Georgia
Four words from my mother, and I felt eleven years old again.
The text comes in around nine that night, while I sit cross-legged on my bed with my lit textbook open to a page I still haven’t actually read, my mind still snagged on the dining hall, on the moment my eyes locked with Puck’s, on the way the whole room seemed to shift around us, on his locked shoulders as some unnamed student steered him away. My phone buzzes against the comforter, and I glance down without thinking, the way you check any notification, expecting nothing in particular.
*How’s the training? Back on track?*
That’s it. No greeting. No "hi honey" or "thinking of you." Just the question, dropped in like the conversation never paused between whatever we last discussed and right now, like she’s been keeping some internal clock running, checking back in at the appropriate interval. I can almost hear the voice behind it, flat and measured, the same tone she used to grade my landings from the boards like I was a stranger’s routine and not her own daughter’s body in motion.
I stare at it for a full minute. Maybe longer. Long enough that the screen dims once and I have to tap it awake again just to keep reading the same four words over and over, like something new might appear in them if I look hard enough. It never does. The words just sit there, patient and precise, exactly the way she is.
Back on track. Like I was ever off track. Like showing up somewhere new, meeting people, figuring out an entirely different rink and an entirely different life counts as some kind of derailment that needs correcting. Something small and tight coils in my chest, the exact same feeling I used to get standing in the kitchen at eleven years old while she reviewed my practice notes over breakfast, red pen in hand even when there was nothing written down yet to grade. I remember the way she’d tap the pen against the table, waiting, like silence itself was a mistake I needed to fix.
I don’t answer. I delete the text instead, thumb moving before I’ve fully decided to do it, like some part of me needs it gone before it can do any more damage sitting there on my screen. For a second, deleting it feels like winning something. It doesn’t last.
It doesn’t help as much as I want it to. The words stay lodged in my head even with the message gone, looping quietly underneath everything else I try to think about for the rest of the evening, threading themselves into every unrelated thought until I can’t tell anymore which worries are mine and which ones are just hers, borrowed and left behind like a coat I never asked to wear.
That night I can’t sleep.
I lie in the dark listening to Mandi’s steady breathing across the room, staring up at the same ceiling I’ve been staring at since I got here, running through everything: the dining hall, Puck’s locked shoulders, Mollie’s four words, the whole tangled mess of this place that keeps handing me more questions than answers. Sleep stays somewhere just out of reach, close enough to feel possible and far enough that I can’t quite fall into it. Every time I close my eyes, some new fragment of the day surfaces instead, refusing to let me rest.
Around two in the morning, the howling starts.
I’ve heard it before, that first night, distant and layered, easy enough for Mandi to wave off as coyotes even though something in me never quite believed her. This is different. This is closer. Close enough that I feel it more than hear it, a low vibration under the actual sound, rolling in through the old windowpanes like the forest itself presses right up against the edge of campus tonight instead of staying politely back in the trees. My skin prickles before my mind even catches up to why.
I sit up slowly, careful not to wake Mandi, and cross the room to the window, my bare feet silent against the cold floor.
The campus below lies dark and still, lamplight pooling in small circles along the empty paths, the tree line beyond it a solid wall of black against a slightly less black sky. I press my palm against the cold glass and search the darkness. My breath fogs faintly against the pane, and I hold as still as I can, willing whatever’s out there not to notice me back.
The howl rises again, closer than before, long and low and unmistakably real.
Then I see it. Two points of gold, low to the ground at the edge of the tree line, catching some faint scrap of ambient light just long enough to register before they vanish. Eyes. They have to be eyes, gone almost before I can be certain I actually saw them at all, swallowed back into the dark like the forest erased them the second I noticed. A cold thread of fear runs straight through my chest, quick and sharp, gone as fast as it came.
My heart hammers against my ribs. I stay at the window a long time, palm still pressed to the glass, waiting for them to reappear. They don’t. The howling fades slowly, farther and farther away, until the campus outside settles back into quiet, ordinary again, like nothing happened at all. My pulse still hammers, refusing to believe I imagined it.
I finally step back from the window and grab my phone off the nightstand, thumb already moving toward Mandi’s name in my contacts. I want to tell someone. I want to ask if she heard it too, if she saw anything, if this is normal, because I don’t have anyone else here yet who I trust enough to ask. The wanting itself surprises me, how badly I crave just one honest answer from someone in this place.
My thumb hovers over the screen.
I picture the delayed laugh. The strange smile at the edges. Everyone knows everything at Rosethorne. I remember how easily "coyotes" slid out of her mouth that first night over pizza, smooth and instant and worn in by years of practice, like a lie told so many times it stopped feeling like one a long time ago. I think of the dining hall too, the way the whole room seemed to breathe in sync around me and Puck, and I wonder if Mandi is part of that same quiet choreography, whether trust here is even a real thing I’m allowed to have.
I don’t send it.
Instead I open my notes app, the same one still holding that single line from weeks ago about Alexa and her eleven seconds of stillness, and I add a new line beneath it, my thumbs moving slow in the dark.
*2 a.m. Howling, closer than before. Two gold eyes at the tree line. Gone before I could be sure.*
I don’t know it yet, sitting there in the dark with my phone glowing faint against my face. A list I haven’t decided to keep is starting, growing one strange, unexplainable line at a time, whether I mean for it to or not. Somewhere underneath the fear, some small, stubborn part of me has already decided to keep watching.