The Day the Comments Started Predicting My Ending

The comments started on a Tuesday, during Advanced Structural Analysis, and they were not kind. I was sitting in the third row of Halloran Auditorium, sketching load-bearing calculations for a suspension bridge I would never build, when the first line of text appeared above Professor Aldrich's head. It hovered there, translucent and pale blue, like a reflection on water. WORLDBUILDING NOTE: THE HEROINE WILL BE INTRODUCED IN CHAPTER TWELVE. SHE IS THE TRUE HEIR TO THE VANE LEGACY. My pencil stopped moving. I blinked. The words remained. Professor Aldrich continued his lecture on tensile stress. The two hundred students around me continued taking notes. No one else looked up. No one else saw anything at all. The text drifted, shifted, and dissolved, replaced by another line. THE BETROTHAL TO SEBASTIAN VANE IS A PLOT DEVICE. SHE WILL BE PUBLICLY HUMILIATED IN CHAPTER FIFTEEN. My chest tightened. I knew those names. Sebastian Vane was the reason I had transferred into this program. Sebastian Vane was the reason my mother had cried when I told her I was leaving home. Sebastian Vane was the man whose ring sat on a chain beneath my sweater, cold against my sternum, a promise made when we were seventeen and stupid and certain the world would arrange itself around our plans. I looked across the auditorium to where he sat, four rows back, surrounded by the usual crowd. He was laughing at something Evan Marsh had said, his head tilted, his dark hair falling across his forehead in that way that still made my stomach flip. As if he felt my gaze, he turned. His smile softened. He lifted two fingers in a small wave. The comments above his head read: HE DOES NOT LOVE HER. HE WILL NEVER LOVE HER. THE HEROINE WILL ARRIVE, AND SHE WILL FORGET SHE EVER EXISTED. I forced myself to breathe. This was a hallucination. A stress response. I had been sleeping badly, eating worse. My advisor had been pressuring me to finalize my thesis topic. That was all this was. My brain, starved of rest, inventing narratives to explain the anxiety that had been building for months. But the comments didn't stop. Over the next three days, they followed me everywhere. In the library, they scrolled across the spines of books: THE AUTHOR IS BUILDING SYMPATHY FOR THE HEROINE. In the dining hall, they hovered over my tray: THIS SCENE IS FILLER. THE REAL PLOT BEGINS IN CHAPTER TWELVE. In my dormitory at night, they crawled across the ceiling: SHE IS NOT THE PROTAGONIST. SHE WAS NEVER THE PROTAGONIST. By Friday, I had stopped pretending they weren't real. Whatever they were, they knew things. They knew that Sebastian's father, Conrad Vane, had summoned him home for a meeting about the family trust. They knew that my fellowship application had been flagged for review by a committee I had never heard of. They knew that Evan Marsh had been seen in the dean's office twice that week, and they hinted that his family's donation to the university was about to pay for a new laboratory. They knew, in other words, the shape of my life better than I did. I started keeping a notebook. Not the kind I used for coursework. A small, black, pocket-sized thing I bought from the campus bookstore and filled with observations. Every time a comment appeared, I wrote it down. The date. The location. The exact wording. I told myself I was documenting a psychological episode. I told myself I was being rational. But the more I wrote, the more I noticed a pattern. The comments weren't random. They were predictive. They described events before they happened. They described people's intentions before those intentions became visible. They described me in the third person, as a character, as a function, as something that could be written out of the story. The worst one came on Saturday morning, as I was walking across the quad toward the engineering building. It appeared in the sky, faint against the gray clouds, and it stayed long enough for me to memorize every word. THE BETROTHAL WILL BE PUBLICLY DISSOLVED AT THE VANE FOUNDATION GALA. SHE WILL BE HUMILIATED. SHE WILL CRY. THE CROWD WILL LAUGH. THIS IS THE PROTAGONIST'S FIRST VICTORY. I stopped walking. Students flowed around me, annoyed by the obstacle I had become. I stood there, shivering in the cold, and I made a decision. I was not going to be humiliated. I was not going to cry. I was not going to let them laugh. The comments, whatever they were, had given me something no one else had. They had given me a warning. And if there was one thing I had learned in engineering school, it was that warnings were only useful if you acted on them. I took out my phone and texted Sebastian. Me: I need to talk to you. Tonight. His reply came within seconds. Sebastian: Everything okay? Me: I don't know yet. Just come. I pocketed the phone and continued walking. Above my head, the comment faded, replaced by a new one. SHE IS MAKING A MISTAKE. THE PLOT CANNOT BE CHANGED. I smiled grimly. Watch me.