Abi In Wonderland

Borrowed Noise

The morning stretched into afternoon, and somehow Abi hadn't moved from her spot on the bed, surrounded by the four of them now sprawled across her room like they'd always belonged there.

"Okay, one more thing before we forget," Pyonghwa said, sitting up suddenly. "The '67' thing—you have to actually see it, not just hear about it."

She demonstrated again, hands weighing invisible items in the air, and this time Abi laughed—really laughed, not the polite kind she'd been doing all morning.

"That's so stupid," Abi said, wiping at her eyes.

"Right?!" Melba threw her hands up. "And yet everyone's doing it."

The laughter settled into a comfortable quiet. Abi pulled her knees up to her chest, watching the four of them the way she used to watch people through car windows—like they belonged to a world she wasn't quite part of.

"Can I ask you guys something?" she said finally.

"Anything," Matilda said, propping her chin on her hand.

"Do any of you… know my school? Or my family?" The question came out smaller than she meant it to. "Like, have you met them, or—"

The room shifted. Just slightly.

"We don't really know the specifics of your life before, Miss Abi," Pyonghwa said, easy and unbothered. "Master just told us to make you feel welcome."

"Yeah, sorry," Melba added, shrugging. "We're kind of in the dark too."

"Same," Matilda said.

"Oh," Abi said. "Okay."

She didn't push it. But something in her chest folded inward, quiet and small, filing the moment away.

They don't know. Or they're just really good at saying they don't.

She thought about her old school hallway, the one with the flickering light near the science lab. She thought about her mother's voice, sharp and distant even when she was standing right there. She thought about how long it had been since anyone outside this house had said her name.

If I wanted to leave, she thought, watching Karen braid a piece of her own hair absentmindedly, I wouldn't even know where to start.

The thought didn't scare her the way she expected it to. It just sat there, patient, like a seed she hadn't decided whether to water yet.

"Anyway," Karen said, breaking the quiet, "you should tell us about your old school sometime, if you ever feel like it. No pressure though."

"Maybe," Abi said softly, glancing at Pyonghwa, who just smiled and let the moment pass without comment.

"How old are you all, anyway?" Abi asked, mostly to fill the silence, but also because she realized she knew almost nothing about any of them.

"Nineteen," Karen said. "Just finished secondary school last year, actually—took a gap year before deciding what's next." She smiled. "Everyone keeps calling me a sophomore like I'm still in it. I'm not even in uni yet."

Abi nodded slowly, filing that away too—not because it mattered, but because everything felt like it mattered right now. Every small fact about these girls, about Zev, about the life happening just outside the walls of this house, felt like a piece she was supposed to be collecting.

Her head started to throb faintly behind her eyes. The room, which had felt warm and easy an hour ago, suddenly felt too full—too many voices, too many new names, too much information crashing into a mind that had spent two years in near silence.

"Abi?" Melba's voice, gentler now. "You okay?"

"Yeah," Abi said, though her hands had curled into the blanket without her noticing. "Just… a lot, I guess. Good a lot. Just a lot."

Pyonghwa reached over and squeezed her wrist, light and reassuring.

"We can slow down," she said. "There's no rush. We've got time."

They stayed a while longer, the conversation drifting into smaller things—Matilda showing her a dance trend that made no sense no matter how many times she demonstrated it, Melba complaining about a drama's ending, Karen falling asleep mid-sentence and startling herself awake again. Someone braided a section of Abi's hair loosely, just for something to do with their hands. By the time the light outside had shifted gold, Abi's cheeks actually hurt from smiling.

Abi nodded, grateful, even as her mind kept turning quietly beneath the surface—how easily they'd all said the same thing, how practiced it sounded, like a line they'd agreed on before she ever asked.

There's a version of my life out there, she thought, that these girls know pieces of, even if they won't say it out loud. And there's a version of theirs I'm only just starting to see the edges of.

She didn't say it out loud. She just let the thought settle, small and sharp, somewhere she wouldn't forget it.

Evening came too fast.

"We should head out before it gets dark," Pyonghwa said eventually, stretching as she stood. "Don't want Master worrying."

The others groaned in unison, dragging themselves up off the bed, gathering bags and phones and the half-eaten snacks they'd scattered across the room. There were hugs—quick, easy, the kind Abi wasn't used to receiving—and a promise from Matilda to bring "actual good snacks" next time.

"This was fun," Abi said, and meant it more than she expected to.

"We'll be back soon," Pyonghwa said, squeezing her hand once before letting go.

Abi walked them to the top of the staircase and no further, some old, unspoken rule keeping her feet planted there. She watched instead from her window, drawing the curtain back just enough to see the four of them cross the compound below—laughing about something she couldn't hear, Karen shoving Melba lightly, Pyonghwa glancing back once toward the house before the gate swallowed them and shut with its familiar metal groan.

Then it was just her again.

The room, which had felt so full an hour ago, seemed to exhale around her, settling back into its usual quiet. Abi let the curtain fall closed and stood there a moment longer than she needed to, listening to the particular silence of a house with no one else awake in it.

She knew this silence. She'd lived inside it for two years.

It didn't feel the same anymore, though—not after the noise, the laughter, the four voices that had filled the room like it was nothing. Now the quiet felt heavier, more aware of itself, like it, too, had noticed what it had been missing.

Abi walked back to her bed, straightened the pillows the girls had thrown out of place, and picked her book back up from the nightstand—the one she'd left open to the same page for a week. She read the same line three times without absorbing a word of it.

Outside, the sky kept darkening. Somewhere out there, four girls were walking home to lives Abi knew nothing about, carrying pieces of hers they weren't telling her.

And Abi, as she always did, settled back into the shape of her hermit kingdom—quiet, contained, and a little more aware, now, of exactly how small it was.