I wake up before my alarm because my life has trained me to be punctual for things that will explode. There's a taste of metal at the back of my mouth, leftover from yesterday's applause and the Meridian Compass humming in my bag like a pet that refuses to be polite. I sit on the edge of the bed and let the city breathe its usual, indifferent rhythm through the window. For three deep, careful breaths I pretend the apartment is mine and not a staging area.
Then I tie my hair up the way Mara likes to see it—high, practical, dishonest in the most flattering way—and I tuck a deck of cards into the inner pocket of my jacket like a secret religion. The deck is Major Arcana heavy tonight, because theatrics are a comfort and comfort is a strategy. Nobody in here needs to know that my hands smell like ozone and old paper, not coffee and deadlines.
Outside, the morning is a script everyone follows because they have been given no better lines. College is a parade of dividers: backpacks, reputations, eyes half-interested. Mara is already a planet and I orbit her politely; she nods at me the way people nod at the sun when it is being modest. Her smile is easy and she presses a pastry into my hand like a small, illegal benediction.
"You look… visible," she says, which is how she compliments people who have been difficult to compliment. I try to parse whether that's a warning or an invitation and decide, as I often must, to take both.
Lecture hall 203 smells of chalk and cheap coffee and the kind of arguments students rehearse for in their sleep. I take my seat at the back row because the back row is where you watch the world decide its jokes. I pull my sleeves down over my wrists like a thief folding up her gloves; it's a comfort, the fabric against skin.
The professor talks about ethics like he's trying to sell repentance in bulk. He draws diagrams on the board: boxes, arrows, the neat thinking that keeps less interesting men in power. His voice is a metronome. Students nod in rhythm, their attention a polite audience that hasn't been invited to the real show.
Halfway through, I look up and the room is a stage.
It happens every time I let the mask breathe a breath of space into my day: the fluorescent lights stop being fluorescent lights and become spotlights; the professor's dry humor blooms into a practiced monologue; the students fold themselves into rows of faces waiting to be told what to feel. The clock above the door turns into a stage clock, the hands a countdown to a finale I never agreed to perform in.
In that tilt, I am not sitting in a pencil-scuffed chair. I am on a ledge, my pulse a drum, and the deck in my pocket hums like a little animal wanting to be let out.
I practice a trick when that happens. I call it an anchor—three small rituals I do to remind my body that I am allowed to be human and not a headline.
1. I press my thumb to the seam of my jacket where the fabric has been worn thin from years of pockets. The pressure grounds me in a place that smells like lint and ordinary life.
2. I taste something absurd—today it's the pastry in my mouth, almond and a smear of sugar—and I focus on naming every ingredient in the crumb. Salt. Almond. Flour. The specificity pulls my head out of the spotlight.
3. I loop my thoughts backward: one quiet memory, one ridiculous fact about Mara (that she collects vintage pens she will never use), one practical task I will need later (text Jess: "loop check at 02:00"). It is small math for keeping two selves from colliding.
The anchor works. The spotlight thins like fog. The professor drones on about moral responsibility and I take notes not for performance but because notes are contracts I keep with myself. My handwriting is a map of two languages: one polite and marginal, the other sharp and decorative where I scribble joke-ideas that would probably get me expelled if I tried them.
Between classes the hallway is a throat of noise. People carry the kinds of weights college grants you: amateur heartache, midterm panic, the very contemporary species of ennui. My deck whispers against my ribs, impatient. The Mask likes lullabies and public interest; the Mask would love to throw open the doors and announce our next trick. It delights in timing. Often I think it would prefer a standing ovation to breakfast.
I do not give it either. I let the next bell ring and the world stay ordinary.
At lunch Mara and I sit beneath the old clocktower, where pigeons perform their own tragic operas. She tells me about a rehearsal and the way a guitarist in the art basement refuses to tune to anything sensible. I laugh because listening to Mara make petty complaints is one of my favorite hobbies. She watches me when I laugh—really watches—and you could almost see the thought that forms sometimes in her chest, like a breath held with curiosity.
"You ever want to just—" she begins, and then folds the sentence into a look. The rest is partly pastry and partly the sort of kindness that does not need grammar.
"Be obvious?" I offer. "Be boring?" I mean it as a joke and she smiles like she understands the difference.
We go to Philosophy together because we like to panic in pairs. Mara sits up front, luminous as a showpiece. When she raises her hand and makes a point, the professor's jaw unclenches like a locket: admiration, public and small. I am happy for her because her victories are quietly mine.
But halfway through that lecture, the room tilts again.
This time it is sharper. A kid near the front drops his tablet and the sound cracks like cymbals; the noise refracts into welcome. I hear the rustle like applause. For a dizzy second I see every face turn—not in judgment but in hunger. I feel the mask's pull as a physical tug at the base of my skull. It is like gravity remembering the Old Rules: mask on, lights on, make them watch.
I keep my hands folded on the notebook, fingers pressing card edges through fabric until I feel the unique ridges of the deck. I imagine—I always imagine—Jess's hands flying across code, weaving loops, a digital lullaby that keeps security cameras asleep. I imagine Raven, patient as stone, on the roof waiting. Those images are not stage props; they are a line I hold onto like a rope.
There is a boy—young, earnest, with a nose that thinks it has jokes—who mistakes me for someone uninterested. He stumbles into a clumsy compliment and tries to make himself funny. The mask learns to like small flattery; it purrs. In that brief electric space I could slip. I could turn that compliment into performance—throw him a card that becomes ten, make the room gasp, take a bow. The possibility tastes like sugar on the tongue.
I do not. I smile, polite and bland, like a human behavior. I answer as Elara, the practical fraud, not Eclipse the show-stealer. "Thanks," I say. "You should probably hydrate." Advice like that keeps me from wearing the applause for a minute longer.
After class I have an hour of nothing. The library smells like old homework and possibility. It is a sanctuary not because books slow time but because pages have this useful habit of accepting notes without gossip. I sit with a textbook about ethics and a deck splayed beside me like an illicit pet.
Mara finds me reading but not studying, and she slides into the seat opposite with the ease of someone who knows all my best excuses. "Do you ever want to tell them?" she asks. She means the students, the professors, the city who murmurs my legend and then adds extra vowels for flavor. She means the people who will never understand why a thief announces her theft like an RSVP.
"Sometimes," I admit. "But honesty at noon comes with fines."
She reaches across and tucks a loose hair behind my ear; the gesture is private, not showy. It stops the tilt for a breath. We look like a small tableau; I could sell this scene as sincerity and people would buy it with their eyes. That part of being Elara is a performance too, softer and usually unpaid.
Classmates pass by. Some nod. One girl—quiet, a little wild-eyed, who carries a sketchbook like a shield—sits down a few tables away. She watches me watch, and it's like looking into a mirror that does not flatter. Her pencil moves across paper and I catch the tilt of her face: she has noticed me without making a headline out of it. We are both dangerous to each other in small ways: she could draw me into being seen; I could turn her into someone who believes that being noticed is always a safe thing.
The deck, of course, protests at regular intervals. Cards have opinions. They fan in my bag like patient witnesses. The Fool flutters and I feel the twinge, that delicious, vertiginous itch—go on. Leap. Tell them. Make them feel. The Fool is so kind about risk. The Magician clicks his fingers in something that looks distressingly like encouragement.
I imagine the Mask laughing at me in our quiet. It finds my indecision entertaining; it likes that I can be both a careful liar and an artful nightmare. Sometimes I feel it eavesdropping on the inside of my skull, or maybe that's just the residue of being chosen by something that remembers things no living thing should.
There is a moment, later, between classes when the world almost betrays me. The student council has posted an announcement about a charity gala; the flyer is the sort of thing designed to make wealthy alumni weep into their napkins. I look at the poster and my brain flips the words into a roll-call I could do in my sleep. Eclipse will be making a guest appearance. My fingers twitch; the Mask likes how easy it would be to answer. I feel my mouth composing the line already—cocky cadence, a time to be precise, "You have my attention for the next ten minutes."
I stop myself by picturing Jess's face when she hears I've signed up for something stupid because it sounded dramatic. I spare her that call. Jess's patience has edges, and I have learned by hard, blushing practice not to test them unnecessarily. Responsibility is a muscle; I flex it when the mask grows loud.
Sometimes the division between Elara and Eclipse is tidy. Most days it's not. Today the seams blur and I spend much of the afternoon policing my own reactions—slowing my laugh, biting the corner of my lip when I feel the urge to deliver a punchline, and keeping my deck in my pocket like a fossil that remembers fire but cannot be lit.
When the day ends I walk the path with Mara and she hums a song she hasn't finished writing. She asks about my schedule for the night and I dance around it with practiced evasions. She knows more than she admits; she knows how a woman looks when she's holding a secret like a warm stone. At the back of my mind the Mask mutters that the night will be better because I have held back daylight. It likes afternoon victories.
I come home, change into the clothes that are reserved for missions—slick enough to be useful, theatrical enough to be later explained as bad taste—and I collapse on the couch for a heartbeat before the roof calls. I feel the relief like someone letting go of a held breath. The day's masks are tucked away; now it's time for the real one.
I could say that this double-life is exhausting and that would be true like the rain is wet. I could say I hate it and not be lying. But the truth is more complicated and therefore better suited to confession: I like the split. I like the small, clandestine problem of keeping two selves in play because it makes both of them sharper. Being Elara teaches me to see the small soft things—plate scratches, the angle of Mara's jaw when she's thinking—while being Eclipse makes me a good liar and therefore a competent thief. The two of them feed each other with the sort of petty, useful virtues that carry you through a long life of wrong choices and better apologies.
Tonight's rehearsal of restraint has an unintended consequence. Under the weak light of the roof, Raven expects me like an old punctuation. He pads up beside me, his gray fur folding like a promise, and I let myself be held by not being the center. The mask waits in its velvet like an animal with manners. It does not scold me for the day I spent being ordinary; instead it hums with amusement, pleased by my performance in reverse.
I take the deck out once, rolling a single card between two fingers: The High Priestess. She is soft and secret and has a way of saying things with her eyes. I finger the edge and hold it to my lips for a moment, not as a spell but as an anchor. The Fool flutters in my pocket like an impatient friend, but the High Priestess steadies me with the kind of quiet that makes people keep their vows.
I tell myself stories to pass the minutes: that one day I might not need to choose or hide, that one day my spectacle and my smallness will be able to breathe the same air without one stealing the other's oxygen. And then I tell myself another, more practical story—that if that day ever comes I will be an extremely boring headline.
The city below continues as if it is not my stage and as if it has the right to ignore me. I like that about it. I like being both anonymous and notorious. I like the small paradox of being beloved by a handful of people who know me whole and loathed by hundreds who only know the echo.
When the roof's shadows thicken and showtime inches closer, the mask's amusement grows louder, a happy dog at the edge of its chain. I stand and slide the strap between my teeth for a second, just to test whether the porcelain remembers my shape. It vibrates a little, impatient.
I do not put it on yet. I take one last breath of the ordinary: the smell of the city's kitchens, the cry of a lone vendor, the faint sound of a radio playing something that will later be sampled in terrible playlists. I fold myself back into the role I practiced all day—Elara, the woman who can almost be content with a pastry and a good joke.
Then, as always, I walk toward the light. The night waits, hungry and full of promises, and somewhere inside me the Fool elbows the Priestess for attention. I smile, a real smile, and tell myself the truth I give to my reflection: we are both necessary, and tonight, as every night, we shall be careful with the way we wear ourselves.
If you are reading this and hoping for neatness—an ending that ties itself into a tidy bow—then I am sorry. My life resists bows. I will, however, give you this: sometimes the hardest theft is stealing back the right to be small. Tonight I practiced that theft, and it felt like saving something precious. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will be braver. Or louder. Probably both.