I sat in the cafeteria with a tray I did not want, staring at that feather.
It was long and black, and up close it was not plain black at all. When the light hit it, it shone blue and green and purple, like oil on water. It was beautiful. That was the worst part. It was beautiful, and it had not been in my bag that morning, and somebody — or something — had put it there while my bag sat under my desk in a locked-up classroom world where only thirty strangers had been anywhere near it.
"You're the new girl, right? Serena?"
I jumped and nearly knocked my drink over. It was the girl from the door, the one who had picked up my pen, tray in her hands and a smile like we had known each other for years instead of one morning.
"Tessa," she said, sitting down across from me without asking, like sitting with the new girl was the most natural thing in the world. "And before you ask — yes, everybody stares on the first day. It wears off by Friday. Mostly."
I liked her before she even finished talking. There is a type of person who decides you are theirs in the first five minutes, and Tessa was that type, and I had never had one of those before, not in my old school, not ever. We talked about teachers. We talked about the town, which she called small like it was an apology. She showed me which vending machine ate money and which bathroom the older girls had claimed, and the whole time that feather sat in my bag between my feet, and I did not say one word about it.
I do not know why I did not tell her. Maybe because I wanted one normal lunch. One normal hour where I was just a girl in a pink dress making a friend, and not a girl finding feathers that should not exist.
On the walk home, I saw it three times.
Once on a telephone pole at the end of the school road. Once on the roof of the little grocery store, where it turned its head to watch me pass below. And once — my heart slammed so hard I had to stop walking — on the gate of a house two streets from mine, close enough that I could see the shine on its feathers and the intelligence in its eye, and I swear on everything I have, it was not a bird's kind of intelligence. It looked at me the way a person looks at you when they are deciding something about you.
I ran the rest of the way home.
I did not tell my mom. I stood in my room with the demolition derby still all over the floor and I put that feather in my nightstand drawer, underneath my old beanies, and I closed it like closing it made it not real. Then I did my homework. I ate supper. I laughed at something my mom said, and the whole time there was a drawer in my room with a feather in it that a raven had given me like a calling card.
That night I dreamed of wings. Not flying — I was not flying. I was being carried, high and fast, with the wind tearing at my pink dress and the whole town small and dark below me, and I was not scared, and that was the strangest part of the dream. I was not scared at all.
I woke to a sound at my window.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The raven sat on my windowsill in the moonlight, on the other side of the glass, and it tilted its head at me — slow, deliberate — and tapped the glass one more time.
Like it was knocking.
Like it was asking to be let in.