Georgia
Course registration happens in the gymnasium, long tables set up in rows with staff sorting through folders and class schedules, students shuffling through in loose lines that don’t quite qualify as organized. I’ve been standing in one of them for almost twenty minutes, folder in hand, half listening to Mandi complain about her eight a.m. electives, when I notice the two girls a few spots ahead of us.
I notice them the way you notice a matched set, identical, dark haired, dressed in a way that looks effortless and definitely isn’t, everything about them pressed and precise even standing in a gym line under fluorescent lights that make everyone else look slightly gray. One of them catches sight of me and leans toward the other, murmuring something I can’t hear. Then they’re both looking at me at once with an attention that feels less like curiosity and more like being cross-referenced against a list.
"Who’s that?" I whisper to Mandi.
"Bellamy twins. Bella and Bianca," Mandi says, her voice dropping to something just short of a whisper. "They’re a whole thing here. Old family, like mine, but different old, if that makes sense."
It doesn’t, not yet, but I file it away with everything else.
The line moves, and before I’ve fully prepared myself for it, I’m standing directly across the table from both of them, close enough now to see that their features are genuinely, precisely identical: same dark eyes, same sharp jawline, same slight upward tilt to the corner of the mouth. Only their expressions set them apart.
"Georgia Steele," one of them announces, her tone brisk and rehearsed, reading my name off a list in front of her even though she clearly already knew it before looking down. "We’ve heard of you."
"You have?" I ask, my voice startled.
"Regionals two years ago. Sectional silver last season." She recites it like statistics off a scoreboard rather than conversation, her smile thin and polished, not unkind exactly, but not warm either. "Small circuit. Everybody knows everybody eventually."
"Bianca," the other one offers, her tone cooler, more measured than her sister’s. She doesn’t add anything else. She doesn’t need to.
"Georgia," I say, my voice flat with reluctant courtesy, mostly because it feels rude not to, even though they clearly already know exactly who I am.
There’s a pause after that, the kind of loaded silence that makes you feel like you’ve missed something everyone else already understood. I glance between them, waiting for one of them to fill it, and neither does right away.
Bella breaks first, her eyes sliding away from mine a half second before it would have felt natural, like she caught herself looking too long and course corrected too quickly to hide it. She busies herself straightening papers on the table that don’t need straightening.
Bianca doesn’t look away at all.
She holds my gaze steady, unblinking, for long enough that it stops feeling like eye contact and starts feeling like being studied under a microscope. It’s not aggressive, not exactly. It’s worse than aggressive. It’s patient, as though she has all the time in the world to figure out whatever it is she’s trying to figure out about me, and my discomfort isn’t even a factor in how long she takes to do it.
"Enjoy Rosethorne," Bianca says, her voice flat and final, breaking the stare on her own terms, not mine. "It’s a very particular kind of school."
"Particular how?" I press, my voice sharper than I mean it to be.
"You’ll see," Bella answers, her tone quick and light, already reaching for the next folder in the stack.
I take my registration folder and step aside to let Mandi take my place at the table. As I do, I catch the way both twins move, reaching for pens, sliding papers across the table, standing from their chairs to greet the next student in line. There’s an economy to it I can’t quite name, a fluidity that doesn’t look like the way other people move through ordinary motions. Too efficient, as though every gesture has been rehearsed a thousand times until nothing wasted remains, the same unsettling grace I noticed in the students crossing campus on my first day, the same thing I saw in Puck before I ever knew what to call it.
My stomach tightens before my brain catches up, some old animal part of me flagging the pattern without waiting for permission. I don’t know what it means yet. I just know it’s there, sitting low and cold, the same way the bent handprints did, the same way Alexa’s eleven seconds of stillness did.
Mandi finishes at the table and rejoins me, already narrating the injustice of her elective schedule again, and we start walking away together, weaving through the crowd toward the gym doors. I’m three, maybe four steps past the table when I hear it.
It’s quiet, low, pitched in a register that shouldn’t carry this far over the noise of a gymnasium full of talking students, shuffling papers, chairs scraping against the floor. I’m not even sure I’m supposed to hear it at all. But some fragment of it reaches me anyway, a handful of words from Bianca’s mouth, meant, I think, only for her sister standing beside her.
"She doesn’t smell like a skater," Bianca murmurs, her voice clinical and assessing.
I don’t catch all of it clearly. The gym is too loud, the distance too far, and by the time the words register I’m already moving past them, Mandi still talking beside me about eight a.m. electives like nothing at all just happened.
The tone stays with me anyway, low and measuring, the same patience Bianca leveled at me across the table. My pulse jumps, and the skin at the back of my neck tightens, gooseflesh rising beneath my collar.