Chapter Two: Splinters

  Mariah came into my life like a sunrise I didn’t question.

  She was all color and warmth, the kind of person who made you feel like something exciting was always about to happen. We met the way bad ideas often begin—too easily, too fast. I was drawn to her because she felt like motion. She made me forget how still I’d been.

  But even from the beginning, something was… off.

  It wasn't in the way she talked, or even the things we did. It was in the gaps—the moments she would laugh at something I hadn’t said, or repeat a line of music like she was pulling it from a script. There were days I couldn’t quite place where we’d been. Nights I’d wake up and she’d already be gone, though I hadn’t remembered falling asleep.

  I chalked it up to the drugs. Just weed, and the occasional pill she’d lift from her aunt’s medicine cabinet. But it wasn’t just the drugs.

  There was a feeling. A kind of static. Like I was picking up signals from a channel that wasn’t meant for me. A low hum in my chest when she smiled. A sliver of doubt buried beneath every perfect moment.

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  She’d tell me things I didn’t remember saying. Finish sentences I hadn’t started. And I let it slide, because love has a way of rewriting logic in its own language.

  We got high a lot. She liked the woods behind her house. Said they felt like the edge of something. We’d lie in the grass and stare at the stars, listening to the same three songs on her old, half-broken phone.

  “Do you ever feel like we’re not supposed to be here?” she asked once, eyes fixed on the moon. “Like we got stuck in someone else’s dream?”

  I laughed at the time. Brushed it off. But something about the way she said it… stuck.

  There was one night—late summer, too warm for jackets but she wore one anyway, covered in patches and stitched-up rips—when we found an old shed behind the water tower. We broke in. It was empty except for a mirror nailed to the wall.

  She stared at it like it might say something.

  “Do you see it?” she asked.

  I didn’t.

  She leaned in close, fogged the glass with her breath, and whispered, “I’m not supposed to be here either.”

  I never forgot that.

  Not because of what she said—but because when I turned to look at her reflection, it wasn’t hers.

  It was mine. Alone.

  She wasn’t in the mirror.

  I told myself it was the drugs. Or the dark. Or a trick of light.

  But something cracked open in me that night.

  Not a break. A splinter.

  The kind that works its way deeper the more you try to ignore it.