Chapter 3 Mostly Normal

Scarlett pov

She woke up not knowing where she was.

That happened sometimes. More often than she liked to admit. There was always a disorienting moment between sleep and waking where her brain scrambled for context which town, which house, which version of her life was she living right now, and she'd learned to just lie still and let it come back in pieces.

Ceiling she didn't recognise. Water stain shaped like a bird in the corner. Curtains that let in more light than they should.

Right. Ashveil.

Scarlett exhaled slowly and sat up.

Her room was small but it was hers, she'd made sure of that last night, unpacking both bags before she let herself sleep, putting her books on the windowsill and her worn leather journal on the nightstand. Small things. Anchors. If a space had a few of her things in it, it was easier to breathe.

She checked her phone. 6.47am. First day at Ashveil High.

Fantastic.

She padded down the hall to the bathroom, stepping carefully over the third floorboard from the top, it creaked, and she'd already catalogued that last night out of habit. Old habit. The kind you developed when waking someone up carried consequences.

Dale's door was shut. She could hear him snoring from behind it. He'd be out until noon at least, which meant the kitchen was hers, the morning was hers, and she could exist at full volume for a few hours without the low-grade vigilance that hummed in the background whenever he was conscious.

She breathed a little easier.

The bathroom mirror was slightly foggy even before her shower, the old house too damp to fully dry out. She wiped it with her sleeve and looked at herself properly for the first time in days.

Dark circles. She'd need to do something about those. Her hair was a disaster, thick and dark and doing something chaotic at the ends that no amount of convincing was going to fix this morning. She had her mother's eyes, Dale had told her once, in one of his rare unguarded moments before he'd caught himself and gone back to being cold. Dark grey, almost silver in certain light.

She didn't know if that was true. She didn't know much about her mother at all.

Dale didn't talk about her. Not ever. Not sober anyway, and drunk-Dale's version of her mother was always too tangled up in bitterness and blame to be useful.

Scarlett pushed the thought down, where it lived with all the others, and turned the shower on hot.

She made toast and black coffee and ate standing at the kitchen counter, scrolling through her new school's website on her phone without really absorbing anything. Student council. Sports teams. A drama programme. A long list of names and faces she'd have to learn and then leave behind in six months or a year when Dale decided Ashveil wasn't working out either.

She didn't let herself think too hard about that part.

The walk to school was twenty minutes according to her maps app. She left at 7.45, bag over one shoulder, coffee thermos in hand, and stepped out into an Ashveil morning.

She stopped her on the porch for a second.

The fog had settled overnight into something low and soft, pooling between the houses and threading through the tree line at the edge of the road. The air smelled extraordinary, damp earth and pine and something sweet underneath she couldn't name, woodsmoke maybe, or rain coming. After years of flat midwestern towns and a stretch in the dry heat of New Mexico, something about this place felt almost shockingly alive.

She walked.

Ashveil in the morning was quiet in a way that felt intentional rather than empty. A woman deadheading flowers in her front garden who looked up and held Scarlett's gaze a beat too long before nodding. Two men outside the hardware store who stopped talking when she passed. A kid on a bike who slowed almost to a stop, staring openly, then pedalled hard around the corner.

She was used to being the new girl. She was not used to whatever this was.

By the time the school building came into view she'd been looked at no less than eleven times by people who had absolutely no reason to notice a girl walking down a street with a coffee thermos. She counted because counting was useful. It gave her something to do with the unease.

Ashveil High was a broad two-storey brick building with a patchy front lawn and a noticeboard out front advertising a homecoming that was three weeks past. Normal enough. She pushed through the front doors into the noise and heat of a school morning and found the main office without too much trouble.

The secretary, a small woman with reading glasses pushed up into silver hair, looked up when Scarlett approached the desk.

Then she did the thing. The same thing everyone else had done all morning, held the look just a fraction too long, something moving behind her eyes that wasn't quite surprise and wasn't quite recognition but sat uncomfortably between the two.

"Scarlett Voss," Scarlett said, before the woman could speak. "I'm new. I need my schedule."

That seemed to snap her back. "Of course, of course." She shuffled papers efficiently, recovered. "Here you are, sweetheart. Homeroom is 114, down the hall, first left. Do you need someone to show you"

"I'll find it." She smiled to take the edge off and took the schedule. "Thank you."

She found 114 without trouble and slipped in just before the bell, taking a seat near the back the way she always did. The room filled up around her and she kept her eyes on her schedule and pretended to be very interested in the fact that she had double English on Thursdays.

She felt him before she saw him.

That same pull from last night, the compass-swing behind her sternum, low and insistent and she looked up before she could stop herself.

He was leaning against the doorframe like he owned it, talking to someone in the hallway, and for a moment she just had a impression of size, broad shoulders, a dark green jacket, a jaw that looked like it had been carved with strong opinions. Then he turned and looked directly at her across the room with eyes the colour of dark honey and Scarlett felt something in her chest clench hard and then release, like a fist opening.

He smiled slowly.

She looked back down at her schedule.

Absolutely not, she told herself firmly. You have enough going on.

She heard him come into the room. Heard the easy greetings from people around her, the comfortable familiarity of someone who belonged here completely. A chair scraped. Settled.

She could feel exactly where he was without looking. Like he had a gravitational field and she was already caught in it.

Fantastic, she thought again, with feeling.

Someone dropped into the seat beside her and she braced herself, but it wasn't him. It was a girl, bright eyes, natural hair pulled up in a puff, a genuine smile that seemed to arrive on her face without calculation.

"You're the new girl," she said, like it was good news. "I'm Maya. Don't look so terrified, I promise we're mostly normal."

Scarlett almost laughed. Almost. "Mostly?"

"Ashveil's a little weird," Maya said cheerfully. "You get used to it. Also Caden Wolfe has been staring at the back of your head since he sat down so whatever you did in a past life, well done."

Scarlett did not turn around.

"I didn't do anything," she said.

Maya's smile widened like she knew something Scarlett didn't.

"Sure," she said. "Sure you didn't."