Georgia
I started writing things down because I was starting to think I was losing my mind.
Three days had passed since Puck told me to stay away from him and then refused to say why. Three days of turning that sentence over in my head at odd moments: during warmups, during lunch, lying awake long after Mandi’s breathing evened out into sleep. The words followed me like a splinter I couldn’t quite dig out, small and constant and impossible to ignore. It sat there unresolved, one more thing in a growing pile of things that didn’t have explanations. Tonight, alone in my room while Mandi was out at some study group I didn’t feel like joining, I finally pulled a fresh notebook out of my desk drawer instead of reaching for my phone’s notes app the way I had been.
The phone notes felt small somehow. Scattered. A line here, a line there, easy to scroll past and half convince myself none of it added up to anything. I could delete an entry with one swipe and pretend I’d never written it, pretend I’d never seen what I saw. A physical notebook felt different. More permanent. Like committing to the idea that I wasn’t just noticing strange things anymore. I was keeping track of them on purpose now, building something that couldn’t be undone with the flick of a thumb.
I opened to the first blank page and sat there for a minute, pen hovering. There was simply too much of it, too many small moments that felt wrong in a way I couldn’t name at the time and still couldn’t fully name now. My chest tightened, a low hum of anxiety that had been building for weeks and finally found an outlet.
I started with Puck, because he was the one who wouldn’t leave my head alone lately.
*Reflexes too fast. Took a hit at hockey that should have dropped him. Up in under two seconds like nothing happened.*
I wrote it plainly, no embellishment, the way I’d log a training note. Underneath it, I added the next line.
*Skin runs hot. Not warm. Burning. Every single time he’s touched me.*
I thought about his hand around my arm that first day, the desk splintering under his grip, our fingers brushing over that book, the heat radiating off him in the library while he sat close enough that I could smell cedar and cold air. My skin prickled just remembering it, a phantom warmth ghosting up my arm even now, hours and rooms away from him. None of it fit any explanation I had for how a human body was supposed to work.
*Eyes flash gold. Twice now. Once outside the classroom, once I can’t even place exactly, just a flicker I caught and then doubted.*
I paused after that one, chewing on the end of my pen. Doubt crept in, familiar and unwelcome, sounding uncomfortably like my mother’s voice. "You’re imagining things, Georgia," it whispered, flat and clinical. I decided, after a second, that I trusted myself more than that voice. I’d spent too many years training my body to notice small, precise details to believe I’d invent something like that out of nothing.
I kept going.
*Campus goes quiet on certain nights. Not just quiet, empty. Like everyone knows to stay inside and nobody’s ever told me why.*
I thought about the two nights I’d noticed it specifically, the strange stillness that settled over the paths after dark, fewer students out walking than there should be, dorm windows dark earlier than usual, an unspoken curfew that seemed to exist parallel to the official one nobody had ever explained to me directly. The memory raised the hair on my arms even now, safe in my room with the door locked and Mandi’s fairy lights glowing soft against the wall.
*Twins move wrong. Too smooth. Too fast. Like their joints work differently than everyone else’s.*
I thought about registration, the fluid, economical way Bella and Bianca reached for pens and folders, the same unnatural grace I’d clocked in Puck before I ever had language for it, the same thing I’d noticed in half the students crossing campus that very first day. It wasn’t just Puck. It wasn’t just the twins. Something ran underneath this entire school, some current everyone else already understood and nobody bothered explaining to me. The isolation of that thought landed heavier than I expected, sharper than anything I’d felt back home, because at least there I understood the rules.
I added Alexa’s eleven seconds of stillness. I added the howling, closer every time, the two points of gold at the tree line that vanished before I could be certain. I added the bent handprints in The Fang’s railing, steel curved inward like it had been warm wax under someone’s grip. I added Mandi’s "coyotes," delivered so smoothly it barely registered as a lie at all, and Bianca’s murmured line I never quite caught the words of, only the tone, only the cold that crawled up the back of my neck listening to it. My hand cramped somewhere in the middle of it all, but I didn’t stop. Stopping felt like giving myself permission to forget, and I’d done enough forgetting, enough looking away, to last a lifetime.
By the time I finished, the page was nearly full, my handwriting shrinking and cramping as I ran out of room, one impossible detail stacked directly on top of the next until the whole page read less like a diary entry and more like evidence laid out for a case I didn’t yet know how to argue. I set the pen down and flexed my fingers, staring at the accumulated weight of it, something between vindication and dread settling low in my stomach.
I looked at the top of the page, blank where a title should go. I thought about writing something there, some header that would make this feel organized, official, real. I couldn’t do it. Naming it meant deciding what it was, and I wasn’t ready to decide that yet, not when every possible name that occurred to me sounded too strange to write down in my own handwriting, too close to the kind of thing that would’ve gotten me laughed out of every rink I’d ever skated on.
I left it blank.
At the very bottom of the page, almost without meaning to, my pen already moving before I’d consciously decided what I wanted to write, I added one more line, smaller than the rest, pressed slightly harder into the paper like my hand wanted it to matter more than the others.
*What is this place?*
I stared at it for a second too long, the question sitting there on the page looking back at me, patient and unblinking. Then I closed the notebook fast, snapping it shut like the motion alone might keep the question from answering itself. My heart pounded harder than it should have, and I sat there in the quiet of my room, listening to my own breathing, waiting for it to slow.