The House Will See You Now

So you’re here for the magic school.

The towers. The wands. The Latin spells and the prophecy and the kindly old mentor who believes in you when no one else does.

Surprise, bitch.

I work at a diner. Worked. Past tense. It’s complicated.

There are four people living in my head and I spent nineteen years thinking that made me crazy. Turns out it makes me valuable. Valuable is worse. Crazy, they leave you alone. Valuable, they hunt you.

I’m writing this in a house that tried to eat me. I mean that literally. The door opened like a mouth. The walls have opinions. Radiators hum lullabies when I can’t sleep, which is always, because I can’t sleep.

There’s a woman down the hall who burns. There’s a man in the basement who talks to the dead. But there’s a therapist who looked at the inside of my head today and didn’t flinch, and I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do with any of this.

I’m supposed to be figuring out what I am. What we are. The voices have names now. Some of them. We’re working on it.

I’m supposed to be learning magic. I can’t even bend a candle flame.

I’m supposed to feel safe here. I almost do. That’s the terrifying part.

So no. No wands. No sorting ceremony. No chosen one.

Just me. Just us. But just a girl who blew up a kitchen and ran into the snow and found something that might be a home or might be a trap or might be both.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about finding a family when you’ve never had one. It gives the world something to take from you. Nineteen years I had nothing, and nothing is safe, because nothing can’t be stolen. Two months I had everything.

I don’t know how this story ends.

But I know how it starts.

Hungry. Freezing. Alone.

Not anymore.