First Confession

Sophia had never been good at keeping secrets from herself.

She could pretend—pretend she didn't notice the way her heart sped when Daniel walked into a room, pretend she couldn't recite the cadence of his laugh, pretend she wasn't always watching him. She learned to laugh on cue and make her gaze skim past him. But pretending didn't change the truth.

One evening, after another day of careful rehearsals, she sat cross-legged on her bed with her favorite pen and opened the worn leather-bound diary Nathan had given her for her thirteenth birthday. The ribbon marker was frayed; the first pages held awkward entries about school dances and secret crushes. She flipped past them and stopped on a blank page. With a breath she wrote: "I think I'm in love with Daniel Harper."

The sentence felt heavier than ink and left her exposed and oddly relieved. It wasn't a passing thing. She'd known the difference between a fleeting crush and something that hummed in her bones. This hummed. It pulled at her during algebra, when Daniel walked by the lockers; it lingered in the pauses between his words when he sat and played guitar at Nathan's house.

She remembered the first time she'd said his name aloud like it mattered. In the bathroom mirror, whispering "Daniel" until her cheeks warmed, she practiced tones and imagined replies she couldn't risk. When he entered a room, she became simultaneously smaller—wanting to disappear—and strangely louder, because every small movement felt magnified. She smiled at jokes that weren't funny and let him muss her hair, letting the nickname "Soph" land where she could feel it.

Her best friend Lena saw through the act. One sunny afternoon, Sophia washed dishes by the sink while Daniel leaned against the porch railing, sunlight catching at his hair as he talked to Nathan. Lena slipped in silently and nudged her.

"You're doing it again," Lena said.

Sophia blinked. "Doing what?"

"That thing where you pretend not to be in love with him."

Her stomach dropped. "I don't— I mean, I'm not—"

"Yes, you are," Lena said simply. "You look at him like he’s the only person in the world."

That bluntness pierced whatever tidy denial remained. Later, lying in the dark, Sophia whispered to the ceiling, "He doesn't see me." The confession tasted like metal.

"Then make him see you," Lena had replied earlier, like a dare tossed in the dark.

The suggestion scared her. To make him see meant risking ridicule, rejection, or the worst—being frozen in a memory of someone she used to be. Yet the thought of never trying was a quieter terror: a life spent arranging feelings in ink rather than voice, folding herself around possibility without ever unfolding.

So Sophia kept a small rebellion. She wrote instead. Pages filled with careful observations: how his laugh brightened when he teased Nathan, how his fingers curved around guitar strings, how his brow softened when a song ended. She cataloged fears too—the fear he'd laugh at her, the fear he'd look at her like she was a child, the fear he'd vanish from her orbit without noticing.

For now, the diary was enough. She slid it under her pillow as if hiding contraband and let sleep arrive with the comfort of a safe confession. Daniel Harper belonged to her in private pages and private breaths—a claim made in ink that felt honest when everything else required performance.

Even if only in secret, it kept her steady. Perhaps someday she'll show it. Until then, ink held the shape of what she felt and kept her company gently.