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SEVENTEEN

LENORE

I woke up in a bed.

Dorian, my father, and my stepmother stood above me, framed in soft white light leaking through the slats of the blinds.

They didn’t move. Just watched me like I was a stranger who’d wandered into the wrong house. My father’s jaw clenched like it always did when he didn’t have the right words. My stepmother’s nails tapped against her thigh in a rhythm too slow to be nervous.

I blinked. My eyes burned.

I pinched my arm beneath the covers. Hard. The sting was slow to register, but when it did, it settled in. Stayed. The kind of pain that doesn’t fade. The kind that leaves a bruise.

“Lenore,” my stepmother said, tilting her head. Her voice was low like she’d practiced saying it in a mirror over and over again. “You woke up last night. You were screaming at us. Do you remember?”

No clock ticked in the room. No sound but the hum of something I couldn’t name.

“What?” I croaked, my throat paper-dry. “I saw…”

But my voice collapsed on itself, like even it didn’t believe me.

She crouched at the edge of the bed, resting her manicured hand on the blanket. Her skin smelled like lavender. Expensive. Fake. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “You had an episode. Again.”

I didn’t ask what that meant.

I just looked at Dorian.

He leaned against the doorframe, jaw working a piece of gum like it owed him something. He was barefoot. Always barefoot. He didn’t look concerned.

When they left the room, he stayed.

Just a breath longer.

Then he winked, slow, crooked. “Welcome home, little stepsister.”

He popped his gum.

The door clicked shut behind him.

The air grew colder.

I sat up.

The sheets felt stiff. Unwashed. Familiar. My fingers brushed the edge of the night dress I wore. Cotton, white, ribbon straps knotted at the shoulders. The one Mom sewed the summer before she died. The seams had started to fray.

The mirror across the room had a crack splitting it from top to bottom, like a lightning bolt frozen in glass. My reflection stared back at me.

Younger.

Softer.

Wrong.

I stepped off the bed, knees buckling slightly like they weren’t used to holding my weight. My legs carried me to the wall before I even decided to move. I reached for the peeling wallpaper—the green one with faded roses.

The edge peeled back easily.

Underneath, written in frantic strokes, black and uneven were written words; “My mind is a dark place no one can ever escape.”

The room exhaled around me.

Or maybe I did.

I stepped away.

Hands trembling.

I looked at them.

At my skin, pale lines were carved up and down my wrists, some faint, some deeper. Faded words stared back. SORRY, FAKE, NEEDY, NOISE.

My legs. Same story.

Scars like whispers. Like secrets, no one ever wanted to hear.

I opened the cabinet in the corner. The wood moaned like it hadn’t been touched in years. Inside, a piece of paper sat alone on the shelf. Folded once. Slightly crumpled at the edges.

I picked it up.

Unfolded it.

Two words, scrawled in uneven letters: “HELP ME.”

My throat closed.

The handwriting was mine.

But I didn’t remember writing it.

Couldn’t remember when.

Couldn’t breathe.

The mirror caught my eye again.

The girl in the reflection still hadn’t moved.

She watched me.

Waited.

I backed away slowly, my heart thumping against the inside of my ribs like it wanted out. I didn’t know where to go. The room wasn’t mine anymore. Maybe it never was.

I laid back down, curling in on myself. The blankets were too tight. The air is too thick.

I stared at the ceiling.

Waited for the room to settle.

It didn’t.

Somewhere inside me, something began to splinter.

Memories I didn’t ask for.

Flashes that didn’t belong.

A swing set.

The smell of wet earth.

Blood on the stairs.

Dorian’s voice. “You promised.”

The walls started to pulse, like something was crawling just beneath the surface.

I turned my head and saw her.

Myself.

In the mirror.

But she was closer now.

She mouthed something I couldn’t hear.

I closed my eyes.

And I saw it again.

The garden.

Black roses blooming against a sky that didn’t have stars. Dorian standing barefoot in the dirt, skin pale, lips cracked.

“You left,” he said, voice low. Too low.

“I didn’t mean to,” I whispered.

“You let them bury me.”

“I didn’t—“ My voice cracked like ice underweight. “I didn’t know.”

“But you do now,” he said, stepping forward. “You always did.”

The ground opened beneath me.

I fell.

Woke.

Back in bed.

Sheets cold now.

The scar on my thigh was bleeding. Fresh. Red. The word was new.

LIAR.

I ran to the mirror.

Touched my face.

Still young.

Still not mine.

I pressed both palms against the glass.

And the girl behind it smiled.

I guess you never really know. What’s real? What’s a dream? Where it begins or where it ends—or if it ever ends at all.

Sometimes I think I should’ve set this place on fire, and let it all burn with everyone still inside. But maybe that wasn’t the end of my story. Maybe that was just the beginning.

Maybe this is a dream. Maybe I was meant to start from scratch. Or maybe… I’m just another version of myself, drifting through some fractured dimension, split off from reality.

What is real?

Do you know?

When you stare into the mirror, what stares back? Is it really you—or something wearing your face? Are you real to yourself? Or just a reflection stitched together by what others see?

And all of this—this noise in my head—is it buried deep in my brain, locked away in some dark corner? Or is it a nightmare, and I’m just waiting to wake up?

I once heard about a dream within a dream. Maybe I’m one of those people. Maybe I never woke up.

And if I didn’t? If this is still the dream?

Then what I did—what I became —wasn’t a choice. It was the script I was handed. A glitch in the sequence. A bleed-through from some other version of me, the one who didn’t survive the fire but learned how to live inside the ash.

I tried to be good. I swear I did.

But goodness doesn’t grow in a mind like mine. It gets swallowed. Chewed up. Rewritten in red.

People say you find yourself in the wreckage. But what if you are the wreckage?

What if the only thing left to find is silence?

And maybe that’s the truth I keep circling back to:

That I was never lost.

I was erased.

And this, this flickering, fractured echo of me, is all that’s left.

End of chapter.