[Maddie’s POV]

I came back late on purpose. Strategic timing perfected through weeks of careful roommate avoidance. Eleven forty-seven should guarantee Emily is asleep, unconscious, safely unable to interrogate me about anything that matters.

The universe, as always, has other plans.

The lamp is on and Emily sits at her desk. Textbook open, pen in hand, very much awake and very much watching me walk through the door. Her expression is unreadable in ways that make my stomach drop through several floors.

“How long have you been telling people your father paid for a private single?”

The question lands like ice water dumped directly into my chest cavity.

“Where did you get that?” I ask, and my voice doesn’t even tremble. Excellent job, Maddie.

“Jenns stopped by. Was very surprised to see me here.”

My hands freeze on my jacket zipper, betraying me before I can manufacture appropriate nonchalance. I recover quickly because recovery is what I do, but Emily already saw the flinch.

She sees everything. She always did, even when we were kids.

“Jenna misunderstood something from last year.” I force my voice to stay light, dismissive. “It was a long time ago. Ancient history, really. Barely relevant to anything happening now.”

“It matters.” Emily’s expression hardens into something dangerous. “It matters because now Jenna thinks she has something on you. Something she can use whenever she wants. And guess who’s the evidence?”

“I didn’t ask you to be assigned here.” The words snap out sharper than intended. Defensive, very cornered animal behavior. “Housing made that decision completely on their own. I had nothing to do with any of it.”

Emily laughs—sharp and tired, completely devoid of humor. The sound scrapes against something raw inside me that I’d rather not examine too closely.

“No, you just let everyone believe a lie. Built your whole perfect image on it, probably. Let them think daddy’s money bought you privacy and special treatment.” She shakes her head slowly. “And now I get to be collateral damage when it all falls apart. Lucky me.”

“You don’t understand what you’re talking about.” I’m pacing now, unable to stay still. “You don’t understand what these girls will do if they smell weakness. What they’re capable of. How fast everything crumbles once they decide you’re vulnerable.”

“Wait, I’m the one who doesn’t understand?”

Emily’s voice rises, cutting through my excuses like a blade.

“What exactly do you think they’ve been doing to me for the past three weeks, Maddie? Moving my stuff around? Making comments loud enough for me to hear? Loosening my blade guards before practice?”

She stands, arms crossed, exhaustion and anger warring across her features.

“That’s weakness-smelling behavior. That’s them deciding I’m vulnerable. That’s them doing exactly what you’re so scared of. To me. While you watched and did nothing.”

The words hang between us like smoke after an explosion.

I stop pacing. Look at her, really look, for the first time since this conversation started.

The exhaustion underneath the anger. The dark circles she’s tried to conceal with makeup. The way she holds herself like someone bracing for the next blow.

And suddenly I’m thirteen again.

Sitting on my bed in the house we couldn’t afford, writing letters that never got answered. Letter after letter, sealed with desperate hope, dropped into the mailbox like prayers into a void.

I’d wait every afternoon, telling myself Emily was just busy.

Emily doesn’t move. Doesn’t soften. Just watch me with those gray-blue eyes that have always seen too much. “What did you mean for, then?”

The question is quiet. Almost gentle, which somehow makes it worse. Like she’s genuinely curious what the plan was. What endgame I imagined when I started building this elaborate fiction of a life.

I open my mouth. Close it again. Search for an answer that doesn’t exist.

Because there was never a plan. Never an endgame. Just survival, day after day, trying not to become the girl who got destroyed. Trying not to feel the things I felt when those letters went unanswered.

The lies accumulated like snow—each one small, each one necessary, until I was buried so deep I couldn’t see daylight anymore.

But I can’t say any of that. Can’t explain the architecture of my own destruction. Can’t articulate how you become someone else so completely that you forget the original version ever existed.

The silence stretches between us, thick with everything I’m not saying.

Emily waits for an answer I don’t have. Her expression shifts from anger to something harder to read—not quite disappointment, not quite pity. Something in between that makes me want to disappear entirely.

Finally, she turns away and crosses to her bed without another word. Reaches for the lamp on her nightstand and clicks it off, letting the room plunge into darkness.

She lies down facing the wall, her back is a clear dismissal.

Again.

I sit in the dark, staring at the shape of her underneath the covers. The conversation is over. Whatever she wanted from me—an explanation, an apology, some kind of truth—I couldn’t give it.

I don’t move for a long time. Just sit there in the darkness, listening to Emily breathe.