CHAPTER TWO

“You love it when I’m bad,” Jake murmured, and then his mouth was on her neck, and her hands were fisted in his jacket.

I stopped walking, my feet suddenly rooted to the ground. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. Not today. Not when everything else was falling apart.

“Jake?” His name came out as barely a whisper, but somehow he heard it. They both did. Jake’s head snapped up, his eyes going wide when he saw me standing there. Emma’s face flushed red, but she didn’t move away from him.

“Aria.” Jake’s voice was carefully neutral, the way people sounded when they’d been caught doing something they knew was wrong but weren’t particularly sorry about. “Hey. I was going to call you back.”

“Were you?” The question came out sharper than I’d intended. I could feel other students starting to notice, whispers spreading through the alcove like wildfire. “Before or after you finished with Emma?”

Emma finally shifted away from Jake, but not far enough. Not nearly far enough. “Aria, we didn’t mean for you to find out like this.”

“Find out what, exactly?” I kept my voice level controlled. The same tone I’d used at breakfast, the same protective numbness settling over me like armor.

Jake stood, running a hand through his hair. “Look, this isn’t… we didn’t plan this. It just happened.”

“It just happened?” I repeated. “What just happened, Jake? Be specific.”

He glanced around at the growing crowd of students, then back at me. Something shifted in his expression, defensive walls sliding into place. “Don’t make this into some big drama, Aria. You know what happened.”

“I really don’t.”

“We’re together now,” Emma said quietly, her voice barely audible. “Jake and I. We have been for… a while.”

A while. 

The words hit me like a physical blow. 

For a while. Which mens that this wasn’t a mistake neither was it some spontaneous oment of distraction and weakness., No, it was a betrayal that had been happening right under my nose.

“How long?” I asked.

Jake’s jaw tightened. “Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

“Three weeks,” Emma whispered.

“Three weeks?” I stared at her, remembering how she’d listened to me worry about my parents, how she’d helped me pick out a gift for Jake’s birthday just last month. 

How she’d hugged me after my mom’s latest crying jag and told me everything would work out. “You’ve been lying to me for three weeks?”

“We weren’t lying,” Emma said defensively. “We just… we didn’t know how to tell you.”

“So you decided to make out in public instead? Very considerate.”

“Don’t be a bitch about this,” Jake snapped, and several students nearby turned to stare. “You want to know the truth? Fine. I’ve been miserable for months, Aria. You’re like dating a fucking robot. You never laugh, you never get excited about anything.”

His words were designed to hurt, to make me the villain in this story. Around us, students were openly staring now, phones probably recording, gossip already spreading through group chats.

“Emma actually talks to me,” Jake continued, his voice getting louder. “She gets my jokes, she wants to do things besides sit in silence and study. She’s not some cold bitch who acts like everything is beneath her.”

“Jake, stop,” Emma said quietly, but she didn’t look at me. Couldn’t look at me.

“No, she needs to hear this,” Jake said, his face flushed with anger or guilt or both. “I tried to make it work, but it’s like you don’t even care about me. About us. When’s the last time you told me you loved me? When’s the last time you seemed happy to see me?”

The questions hung in the air like accusations. Because he was right, wasn’t he? I hadn’t said those words in weeks. I’d been too busy surviving, too busy keeping my family’s dysfunction from bleeding into every other part of my life.

“I left you a voicemail twenty minutes ago,” I said quietly. “Saying I needed you.”

Jake’s face flickered with something that might have been guilt. “That doesn’t count. You were upset about something else.”

“So you only want me when I’m happy? When I’m convenient?”

“No, but I need you to be human,” he shot back. “To act like you actually give a damn about something other than your grades and your perfect image.”

“My perfect image?” I laughed, but it came out hollow. “You think this is perfect? You think I want to be the girl who doesn’t cry when her parents are getting divorced? Who doesn’t scream when her boyfriend cheats on her with her best friend?”

“Your parents are getting divorced?” Emma asked, her voice small.

“This morning,” I said, still looking at Jake. “Over breakfast. That’s why I called you. That’s why I needed my boyfriend to be there for me. But I guess you were busy.”

Jake’s anger deflated slightly. “Aria, I’m sorry about your parents, but that doesn’t change anything between us.

“No,” I said, my voice steady despite the chaos in my chest. “It doesn’t. Because there is no us. There hasn’t been for three weeks, apparently.”

“That’s not—”

“Thank you,” I said. “Both of you, really. I’m glad the deception is uncovered and I finally know what the two people I loved the most thought about me.”

“Aria…”

“I hope you both rot in hell.”

Then I turned and walked away, my steps measured and calm, leaving Jake and Emma and the crowd of whispers behind me.

But halfway across the courtyard, my composure began to crack. Every step felt like walking through quicksand, my legs suddenly heavy and unsteady. The whispers followed me, growing louder in my head until they became a roar.

Did you see Aria’s face?

Jake and Emma? Since when?

I always thought she was weird anyway.

Poor thing. First her parents, now this.

Poor thing. Like I was some broken doll to be pitied. Some tragic figure in their high school drama.

BASTARDS!

I made it to the main building before my vision started to blur. I could feel anger, and pain building in my chest like a volcano ready to erupt but I couldn’t let anyone see me fall apart.

 Not here. 

Not like this. 

I needed somewhere safe, somewhere quiet, somewhere I could let my carefully constructed walls crumble without an audience.

“Aria, wait!” Emma’s voice called after me, but I didn’t turn around.

 I couldn’t look at her face, couldn’t see whatever combination of guilt and pity was written there.

I pushed through the heavy doors and climbed the stairs to the second floor, my breathing shallow and quick. 

My hands were shaking now, and there was a strange buzzing in my ears, like static electricity building before a storm.

The girls’ bathroom was mercifully empty, which meant I could finally let my mask slip. I gripped the edge of the sink, staring at my reflection in the mirror. 

My face was pale, my eyes too bright, my mouth pressed into a thin line that reminded me disturbingly of my father.

“You’re fine,” I whispered to my reflection. “You’re fine. You can handle this. You always handle this.”

But I wasn’t fine. In the space of three hours, I’d lost my family, my boyfriend, and my best friend. The three pillars that had held up my carefully ordered world had all crumbled at once, and I was left standing in the wreckage, trying to convince myself I was still whole.

The sob that escaped me sounded foreign, like it belonged to someone else. I pressed my hand to my mouth, trying to hold back the flood of emotions I’d been suppressing for months. But they wouldn’t be contained anymore. The careful walls I’d built around myself were crumbling, and everything I’d been holding back came rushing out at once.

“I trusted you,” I whispered to the empty bathroom, my voice cracking. “I trusted both of you.”

Emma, who’d moved here from California and latched onto me like I was some kind of lifeline. Who’d said I made her feel less lost, less alien in this new place. But maybe I’d been wrong about who was saving whom. Maybe she’d just been studying me, learning my weaknesses, figuring out what I had that she wanted to take.

And Jake. God, Jake. Who’d held me when my parents had their first screaming match in front of me. Who’d told me my intensity wasn’t too much, that he liked having someone who actually thought before speaking. Who’d made me believe that maybe I wasn’t as broken as my family made me feel.

All lies. All of it.

Another sob tore through me.

The grief crashed over me in waves. Grief for my parents’ marriage, for the illusion of stability I’d clung to. Rage at Jake’s betrayal, at the casual cruelty in his words. The devastating loneliness of being seventeen and having no one left to trust. The fear that maybe he was right—maybe I really was too cold, too broken, too much of a ghost to deserve love.

The emotions I’d been holding back for months poured out of me like a dam bursting, and with them came something else. 

Something that made the air in the bathroom feel electric, charged with potential energy.

The bathroom lights flickered overhead. Then the faucet beside me turned on by itself, water rushing out in a violent stream.

 I stepped back, confused, but the next faucet turned on too. 

Then the next.

 All of them, water spraying everywhere, the sound deafening in the small space.

“What the hell?” I breathed, watching the chaos unfold around me.

The mirrors began to shake in their frames, my fractured reflection multiplying and distorting until I couldn’t tell which was real. The windows rattled like something was trying to break in—or break out. And in the corner of the bathroom, impossible and terrifying, a miniature whirlwind was forming, spinning faster and faster, pulling paper towels and debris into its vortex.

I pressed myself against the wall, heart hammering, watching my reflection fracture in the shaking mirrors. The storm was inside the bathroom, but somehow I knew—with a certainty that defied logic—that it was also inside me.

The water, the wind, the trembling walls—they were responding to the tempest in my chest, to the emotions I’d finally allowed myself to feel.

There was only one word to describe what I was seeing - MAGIC.