Snap.
Fingers in front of my face.
The sound isn't loud, but it slices straight through the fog in my head.
It's not even the snap that jolts me—it's the fact that my body reacts like it's a gunshot. My shoulders jerk. My throat tightens. My pulse leaps so hard my vision swims for half a second, like the world stutters and has to reload.
I hate that.
I hate that my nervous system is living in a different calendar than the rest of me. That it keeps bracing for impact in the middle of lattes and gossip and completely normal mornings.
I blink once. Twice.
The café is still here. The smell of espresso. The sticky tables. Someone laughing too loudly near the pastry case. A blender whining like it's being punished. A barista calling out an order with the forced joy of someone who's been awake since 4 a.m.
Everyone was talking about summer like it was already here, even though spring had barely settled.
But it takes effort to believe it.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth when I swallow, like I've been holding my breath without realizing. My fingers have gone numb around the paper cup. When I loosen them, there's a faint ache in my joints—like I've been gripping something heavier than a coffee for far too long.
Shelby—who is staring at me like I've personally offended every ancestor on her family tree.
"Ang. You're not listening."
"I am," I lie, burying a yawn in my sleeve like it's a crime.
Across from me, Cassie watches quietly over the rim of her thermos, eyes sharp and too-knowing, like she's taking notes on a test only she can see. Like she's already seen the answer key and is waiting to see if I'll catch up.
Shelby narrows her eyes. Her whole soul narrows with them. "Angela."
"I'm listening," I groan, rubbing my face and turning away so she can't see the exhaustion dragging my features down, or the way my skin still feels a fraction off, like I haven't fully finished waking up in this life.
She smacks my arm.
"Ow! Shelby!"
The sting snaps me the rest of the way into my body.
Not all the way, though.
There's still this slight delay—like my thoughts arrive first, and the rest of me follows a second later. Like my soul is tired of keeping up and keeps lagging behind on purpose.
My skin feels too tight. My hoodie collar scratches the side of my neck. The noise in Delmont presses from every angle, the kind of sensory pile-up that makes it hard to tell what matters.
I try to ground myself the way Cassie taught me without admitting she taught me anything.
Cold cup.
Warm coffee.
Chair under my thighs.
Shelby's sneaker tapping against the booth in an anxious rhythm she thinks no one notices.
My heart refuses to calm down. It's thudding hard enough that I can feel it in my teeth, in my fingertips. It keeps insisting: something is coming.
And the worst part?
A small, ugly part of me believes it.
Because the closer we get to the Masquerade, the more the air feels…wired. Like the world is waiting for a curtain to lift. Like I'm waiting for it, too, even while I'm pretending I'm not.
Shelby Tran—hurricane of a girl, human caffeine shot, my anchor since sixth grade—is the only person in this world who can hit me in public and call it affection.
We met long before we remember meeting: babies dumped in the same daycare, toddlers sharing crayons, kids who grew up on the same street. But everything really changed the year she transferred to my school—the year Tiffany Weismann decided Shelby was her new prey.
Shelby refused to break.
Where Tiffany hissed, Shelby laughed. Where Tiffany shoved, Shelby planted her feet. She was brave without posturing, kind without apology. The kind of person who made you feel like joining her was an adventure—even when the "adventure" was just sneaking salt-and-vinegar chips into the library and telling stories dramatic enough to make a sixth-grader feel like they were spells.
She's still that girl.
Still magic in human form.
Which is why I force a smile now.
"You know more than anyone how big the Masquerade Ball is," she says, crossing her arms. "We've been planning this since freshman year. And you are acting…off. What's going on?"
I sigh. "Couldn't sleep. Nightmare."
Her expression softens—not surprised, just tired-of-being-worried. "Still?"
I nod. "Every night. Same one. My birthday's coming up, and the coven thinks it's…significant."
I do finger quotes. She rolls her eyes—teasing, not mocking.
Shelby isn't Wiccan, but she respects that I straddle two worlds: Mercy University by day, Northwood Academy on the weekends. Other people aren't so generous. I've lost count of the protestors who've stood outside the Academy gates waving DEMON WORSHIPERS signs while we're literally running CPR drills and writing research papers like normal students.
It's exhausting.
And it's not just the protestors.
It's the double life itself—the constant code-switching. Mercy wants resumes and internships and the right kind of smile. Northwood wants discipline, devotion, and silence about anything you can't explain to a normal roommate.
At Mercy, I'm Angela: nursing major, coffee addict, girl who always has an extra pen and an emergency hair tie.
At Northwood, I'm Meyler: bloodline, potential, watch list. The way some of the older instructors look at me makes my stomach twist, like they're measuring how sharp the blade is before they decide whether to use it.
Sometimes I catch myself wondering which version is real.
Then the nightmares happen and it feels like the question answers itself.
Because in the dreams, nobody calls me Angela like it's a name.
They say it like it's a disguise.
Cassie's gaze flicks to me at the word nightmare. Her thumb rubs absently over a chip in the ceramic mug, but her eyes sharpen like a camera refocusing.
"Same crash?" she asks quietly. "Same door?"
My throat tightens.
"Yeah," I admit. "Same everything."
"Any new details?" Cassie presses, and it's not nosy—it's clinical. She never asks, Are you okay? She asks, What changed?
I think of the hooded figure. The veiled one. The door breathing like a living thing. The name that isn't mine.
"No," I lie. "Just the rerun."
Cassie's jaw flexes.
The tiniest tell.
If you don't know Cassie, you'd miss it. She's composed in a way that makes other people feel messy just for existing near her. But that jaw twitch is her version of alarm bells.
Her gaze slides to my hands.
I'd been tapping my fingers against my knee—fast, thoughtless, the way you do when you're trying not to bolt. I stop. Pretend I wasn't doing it. My leg keeps bouncing anyway.
Cassie doesn't blink.
It's like she's watching two timelines at once: the one where we're three girls in a café, and the one braided underneath it where something ancient is inching toward me.
She lowers her voice. "You keep lying about the details."
My stomach drops.
Shelby doesn't notice—she's busy scrolling, building her Masquerade fantasy like she can will it into safety. But Cassie's attention pins me to the booth.
"I'm not—" I start.
Cassie's expression doesn't change. "You are. It's fine. I'd lie too."
That shouldn't be comforting, but somehow it is. My throat tightens anyway.
She says, "Then the message is the same. They're not done talking yet."
Shelby waves both hands like she's fanning smoke away. "Okay, no offense to your ghost group chat, but can we not do doom first thing in the morning? I'm trying to manifest a non-cursed Masquerade Ball."
"If Evan hasn't asked you yet," I say, desperate to steer her back to safer waters, "you could ask him."
Shelby's gasp is theatrical devastation.
"You did not just say that."
"It's the twenty-first century," I argue. "Girls can ask guys out."
She fixes me with a scandalized stare. "Ang, that is not how the Masquerade works."
Her voice trembles—not with anger, but with the same fear I saw the night of senior prom.
Corey Martins—all-star quarterback, human red flag, ego in a letterman jacket—promised he'd go with her. Then the night before prom, he slid back to his ex like it was a group chat he'd never actually left. Shelby stood by her front door in her gown for an hour, waiting for someone who never showed.
I stayed home too.
James, my boyfriend back then, was furious—furious enough to almost end us. But Shelby's hurt was louder than his ego. We sat on my bedroom floor, ate cookie dough out of the tub, and pretended the music from town wasn't floating through the window. The next morning, she burned every picture of Corey she owned. Watched them curl, blacken, and collapse to ash.
I watched the ash fall into the sink like it was snow.
We stood there in her kitchen, still in our prom clothes, mascara streaked, hair half-fallen out of pins, both of us smelling like cheap perfume and humiliation. Shelby didn't cry anymore. Her face had gone too still. Too blank.
It scared me more than the sobbing.
She turned the faucet on and let water run over the ashes until they broke apart into gray sludge, then she scrubbed the sink like she could erase the whole night.
"I'm fine," she said, voice flat.
I knew she wasn't.
But I also knew what she meant: I'm not going to die from this. I'm not going to let him make me smaller.
That was the moment Shelby became my anchor for real.
Not because she needed me.
Because she taught me, without meaning to, what it looks like when pain shows up and you refuse to kneel.
So when her voice trembles now—talking about Masquerade rules like they're laws of physics—I don't tease her.
Not really.
Because I know what's underneath the jokes:
A girl who waited in a gown once, believing someone would show.
A girl who still wants to believe it won't happen again.
So yeah. I get it.
"He'll ask," I say softly. "After a year together? At this point you two are a combo meal."
She mutters, "I do love PB&J."
"If you're worried," I say, leaning in, "I'll do recon. I'll poke his tiny man-brain with questions."
She throws a Cheeto at my head. I dodge badly because my reflexes are trash. It hits Cassie, who plucks it off her sleeve and eats it without breaking eye contact with me.
"You're the best," Shelby says, beaming.
But her smile doesn't reach mine.
Because while we're laughing about dresses and shoes and the politics of who stands next to whom in group photos, my brain keeps looping back to the same thing.
The eyes from my dream.
That winter-bright blue that froze me down to my bones.
The Masquerade Ball at Mercy isn't just a party—it's a ritual dressed in velvet and secrets.
The first time I heard about it, it was whispered like a myth.
Upperclassmen talked about it the way people talk about haunted houses: half brag, half warning. You could tell who'd been invited because they stopped pretending they were regular students for a week. They walked different—chin up, eyes sharper, like the invitation came with a crown you weren't allowed to see.
And Mercy's "philanthropic society" loved the theater of it.
Hand-delivered envelopes. Wax seals. Location kept "private" until the day of. Photos that always looked too staged to be candid—Sigma girls in masks, donors laughing in tuxedos, professors smiling like they weren't judging you.
It always felt performative.
But now… it feels calibrated.
Like the whole night is a net, and everyone is busy admiring the glitter while the knots tighten.
And every time someone says Masquerade, my body hears: threshold.
Even if Shelby bans the word.
Officially, it's a fundraiser-slash-tradition. Unofficially, it's where the hierarchy gets written in ink. Only those chosen by Mercy's "philanthropic society" (read: the Secret Society everyone pretends doesn't exist) receive invitations. If your date isn't a Mercy student, they have to buy a second ticket at double the price.
Mercy calls it exclusivity. I call it elitist as hell.
For the sororities—especially Sigma—the Ball is a map. Who arrives with whom. Who leaves with whom. Who's seen laughing with which donor or professor. Graduation, internships, post-school networking—they all get shaped in invisible ways by this one night.
But nobody says that out loud.
We talk about dresses instead.
"What about mermaid cut?" Shelby is saying, scrolling through her phone. "Or, oh my god, the tulle skirt one—the pouf. Ang, imagine the pictures."
"I would look like a drowned cupcake," I tell her. "I'm making mine. You saw the sketches."
She brightens instantly. "You're unfairly talented. It kills me that you picked nursing instead of fashion."
"Fashion doesn't come with health insurance," I say automatically. That's my default answer. It's also true.
But there's another truth I don't say: when I'm sketching or pinning fabric, it feels like I'm translating a language I didn't know I spoke. Like my hands remember patterns my mind never learned. Certain stitches feel nostalgic, like déjà vu in thread—like I've sewn this exact shape into someone else's life before.
Cassie watches me over the rim of her mug, head tilted.
"What?" I ask.
"You keep designing armor and then pretending it's dresses," she says mildly.
I blink. "It's lace, Cass. Not chainmail."
"Lace can be armor," she says. "Thread can be a shield. Depends on who wrote the pattern."
Shelby huffs. "Okay, can the two of you not turn my dream night into a metaphysical TED Talk?"
She nudges me under the table. "Anyway, with your dress and my hair, we're going to obliterate everyone. Including Evan's self-control."
"Subtle," Cassie says.
"Shut up," Shelby says cheerfully. "What are your plans for the Ball, Miss Seer of All Things, Kisser of Absolutely No One?"
Cassie's expression doesn't change. "Avoid prophecy. Steal desserts. Watch the threads."
Shelby groans. "Why are my best friends like this? One's a doom magnet and the other is a cryptic fortune cookie."
She squeezes my hand across the table. "Just promise me you'll actually show up. No bailing. No 'I'm too tired' or 'my aura feels weird.' I want pictures of us together, preferably not at a hospital or in a cursed library aisle."
Something in my chest tightens, like a knot pulled in a string.
"Okay," I say. "I promise."
Cassie's eyes flick down to our joined hands.
"Careful with promises," she murmurs. "Somebody always collects."
Shelby flicks a sugar packet at her. "I swear, if you hex my Ball vibe—"
"I don't hex," Cassie says. "I just see where the hexes land."
Her gaze slides back to me, and for a second the noise of Delmont fades.
"Don't treat the Ball like just a dance," she tells me quietly. "It's…more than that. For you."
A shiver runs down my spine.
"What does that mean?" I ask.
She exhales through her nose. "It means doors aren't only wood and iron. Some of them are nights. Some are rooms full of masks." Her fingers trace a slow circle in a ring of condensation on the table. "This one's a threshold."
Shelby snaps her fingers. "Nope. Absolutely not. We are banning the word 'threshold' from this conversation. Also 'fate,' 'threads,' and 'there will be consequences.' The Ball is for kissing and slow dancing, not…whatever ominous word salad you're serving."
"You asked," Cassie says.
"I asked if I should wear red lipstick or nude, not whether time is a flat circle."
I laugh, even though part of me is still stuck on For you.
The Masquerade has always been this glittering, distant thing—a maybe. A someday. A point on the horizon you joke about and pin Pinterest boards for.
Now it feels…closer. Sharper. Like a shape moving toward me in fog.
I keep trying to tell myself it's normal nerves.
Big event. Big night. Social pressure. The usual cocktail of anxiety and caffeine.
Except it doesn't sit in my stomach like normal nerves.
It sits behind my ribs, heavy and watchful, like something inside me is listening for a signal.
When Shelby says "masquerade," I don't just picture a ballroom.
I picture doors.
Not the literal kind—though those too. I picture the moment a room changes from a place you're standing in to a place that has claimed you. The moment a yes becomes permanent.
And the scariest part is how familiar that feeling is, even though I've never been there.
Like I've stood in that kind of night before.
Like I've worn a mask before.
Like I've danced while something terrible waited behind the music.
A metallic taste blooms at the back of my tongue. I swallow it down, pretending it's just coffee.
It isn't.
It's memory trying to surface.
I drain the last of my coffee and glance at the clock over the counter.
"I've got to go," I say. "Collins will sacrifice me on a PowerPoint if I'm late."
Shelby slides out of the booth, already mid-sentence about contour palettes. "Planning at my place tonight," she reminds me. "Snacks, spreadsheets, gown murder board. We are finding your dress one way or another."
"Finding it?" I tease. "I'm making mine."
She presses a hand to her heart. "You are my favorite human. Don't tell Evan."
"Tell him," Cassie says. "He needs the humility practice."
We spill out of the booth in a tangle of limbs and bags. The bell above the café door jingles as we push out into the street.
The wind hits us like a warning.
Clouds churn low and fast, the kind that make you feel like the sky is just a ceiling someone might forget to hold up. The air is damp and heavy, an almost-storm pressing against my skin. It smells faintly of salt and something metallic, like the moment before lightning chooses a place to strike.
I glance toward the package store across the street.
The black truck is gone.
I stop walking without meaning to.
It's so small, the pause. Half a beat. Shelby doesn't even notice at first. But my whole body does that thing again—tightening, bracing—as if absence can be a threat.
The curb looks normal.
Too normal.
Like someone wiped the scene clean.
The damp air still smells faintly of exhaust and wet pavement, but there's something else threaded through it, so subtle I almost miss it: ozone, sharp and clean, the smell right before lightning.
My pulse trips.
I scan the street like a paranoid animal: storefront windows, the reflection in the café glass, the blur of moving cars. Nothing.
But the hair at the back of my neck lifts anyway.
Because I don't feel watched.
I feel…counted.
Like something checked a box and moved on.
Shelby's shoulder bumps mine. "Ang," she says, warning-laughing. "Don't do that thing where you stare into the void and make me think you're about to levitate."
I force a smile.
My eyes stay on the empty curb a second too long.
Because deep down, I don't think it left.
I think it just stopped needing to be seen.
No engine noise. No taillights disappearing around the corner. Just an empty patch of curb where the air feels slightly denser than everywhere else, like the ghost of a presence hasn't quite let go.
A crawling ache rises at the base of my skull.
"Ang." Shelby bumps my shoulder again. "If you start zoning out in the parking lot, I'm going to staple a bell to you."
"Sorry," I say. "Just—thought I saw something."
Cassie follows my gaze, eyes narrowing for a heartbeat. Then she tucks her hair behind her ear and looks away, too casual.
"Ang, don't forget," Shelby says, looping her arm through mine as we walk. "Tonight at my place. We're stocking the snack shrine and mainlining rom-coms until you admit you want to be kissed at the Ball."
"I never said I wanted—"
She steamrolls me. "Also, we need to finalize your dress design. You can't keep re-sketching it, or you'll end up going naked and calling it a 'statement.'"
"Bold of you to assume I don't want to terrify the Secret Society," I mutter.
"You're ridiculously talented," she says, ignoring me. "It kills me that you chose nursing instead of fashion."
I shrug. "I like keeping people alive."
Cassie makes a quiet sound that isn't quite a laugh. "Those skills may overlap more than you think."
Shelby waves a hand. "See? Cryptic. Always."
We reach the split in the sidewalk where the path forks—one way to the science building, the other toward the humanities quad.
Cassie pauses there, like the invisible line means more to her than it does to the rest of us.
"I've got Myth in Hall C," she says. "Try not to open any doors you can't close."
The words shouldn't make my stomach flip, but they do.
"I'm not opening anything," I protest.
Her gaze flicks to me and lingers, like she's reading the fine print on a contract already signed.
"Sometimes," she says, "saying yes is a door."
"Okay," Shelby cuts in, clapping her hands once. "New rule. No more door metaphors before noon."
Cassie's mouth twitches. "Text me if the buzzing gets worse," she says to me, almost as an afterthought.
"Buzzing?"
"In your head."
I hesitate. "How do you know there's—"
"Because you keep rubbing the same spot on your temple," she says. "And because it's you."
Then she turns and walks away, boots thudding in a steady rhythm on the concrete.
Shelby exhales dramatically. "I love her, but she needs, like, a vacation from her own brain."
"Yeah," I say softly. "Don't we all."
The wind gusts suddenly, shoving my hair into my mouth. I spit strands out and squint toward the parking lot.
The sound comes first.
A low, distant engine purr that shouldn't carry this far on campus. It rolls across the grounds, under the wind, through the chatter of students.
I turn.
The parking lot is ordinary.
Rows of cars. A rusted sedan. A white pickup. A small red hatchback with a missing hubcap.
No black truck.
The hum fades like it was never there.
Except my body remembers it.
My palms go slick on the strap of my backpack. My throat tightens like I'm about to cry or throw up, and I can't tell which would be more embarrassing on a campus sidewalk.
The sound wasn't loud.
It wasn't even clear.
It was the kind of noise you feel in your bones—a vibration that lines up perfectly with the nightmares, with the crash, with that impossible door.
Recognition is its own kind of fear.
It's not panic.
It's the moment you realize you've been running from something and it's been walking behind you the whole time.
Shelby keeps talking, trying to drag me into the comfort of "next class, next plan, next normal thing."
And I let her.
Because if I stop moving, I might look back.
And if I look back, I'm terrified I'll find out I'm not actually walking away from anything.
I'm just being allowed to go…for now.
My scalp prickles. The instinct to run pulses through me—not away from danger, but away from recognition, like some deeper part of me already knows what waits at the end of that sound.
"Ang?"
Shelby's voice pulls me back.
One more class. One step deeper into ordinary. That's all I need to focus on.
I force a smile. "Last class, then waffles and war paint."
"That's the spirit," she says, bumping my hip with hers.
She peels off toward the Arts building. I head for the science wing, backpack heavy on my shoulders, the air heavier on my skin.
The ordinary is the initiation.
The calm before the world shatters.
And somewhere deep in my bones, beneath the coffee and the jokes and the dress sketches, something hums in agreement.
Because whatever is circling me—in dreams, in trucks, in invitations that feel like recognition—is getting closer.
And I am already standing on the edge.