CHAPTER THREE — Seventeen Again

Hannah’s POV

The first thing I heard was Cheryl’s voice.

Even through whatever thick dark place I had been floating in I knew it was her. Seventeen years of friendship wires your ears to recognize someone before your brain fully catches up.

“Zara you would have to stay with me for a while, just until your mom gets better.”

I tried to open my eyes. Nothing. Like my body had made a decision without consulting me and wasn’t ready to reverse it yet.

“Mum, I’m so sorry. Please stay with me.”

Zara.

I fought harder. Pushed against whatever heaviness was sitting on top of me. I needed to see her. Needed her to see me open my eyes so she would stop crying in that voice, that small broken voice that didn’t sound like my daughter at all.

But the harder I pushed the more stuck I felt. Eventually my body simply said no and I stopped fighting and just listened until even that faded out.

Then I was somewhere else entirely.

A classroom. Sunlight coming in at the wrong angle. The smell of chalk dust and floor wax and cheap canteen food.

I was back in high school.

Not remembering it. Not dreaming about it. In it. Sitting at a desk by the window in a uniform I hadn’t worn in seventeen years, tears on my face that I hadn’t felt start, everything around me so familiar it turned my stomach.

“Hey Hannah.”

I turned around slowly.

The school cleaner. Standing at the back of the empty classroom with a mop she wasn’t using, watching me with an expression too calm for the situation. I knew her face. I had known it from the first time I sat in this exact classroom crying, the worst day of my life unfolding outside the principal’s office while nobody did anything.

The whole memory came back in one wave. The boys. The principal’s rehearsed non-response. The sponsor’s name above the school entrance. Walking out of that office unable to go home and sitting here until she found me.

That was how Zara came into existence. That was the beginning of everything.

“My child,” she said warmly. “It has been a very long time. How old is your child now?”

“Seventeen,” I said. “She’s seventeen.”

“And has a lot changed?”

“I’m a grown woman. A mother. Everything has changed.”

She tilted her head. “But I don’t see that.” She stepped closer. “All I see is a seventeen year old girl.”

I stood up. Crossed to the mirror on the far wall and looked.

Seventeen year old Hannah looked back at me.

Not a memory. Not a reflection of who I used to be. Me. Right now. The same face I had before everything happened,  before years of sacrifice and single motherhood quietly rearranged my features into something harder.

I pressed both hands against my cheeks.

“I’m dreaming,” I said firmly. Like confidence would make it true.

“Hannah.” Gentle but certain. “This is what you wished for.”

“No.” I turned fast. “I wished to fix my daughter. To be there for her. I didn’t ask for this.”

“Then here you go,” she said simply. “But this isn’t forever. Everything goes back to normal on your next birthday.”

My next birthday. Two months away.

“There is one more thing,” she said, her voice shifting,  quieter now, deliberate. “The magic doesn’t just make you younger. It makes you invisible to everyone who knew Hannah. Your best friend. Your daughter. Anyone who has ever known your face will look at Nora and see only a stranger. Not a resemblance. Not a familiar face. A complete stranger. The wish was for a clean slate and the magic honored that fully. Nobody will recognize you. Not even the people who love you most.”

The words landed one by one.

“Nobody?” I whispered.

“Nobody,” she confirmed. “That is the price.”

I had more questions, a hundred more,  but my eyes were doing something strange. Getting heavy. A force pressing them closed from the outside in.

“Wait…” I started.

But she was already gone.

And so was I.

I woke up to antiseptic and machines.

Hospital. I lay still just breathing. A dream. Too real but a dream. I was in a hospital bed because I had fainted and everything else was just my exhausted brain doing what brains do under pressure.

Except I felt different.

A lightness that had nothing to do with rest. An energy that felt almost foreign  like something returned to me that I had been missing so long I forgot what it felt like.

The room had no mirror.

That detail arrived with a specific kind of dread.

I disconnected the monitor clips. Stood up. Found the bathroom at the end of the corridor and stood outside the door with my hand flat against it.

Then I pushed it open and walked to the mirror.

The scream came out before I could stop it.

Seventeen. I was seventeen. A thirty four year old mother was standing in a hospital bathroom looking at the face of the girl she used to be before everything happened.

I screamed again. Heard footsteps. Dragged myself back to the room with my heart slamming.

The room was already full. Two doctors. Four nurses. And Cheryl  my best friend  standing in the middle of all of them with her face doing that specific thing it did when she was trying not to fully panic.

The moment she saw me she stepped forward and stopped directly in front of me.

Cheryl, I thought. Cheryl will know me anywhere.

“Hey sweetie, did you see the patient in this room? Tall, curly hair, about thirty ”

She kept talking.

I stopped hearing her.

The magic had warned me. I had heard the words. Understood them before they became real.

This was them becoming real.

My best friend of seventeen years was standing close enough to touch and looking straight through me like I was a stranger who had wandered into the wrong room.

The clean slate. This was what it cost.

I stood there in a body nobody recognized with two months on a clock nobody else could hear and felt the full weight of what I had agreed to without knowing I was agreeing to anything.

Two months, I thought.

That’s all I have.

It has to be enough.