunch remaining.
He does not leave.
At minute thirty-two he says: “Okay, genuine question, no buddy-system agenda, are you actually fine or are you doing that thing where you act fine because you don’t like explaining things to people?”
I look up from my book.
He is looking at me with the same bright-eyed attention, but something in it has shifted — the social performance is down a fraction and what’s underneath is just a person asking a real question. I look at his face and I look for what he wants from the answer and I don’t find the usual things. I find: genuine curiosity, mild concern, and something I don’t immediately recognize.
I choose to play dumb “What?”
“The thing. Everyone has it. Mine’s making terrible jokes. Yours looks like pretending to be interested in a book.”
I look at him for another second before saying “Both.”
He nods. “Cool. That makes sense.” He goes back to his lunch without pushing further.
I look at the top of his head for a moment.
Then go back to my book.
At the end of lunch he stands up, collects his tray.
“Same time tomorrow?”
“I didn’t agree to today.”
“Yeah, but you also didn’t leave.”
He walks away.
I look at the space he occupied for a moment. I look at the room — the exits, the windows, the Tuesday afternoon light coming through the high cafeteria windows.
I do not feel fine. I feel like someone has lifted a burden from my chest and all of a sudden it dawns on me that I’m in a new room and have not yet figured out which parts of myself came with me and which parts stayed behind in the Ashvale clearing at midnight.
But I pick up my bag and go to my next class.
I am fine. I am absolutely, definitively, comprehensively fine.
- Writer
