Georgia
I laughed for the first time in months, and it scared me more than anything else that day.
It starts with Mandi standing in the doorway of our room around seven, phone in one hand, a takeout menu practically glowing on the screen. "Pizza night," she announces, her tone landing like a proclamation instead of a question. "It’s tradition. Well. Not capital T Tradition. Just a thing we do. Alexa’s already ordering, so unless you have strong feelings about pineapple, get up."
"I don’t have strong feelings about pineapple," I say, flat.
"Good. Alexa has very strong feelings about pineapple, and I’ve learned it’s easier for everyone if the rest of us just stay neutral," Mandi says, already grinning.
"Alexa?" I ask, pulling myself up off my bed, still half unpacked, my suitcase yawning open against the wall with its careful bottom layer of buried medals.
"Reyes. Down the hall. She’s been coming to Rosethorne since freshman year, we’ve been friends since we were kids, our moms did some charity thing together forever ago," Mandi says, waving a hand like the details don’t matter, already halfway out the door, curls bouncing with every step. "You’ll like her. Everybody likes her. It’s honestly a little suspicious."
Ten minutes later I’m sitting cross-legged on the common room floor with two girls I’ve known for roughly twelve hours combined, a stack of pizza boxes open on the coffee table between us. The tape under my sleeve itches, a small reminder of the burn I’m hiding, and for a second I catch myself wondering what these girls would do if they saw it. Whether they’d flinch, or whether they’d already know exactly what it meant. I push the thought down. The common room helps with that. It’s warm in a lived-in way, worn couches and a fireplace that isn’t lit but looks like it’s been lit a thousand times before, the kind of room that’s absorbed a hundred years of other people’s ordinary evenings.
Alexa is quieter than Mandi, which isn’t a high bar, but there’s a stillness to her that isn’t shy so much as attentive. She’s got dark hair pulled back in a simple braid, and when she looks at me it doesn’t feel like being looked at the way most people look at each other. It feels like being read. Like she’s taking in more than my face, more than what I’m saying out loud, cataloging something underneath it that I haven’t said at all.
"So you’re a skater," she says, tone easy, reaching for another slice.
"How’d you know?" I ask, curious.
"Mandi mentioned it," Alexa says, smiling faintly. "And you sit like someone who’s spent a lot of time balancing on something narrow. It shows in the shoulders. The way you keep your weight centered even sitting still."
I don’t know what to do with that. It’s too specific, too accurate, like she’s been watching me longer than the last ten minutes. "That’s either really observant or really creepy," I say, half laughing.
"Bit of both," Alexa says, warmth threading through it rather than offense, and something in my chest loosens just slightly, some knot I didn’t realize I’d been carrying since I pulled off the highway this morning.
We talk about nothing important for the better part of an hour. Mandi does most of the talking, telling a long and increasingly implausible story about a Founders’ Day incident involving a runaway ice sculpture of the school’s original headmaster that apparently ended up in the reflecting pool. Alexa adds quiet commentary that somehow makes the story funnier without stealing it, a dry aside here, a raised eyebrow there, timed so perfectly it feels choreographed. I notice that timing more than once, the way the two of them seem to know exactly when the other will speak, like they’ve rehearsed a version of themselves for exactly this kind of evening. I tell myself that’s just what old friends look like. I’m not sure I believe it.
"You’re leaving out the part where your cousin got blamed for it," Alexa says, smirking.
"My cousin was blamed for it. Wrongly. Slanderously," Mandi says, indignant.
"You told me you saw him do it," Alexa says, deadpan.
"I told you I saw someone who looked like him do it, in low lighting, from a distance, and I stand by that testimony," Mandi says, laughing despite herself.
I find myself actually laughing, not the polite kind I’ve perfected over years of skating banquets and post-competition interviews where a judge’s assistant is always watching how you carry yourself even when you’re supposedly off the clock. This is the real kind, the kind that comes up from somewhere low in my chest, somewhere I half forgot I still had access to. My face actually hurts a little from it by the time Mandi finishes the story with a flourish, hands spread wide like she’s taking a bow nobody asked for. And even mid-laugh, some small cold part of me registers the strangeness of it: that I’m sitting here giggling about a melted ice sculpture in a school where the ice hums along with my own pulse, where a boy’s hand left a mark on my arm that glows faintly if I look at it too long. The guilt of forgetting, even for a moment, needles at me before I can name why it should.
For one unguarded hour, I try not to think about Mollie’s timeline or the wax seal that moved and then didn’t or the boy with burning hands who looked at me like I was something he’d been waiting his whole life to find. I’m just a girl eating pizza on a Tuesday night, laughing at a story about a sculpture nobody actually witnessed melting down, surrounded by people who have no idea what invitation letter brought me here or what it might have meant. But the ease of it unsettles me more than it should. I’ve spent years building walls around myself out of necessity, out of Mollie’s constant evaluation, out of every rink being a place where somebody’s always watching and grading. And here I am, less than twenty-four hours in, laughing until my stomach hurts with two girls I barely know, in a place that has already shown me it isn’t what it pretends to be.
That’s when the howl rolls in.
It comes from somewhere deep in the trees beyond the window, long and low, curling through the evening air in a way that makes the whole common room feel smaller, like the walls have shifted an inch closer together without moving at all. It isn’t loud, not exactly, but it carries, the way certain sounds do when they’re coming from somewhere old and somewhere close.
Mandi keeps talking, doesn’t so much as pause mid-sentence, launching straight into her next story like nothing happened at all.
But Alexa goes still.
Not startled still. Not flinch still. Frozen, completely, her slice of pizza halfway to her mouth, her eyes fixed on some middle distance past the window, every muscle in her body locked like she’s waiting for something specific to happen next, something she already knows the shape of.
"Was that a wolf?" I ask, mostly to break the silence that’s suddenly sitting too heavy in the room, thick enough that I can feel it pressing against my ribs.
"Coyotes," Mandi says, instant and smooth, not even glancing up from the pizza box, already reaching for another slice like the question barely registered. The word comes out so easily, so naturally, that it barely sounds like an answer at all. It’s not a lie so much as a reflex, something worn in by years of repetition, a groove she’s walked so many times she doesn’t even notice the path anymore.
I look at Alexa. She’s still not moving.
"Alexa?" I ask, softer.
It takes her a second, a long one, before she blinks and lowers her slice back to her plate, her smile sliding back into place like a mask clicking shut, seamless and practiced. "Sorry. Zoned out," she says, voice light again, easy again, but it doesn’t quite match the stillness I just watched drain out of her, doesn’t quite erase what I saw in the half second before she noticed I was watching.
I don’t say anything. I don’t believe her, not for a second, but I’ve known these girls for twelve hours, and calling someone a liar over a pizza box feels like a fast way to end a friendship I’ve just started to want. So I sit with it instead, the wrongness of it settling low in my stomach, and let the silence stretch one beat longer than it should before I let it go.
The conversation moves on. Mandi finishes her sculpture story with the cousin fully exonerated by the end, despite the earlier testimony. Alexa laughs at the right moments, asks me a question about my old rink, listens to the answer with that same reading kind of attention. Nobody mentions the howl again. By the time the pizza boxes are empty and Mandi starts talking about bed, it’s like it never happened at all.
Later, back in my room, Mandi already asleep in the bed across from mine, breathing slow and even, I sit cross-legged on my own mattress with my phone glowing in the dark and open my notes app. I don’t fully know why. I just know I don’t want to lose the thread of it, whatever it was, before I fall asleep and convince myself in the morning that I imagined the whole thing, the way I’ve been trying to convince myself about the wax seal.
I type it out anyway, my thumbs moving slower than they need to, like some part of me is testing whether the words hold up once they’re actually written down.
Alexa didn’t move for eleven seconds after that sound. Who does that over a coyote?