003 Going To Paris

Isla woke up to her phone buzzing.

Not the alarm. The other kind of buzzing — the rapid, relentless kind that meant multiple notifications arriving at the same time. She reached for it with her eyes still half closed and squinted at the screen.

Seven texts. Three missed calls. A string of notifications from I*******m ,an app she barely used.

She sat up.

The first text was from a number she barely recognized. A girl from her chemistry class sophomore year. They hadn't spoken since.

“Isla. your diary. it's everywhere.”

She stared at the message for a long time trying to grasp it.

Then she opened the next one. Same thing, different person. Then another. Then another. All of them saying some version of the same sentence in different words — ‘have you seen’, ‘are you okay’, ‘oh my god isla’ and she was reading them but not processing them, her brain doing that thing where it received information and refused to believe it at the same time.

She opened the app.

Screenshots. Pages and pages of her journal. Her handwriting — her actual handwriting, which somehow made it worse than if it had been typed, because handwriting was personal in a way that felt like skin — filling her screen. Her words. Her sentences. The ones she'd written at two in the morning when she couldn't sleep and the feelings had nowhere else to go.

The page about Marcus's laugh.

The entry from last winter about feeling like glass — like people could see through her but never actually see her.

The one from three nights ago. The one about his name at Tyler's party and the four minutes in the bathroom.

All of it. Every embarrassing, private, necessary word.

Eleven thousand shares.

She put her phone face down on the mattress and sat in the silence of her bedroom and stared at the wall.

Her mom knocked on the door at seven-thirty. "Isla? You're up early."

"Yeah."

A pause. "You okay?"

"Fine."

Another pause, longer this time. Her mom knew the difference between fine and fine. She always had. But she didn't push — she just said "breakfast in ten" and her footsteps went back down the hallway.

Isla picked up her phone again.

Eleven thousand, two hundred and forty shares. In one night. While she slept.

She opened Sofie's contact. No texts. No calls. Nothing. Sofie, who texted her good morning every single day without fail, who had been the first person to text her about literally everything for five years, had sent nothing.

The quiet wrongness from last night came back. Louder this time.

She called.

It rang four times and went to voicemail.

She called again.

Three rings this time. Then Sofie picked up.

"Isla."

"Did you do this?"

Silence.

"Sofie."

"It was an accident." Sofie's voice was wrong. Too careful. Too prepared. "I was looking at it and my phone — my finger slipped and I didn't mean to and I'm so sorry, I'm so .."

"Your finger slipped."

"Yes."

"And posted twelve pages of my journal."

"I know how it sounds .."

"How does it sound, Sofie? Tell me how it sounds."

"Isla, please, I'm so sorry, I didn't .."

She hung up.

She sat on the edge of her bed and looked at her journal on the desk. The one she'd left open. The one she'd walked away from for twelve minutes while she went downstairs for dinner.

She thought about Sofie's face last night. Carefully neutral. That told her everything she needed to know.

She thought about a slipped finger and twelve pages.

She thought about the shares, comment and likes. About what people were talking about her.

Her phone kept buzzing. She turned it face down again and went to the window and stood there looking at the street below. Mrs. Patterson from next door was walking her dog. A car she didn't recognize was parked outside the house two doors down. Everything looked completely normal and ordinary and exactly the same as it always looked.

Nothing was the same.

She turned around and looked at her room. At the journal on the desk. At her half-packed suitcase in the corner that she'd started last night after Sofie left, optimistic and excited, before any of this.

Paris.

She had a flight. She'd confirmed it yesterday, standing in the parking lot with Marcus's laugh in her ears and something stubborn lit up in her chest.

She opened her laptop. Found the program email. Found the earliest possible departure date — four days earlier than she'd originally planned.

She booked it before she could think too hard about it.

Then she opened her suitcase and started packing properly. Not the casual, excited packing of last night. The fast, focused packing of someone who needed to be somewhere else before they fell apart completely.

Her mom appeared in the doorway twenty minutes later holding two cups of tea and taking in the open suitcase and the expression on Isla's face.

She didn't ask what happened. She just came in and set a cup on the desk and sat on the edge of the bed and waited.

That was the thing about her mom. She always knew when to wait.

"My journal got posted online," Isla said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "All of it. It's everywhere."

Her mom closed her eyes for a second. "Oh, baby."

"I changed my flight. I'm leaving sooner."

"Isla"

"I can't be here." She kept folding things, putting them in the suitcase, keeping her hands busy. "I can't walk around this town right now with everyone having read that. I can't."

Her mom was quiet for a moment.

"Do you know who posted it?"

Isla didn't answer.

Her mom looked at her for a long time. "Okay," she said softly. "Okay. Let me help you pack."

They packed together mostly in silence. Her mom folded things neatly while Isla moved in fast, slightly chaotic circles around the room gathering what she needed. At some point her mom put on music — something soft, something old and the room felt slightly less like it was collapsing.

At some point Isla's phone buzzed with a text from a number she knew too well.

She looked at the screen.

Marcus Ellis: Isla. I read it. I need to talk to you.

She stared at his name on her screen for a very long time.

Then she put the phone in her suitcase pocket, zipped it shut, and told herself she would deal w

ith that later.

She had a flight to catch.

And Marcus Ellis had just become a problem she was going to have to face from another country.