The alarm clock blared. 6:47 AM. Same sound since my thirteenth birthday, back when mornings felt possible.
I didn't move. My chest rose too fast, breath caught between a dream and waking. Then it was gone. Just like always.
My palm slammed the snooze button. The ceiling stared back, white and empty. The room felt colder than it should. Or maybe that was just me.
I didn't want to get up. Lately, I never did.
The shower ran hot. I stood beneath it and pretended: school didn't exist, people didn't exist, I wasn't waiting for something to go wrong.
The knock shattered it.
"Seriously, Jade! Move faster!"
Amber. Second oldest, eighteen, dark flowing long hair with red amber tips, dark brown eyes and slim built, permanently inconvenienced by my existence. I didn't need to see her to picture the eye roll, the stance that said the world had arranged itself specifically around her schedule.
"It's not my fault I'm genetically gifted," I muttered. A tired smile tugged, then died.
She hadn't always been like this. We used to promise—stick together, no matter what. Now I wasn't sure she liked being seen near me.
"Sorry, Amber." Light. Careful.
"Ugh, whatever."
She brushed past, door slamming. I finished dressing and followed the smell of breakfast downstairs. "Good morning, Mum! Good morning, Dad!"
Dad didn't look up from his newspaper. Mum smiled, warm and bright, like nothing could ever be wrong. "Good morning, Jade."
Eggs. Bacon. Toast. It should have comforted me. Lately it felt distant. Like watching someone else's life through glass.
Amethyst the eldest with dark brown eyes, dark flowing hair and slim built well put together wandered in, twenty-one, half-asleep, mumbling hello over her coffee.
Honk.
The bus.
"Bye, Mum."
She kissed my cheek. "Have a great day, honey."
I smiled small and stepped outside. Amber was already ahead, texting, slipping into a world I couldn't enter. The bus ride stayed quiet. I sat front-left, watching the town blur past, something itching beneath my skin that I couldn't name.
At school, Amber vanished into her group—perfect smiles, loud laughter, confidence that looked effortless. A version of my sister I didn't know how to reach.
English. Math. The routine ground forward. Two hands instantly covered my eyes. "Guess who!"
I laughed despite myself. "Fish and chips?"
"Incorrect!"
"Synthia." Genuine warmth. One of the few reasons school didn't feel like drowning. She had long brown flowing hair and always kept to herself but would always stand up for me she had the greenest eyes that anyone had seen.
Four hours later, the bell released us. Lunch. Finally. We stepped into the courtyard—And stopped.
The whispers hit first. Sharp, spreading, intentional. Students stared like they knew something I didn't. My grip tightened on my bag strap.
"Okay… what's going on?" Synthia's voice barely audible.
"I don't know."
Then I heard my name.
"That's her."
"That's Jade."
My stomach dropped.
"Why are they talking about you?"
I couldn't answer. The air had gone strange, pressure building against my eardrums.
"He's back."
"I heard he transferred."
"No way…"
My eyes lifted toward the entrance.
Tall. Still. Everyone moved around him like water parting for stone. He didn't walk through the crowd so much as occupy space they suddenly couldn't have.
My chest seized. Wrong, my body said. Familiar , something deeper answered.
He stopped. Slowly, like he felt the weight of my stare, he turned his head.
Across the courtyard, across the noise and the whispers and the held breath of two hundred students—I felt it.
That specific gravity. The particular darkness of being seen.
The feeling I hadn't known existed until that exact moment.
Because two years ago, my parents had been explicit. Funeral, closed casket, gone. The grief had been real. The absence had been real. I had learned to stop looking for him in crowds, to accept that some holes don't fill.
But the boy standing in the courtyard entrance looked exactly like—
No.
They told me he was dead.
They promised.
And now everyone was staring at me like I was the ghost.