The Weight of Unsent Letters

Fairholt High had a rule about new girls, and the rule was: don't be one for long. Blend in by the second week or get eaten alive by the third. Mila had transferred in September, and by October she'd learned exactly one thing worth knowing about this school, that Cole Ashford ran it the way a king runs a country he's never had to fight for. He didn't even have to try. That was the worst part. He walked down the C-hall like the floor owed him something, laughed too loud at his own jokes, and had somehow convinced an entire junior class that his personality was charming instead of exhausting. Mila had disliked plenty of people efficiently in her life and new schools bred a talent for it but she'd never disliked someone this completely, this fast. "You're in my seat," she told him, the first week, in AP Bio. "It's not assigned," he said, not even looking up from his phone. "It's the seat by the window. I like the window." He looked up then, slow, like he was doing her a favor by acknowledging she existed. "New girl wants the window seat." He said it to the room, not to her, and the room laughed, and Mila sat two rows back for the rest of the semester and hated him with the pure, uncomplicated hatred of someone who'd decided, correctly, that this person would never be worth her time. She just focused on her newly found anonymous love. Slot 112 was the school's worst-kept secret and nobody's business. Somewhere in the bank of ancient mailboxes outside the old journalism room, brass, dented, most of them rusted shut but one of the slots did something the others didn't. You wrote a note, folded it small, and pushed it into 112. The next morning, there'd be a reply. Different handwriting. No name. Nobody had ever figured out the trick, and everyone had stopped trying, because Fairholt kids were more interested in what 112 was for than how it worked: it was where you put the things you couldn't put anywhere else. Mila had found it by accident, crying in the empty hallway on her second day, and written the truest thing she had "I moved here three weeks ago and I don't think anyone has said my actual name since". She hadn't expected an answer. She'd gotten one anyway, tucked into the slot the next morning, in handwriting that slanted hard to the right like it was in a hurry to be somewhere else: Everyone at this school already knows everyone else's name and I still feel like nobody's said mine either. Welcome to Fairholt. It's worse than it looks. She wrote back before she could think better of it. He wrote back the same day. Within a month she was telling 112 things she'd never said out loud to anyone.The real reason her family kept moving, the ache of watching the moon get fuller every night and having no one to explain it to, the specific loneliness of being surrounded by people and unable to tell a single one of them what she actually was. Sometimes I feel like there are two versions of me, she wrote, near the end of October, and the real one only exists on paper, at eleven p.m., to someone who doesn't even know my name. Is that pathetic? Tell me that's pathetic so I can stop doing it. It's not pathetic, 112 wrote back. I think about you more than I think about anyone I actually talk to. I don't know what that says about me. Probably nothing good. She read that letter four times. She did not, obviously, connect it to the boy who'd humiliated her over a window seat two weeks prior. Why would she? They were not even the same species of person. The full moon came on a Thursday, which Mila hated, because Thursdays had Bio last period and Bio last period had Cole Ashford radiating easy, insufferable charm three seats up while her skin felt too tight for her body and her patience wore down to something sharp and animal. She left the second the bell rang. Cut through the tree line behind the parking lot the pack territory, technically hers to walk since her family had settled here, a boring obligation she performed because her mother made her and was three steps into the trees when she heard something that made every hair on her arms stand up: a sound that was half a boy's voice and half something that shouldn't have a voice at all. Choking. Breaking. Wrong. She found him on his knees in the dirt behind the equipment shed, spine arched at an angle no human spine should manage, and even through the pain twisting his face into something unrecognizable, she knew him instantly. Cole Ashford. On the ground. Shaking apart. "Get away," he managed, teeth already too long for his mouth. "Get someone, get away from me" "You're shifting," she said, and her own voice came out strange, flat with disbelief. "You're, how are you shifting, you're not" "I don't know what's happening to me." It came out raw, stripped of every ounce of the swagger she'd spent two months despising. Just a boy, terrified, mid-transformation, with nobody. "It started a month ago. I wake up in the woods. I don't remember anything. I thought I was losing my mind, I didn't he stammered I didn't know there was a word for this, I didn't know it was real" Mila had ten seconds, maybe less, to decide. Pack law was absolute: no unregistered wolves, no exposure, no exceptions, and a bitten wolf going through an unsupervised first change could die, or worse, get seen. She could turn around. She could let this be someone else's problem. She dropped to her knees in the dirt in front of him instead. "Look at me. Breathe with me, okay? I know what this is. I know what you're going through. You are not losing your mind." He looked up at her, his pupils blown wide, gold bleeding into brown, and underneath the pain, something that might have been relief so total it looked like grief. "How do you know what this is?" "Because it's mine too." She held out both hands, steady, though nothing about her felt steady. "Breathe. I've got you. First one's the worst. I promise it gets easier." It took an hour. By the end of it he was sitting in the leaves, human again, wrecked and shaking and staring at her like she'd rebuilt him from pieces. "Why did you stay?" he said. "You hate me. You've hated me since the window seat." "I don't know," she said, which was a lie, because some small unquiet part of her already suspected the answer and didn't want it yet. He wiped his face, laughed once, exhausted and in disbelief. "I told someone about this. Not — not about the actual wolf part, I didn't know that part yet, but the waking-up-in-the-woods part, the not-remembering. I've been writing to this box at school. Slot 112. I don't even know who it is. It's the only place I've told the truth in a month." Mila went very still. "I've been thinking about her more than I think about anyone I actually talk to," he said, quiet now, not performing for anyone. "Which is insane, because I don't even know her name." I think about you more than I think about anyone I actually talk to. I don't know what that says about me. Probably nothing good. She heard it in his voice this time not the slant of the handwriting, but the exact same halting honesty, and the floor of the world tipped sideways beneath her. "Cole," she said, and something in the way she said his name made him go still too, made him look at her like he was seeing her for the first time and the four-hundredth time all at once. "I need you to tell me exactly what you wrote to 112 last night."