Chapter 2 Flash Back

My phone buzzed. For a second my heart leapt, Victor, maybe, with the right words, the ones that would make my ribs stop feeling too narrow for my heart.

It was my aunt. Don't forget to lock up if you get in late. There's stew in the fridge.

I smiled, because the universe wasn't all knives tonight.

The door banged open. Vivienne tumbled out, hair wild, lipstick smudged in a way that made her look more expensive somehow. "You disappeared," she accused, linking our arms automatically, like we came as a set even when I was halfway to unraveling.

"Just needed oxygen."

She studied me for a second. She could always tell when I was lying, which was inconvenient because I was doing it constantly. "Come sleep over," she said. "I hate waking up without you."

The want in her voice was sharp and true. Whatever else she was, she loved me. That made everything worse and better at the same time.

"I have an early start," I said. "Notes to organize. My aunt will stage a small coup if I ghost her."

"Text me when you're home." She kissed my cheek and left a fingerprint of glitter there. "And stop making that face."

"What face?"

"The one where you swallow the whole world and then apologize for the indigestion."

I laughed, because she wasn't wrong, and also because it was easier than saying, I'm scared I'm not enough for either of you.

We split at the curb. She slid into a ride with two girls who hugged her like a celebrity meet-and-greet. I ordered a Bolt and pretended not to see her glance at her phone like it was a secret.

The car smelled like pine and old coffee. The driver had a radio station on quietly, the host talking about traffic like it was weather. Streetlights slipped over my face in gold bars, flipping the city into slides. I watched people on sidewalks, couples leaning into each other, a guy balancing three boxes of pizza like a circus act, a woman dragging a reluctant dog who had clearly given up on the night.

I typed and erased three different texts to Victor. I tried "Can we talk?" and "Are you with Viv?" and "What do you mean by too quiet," and deleted them all because they felt like begging for definitions that would only hurt.

My aunt had left the porch light on. It spilled a dull, honest glow over the stairs and the stupid flowerpot I kept forgetting to bring inside when it rained. I let myself in quietly, toed off my shoes, and dropped my keys into the bowl that used to hold fruit until we gave up and admitted we were not fruit-bowl people.

"You're back," my aunt called from the bedroom, voice thick with sleep.

"Yeah," I said. "Stew smells amazing."

"Eat," she mumbled. "Dream good."

"I'll try."

In my room, the quiet felt like a pressure change. The mirror had a smear where I'd cleaned it with the wrong cloth. My desk was a graveyard of half-finished notes. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at my hands until they stopped shaking.

Then I reached for the notebook I kept in the drawer. It wasn't special just a plain black cover, corners softened by being shoved into bags, pages wrinkled from tears I would not be confessing to publicly. I clicked my pen three times because the habit comforted me and wrote, small and careful:

If I lose her, I lose everything I know. If I lose him, I lose the part of me that believed I could be chosen.

The words looked dramatic on the page in a way that made me want to cross them out. I didn't. I underlined "chosen" instead, as if that would make it less pathetic.

My phone lit up on the bedspread. Victor again.

Home. Night, Ivy.

Two words the size of a planet. Nothing about the club. Nothing about Vivienne. Neutral, neat, like a bandage you slap over a wound so you don't have to look. I typed "Night" and stared at it until the letters blurred, then added a heart because I hate myself, then deleted the heart and sent the naked word.

In the mirror, the glitter Vivienne had left on my cheek caught the light. I wiped it off with the heel of my hand. It didn't all come away. Glitter never really does. You find it for days, weeks, in places it has no business being, a constellation you didn't ask for, reminding you where you were when you picked it up.

I closed the notebook and slipped it back into the drawer. I lay down and stared at the ceiling like it might offer a translation for the lock-screen text I couldn't unread.

Too quiet. Not the one.

People always told me quiet girls hear more. I wished, for once, that I hadn't heard a thing.

When I was little, I used to imagine that if I stood really still, the world might forget I was there.

It sounds dramatic now, but at eight years old, it felt like a survival strategy. My parents weren't cruel. They weren't absent, either. They just... lived in their own storm clouds, loud arguments about bills, silence that stretched for days, then the occasional thunderclap of slammed doors.

So I became the quiet one. The good daughter. The ghost who didn't ask for more than the bare minimum.

I thought invisibility was a kind of power. Until I met Vivienne.

The first time I saw her, I was sitting on the steps outside St. Mary's Elementary with a book in my lap. (I don't even remember what book. Something with horses, probably. My escape was always galloping somewhere else.) Kids streamed past me in loud clusters, ponytails flying, sneakers squeaking, backpacks thudding against their spines. I hugged my knees and waited for Mom, who was running late again.

Vivienne didn't walk past me. She stopped.

"Why are you reading outside?" she asked, tilting her head so her glossy brown hair slid like water over one shoulder. She was ten, like me, but she already had this self-possession like she'd been born knowing she belonged.

"My mom's late," I muttered, half-hoping she'd leave.

Instead, she plopped down next to me, crossing her long legs like she owned the concrete. "Mine too. She's always late. Drives me crazy."

I blinked at her. No one had ever admitted that before, like lateness was just something you swallowed and smiled through.

She grinned, sharp and conspiratorial. "Wanna wait together? It's less boring."

That was Vivienne. Turning my shadows into something almost... glamorous.

By middle school, we were inseparable. She was light, I was shade. She thrived on attention always raising her hand in class not just because she knew the answer, but because she liked the way teachers' eyes lit up when she did. I stayed quiet unless I was sure.

But Vivienne didn't let me fade into the background entirely. If someone overlooked me, she pulled me forward. If I stayed home, she dragged me to the sleepover. She'd introduce me like I was the punchline to some inside joke only she understood "This is Ivy. She looks quiet but she's funnier than she looks. Trust me."

I wasn't funnier than I looked. But people laughed anyway because Vivienne had already decided I was worth listening to.

And when she said things like that, I believed her.

Of course, there were cracks.

Vivienne collected friends like charm bracelets. She liked being the center of a circle, and sometimes I was just one of many orbiting moons. At birthday parties, I'd watch her float between groups, laughing with the boys by the snack table, dancing with the girls under string lights, leaving me to nurse my soda in the corner.

She always came back, though. Sliding her arm through mine, pulling me into the spotlight. "There you are," she'd say, as if she'd been looking for me the whole time.

And I'd forgive her, every time, because that's what ghosts do when the sun remembers them.

There was one afternoon, freshman year, that still burns at the edges of my memory.

We were sitting on her bed, painting our nails, hers was bright coral, me soft pink when she suddenly asked, "Do you ever wish you were me?"

I laughed, awkward, because what do you even say to that?

But she didn't laugh. She watched me with those piercing green eyes, waiting.

"I mean, sometimes," I admitted. "You're... braver than me."

Her smile was sharp, like victory. "Exactly. I make things happen. You wait for them."

It wasn't cruel, exactly. Just... true, in the way that made me shrink a little inside.

But then she handed me the coral polish. "Here. Try this. It'll look good on you."

So I did. And when I looked at my hands, they looked a little less ghostly.

By the time Victor showed up junior year, Vivienne and I were a packaged deal. If you got one, you got the other. That was the rule.

And yet, sometimes I wonder if Vivienne always knew the ending, that sooner or later, the boy who saw me first would end up choosing her instead.

Because that's the thing about being a ghost girl, people notice you only when the light hits just right.

And Vivienne? She's the light.

I don't tell this story for sympathy. I tell it because it explains why, when I found Victor's message glowing on Vivienne's phone last night, the sting wasn't entirely new. It was the same old wound, ripped open again.

I should have seen it coming.

But ghosts don't see. They haunt.

And I've been haunting my own life for a long, long time.