My Diary , His Eyes

The last day of high school felt like the last day of something much bigger, and Isla couldn't figure out if that was good or terrifying.

She stood at her locker pulling out the last of her things one by one, slower than necessary. A French quiz she'd gotten a B-minus on and kept for no real reason. Three pens that had stopped working months ago. A scrunchie she didn't remember putting there. And a photo of her and Sofie from sophomore year, taped to the inside of the door so long the edges had curled and gone yellow at the corners.

She looked at the photo for a moment. Sofie was mid-laugh in it, head thrown back, completely unbothered by the camera. Isla was looking slightly to the left of the lens, like she'd been caught thinking about something else entirely. Which she probably had been.

She put it in her bag and closed the locker for the last time.

The hallway was doing its thing. People signing yearbooks, taking pictures, crying in that loud performative way that felt more like a show than actual sadness. Someone had brought balloons. Someone else was handing out candy from a plastic bowl. A group of girls near the water fountain were hugging each other like they won't still have applied in the same college. 

Isla didn't have a yearbook. She'd forgotten to order one in October and by the time she remembered it was February and she couldn't summon the energy to care. She'd spent four years slightly outside of high school anyway. Not unhappy — just watching it from the edges, like someone standing outside a party listening to the music through the wall. Close enough to hear. Not quite inside.

"You look like someone died," Sofie said, appearing beside her with two juice boxes and the specific grin she wore when she was about to be aggressively optimistic at someone.

"Feels like something did."

Sofie shoved a juice box into her hand. "Stop being dramatic. This is a good thing. We're free."

"Free to do what exactly?"

"Anything." Sofie threw her arms wide like the hallway was a stage built for her. A junior walked straight into her elbow. She didn't apologize or even look at him. "Paris, for starters. You confirmed your spot, right?"

Isla hadn't. The email had been sitting open on her laptop for three days. Her cursor had hovered over the confirm button exactly six times. She'd closed the laptop each time and gone to do something else and told herself she would decide tomorrow.

"Still thinking."

"Isla."

"It's a big decision."

"It's Paris." Sofie grabbed her arm and steered her toward the exit. "You applied on a random Tuesday night on a whim and you got in. That's the universe handing you something. You don't say no to that."

"The universe doesn't cover luggage fees."

Sofie laughed — the big one, loud and real, the kind that turned heads in hallways. Isla almost smiled.

They pushed through the double doors and into the afternoon sun. The parking lot was the usual last-day chaos — cars parked everywhere, music blasting from someone's rolled-down window, a group of seniors spraying foam string at each other near the bicycle rack.

She was comfortable on the outside of all of it. She had Sofie who was loud enough for both of them, she had her journal, and that had always been enough.

"There he is," Sofie said. Her voice dropped into that specific tone she used when she was pretending to be casual about something she absolutely wasn't casual about.

Isla didn't have to ask who.

Her eyes found Marcus Ellis before her brain even gave the instruction. He was standing by the stone steps with two of his friends, laughing at something, his backpack slung over one shoulder like it weighed nothing. He had this aura about him — this way of existing in a space that made everything around him feel slightly warmer. Like a lamp turning on in a room you didn't realize was dim.

She'd written four pages about that him last November. Front and back. Her smallest handwriting. At two in the morning when she couldn't sleep.

She looked away quickly.

"Don't," she said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

Sofie pressed her lips together with visible effort. Then … "He looked over here. Just so you know."

Isla's stomach did the thing. The specific and deeply annoying thing it did whenever Marcus was within a hundred feet of her. She had been telling it to stop for a year and a half. It had never once listened.

She pulled out her phone. Opened her email. The Paris confirmation form was sitting right at the top, patient as ever.

Her thumb hovered.

She thought about the eight weeks. The unfamiliar city. The people she didn't know yet.

She thought about staying here all summer. Running into Marcus at the grocery store and at every party and everywhere else small towns put people in the same spaces over and over.

She thought about her journal sitting on her desk at home. The fifty-something pages she'd filled since January with feelings she'd never said out loud to anyone.

Her mom had asked about the Paris program at breakfast that morning. “You should go, baby. You've been waiting for something and you keep not going toward it.” Isla hadn't known what to say to that so she'd eaten her toast and changed the subject.

Now, standing in the parking lot with Marcus's laugh carrying across the noise, she thought maybe her mom had a point.

Across the parking lot Marcus laughed again. She heard it clearly through all the noise the way you always heard the sound you were trying hardest to ignore.

She pressed confirm before she could talk herself out of it.

"You just .." Sofie grabbed her arm so hard Isla nearly dropped her phone. "Isla. You literally just did it."

"Don't make it a thing."

"You're going to Paris!"

"I'm going to need you to lower your voice."

"You're going to Paris and you told me to lower my .."

"Sofie."

But even as she said it, something small and stubborn and slightly terrified had lit up in her chest. She was going. She was actually going.

She slipped her phone into her pocket and looked across the parking lot one last time.

Marcus was still there by the steps, completely unaware that she existed in the specific way he'd always been unaware that she existed.

She looked away. For what she told herself was the last time.

She walked home with Sofie talking the entire way and her mind somewhere else entirely, already thinking about what to pack, already imagining Paris in the vague way you imagined places you'd never been.

She didn't tell Sofie about the journal on her desk. The one she'd been filling for two years. The one with Marcus's name on too many pages.

She should have taken it with her when she left the house that morning.

She didn't know yet that by tomorrow night, she would wish more than anything that she had.