Breakfast was eggs and pancakes, and my mom had put strawberries on top of the pancakes in a little smiley face, the way she used to when I was small and scared of something. She did not say a word about it. She just set the plate down in front of me and squeezed my shoulder as she went past, like this was any normal morning in any normal house. I ate every bite, because she was trying so hard, and because a part of me was scared that if I did not eat now, my stomach would be too knotted up to eat all day.
"You look beautiful, Serena," she said at the door, and she straightened the strap of my dress like I was five years old. "This year is going to be different. I can feel it."
"I know, Mom," I said, and I almost believed us both.
The new school was bigger than my old one, with wide front steps and a flag snapping in the wind, and kids everywhere in little groups that had clearly known each other forever. I stood at the bottom of those steps with my bag held in front of me like a shield, wearing a pink dress that suddenly felt like a costume, and I had to talk myself into moving. One step. Then another. Nobody pointed. Nobody laughed. A girl with a ponytail nearly as long as mine held the door for me and said, "Cute dress," as I went past, and it startled me so much I nearly tripped.
Cute dress. Two words. In my old school, two words about my clothes were never kind ones.
First period, I sat near the window because the seat was empty and out of the way, and I let myself breathe. The teacher made me stand and say my name and where we had moved from, and thirty faces looked at me and then, just like that, looked away again. Not cruel. Not kind. Just... normal. I sat back down with my heart going like a hammer, and for the first time since we moved, I thought maybe — maybe — this could actually work. Maybe the new Serena in the pink dress gets to have the life I always pictured. Friends. Ordinary days. A future.
That is when I saw it, out the window, on the roof of the gym across the courtyard.
The raven.
The same raven — I would know it anywhere, that size, that stillness, black against the pale morning sky. It was facing the school. Facing my window. The cold feeling went down my back again, slower this time, and I gripped the edge of my desk. Birds land on roofs, I told myself. Birds are everywhere. It does not mean anything.
Except it had been on my fence at dawn.
And now it was here.
"Serena?" the teacher said, and I jumped so hard my pen hit the floor. A couple of kids laughed — not mean, just startled laughing — and the girl from the door leaned down, picked my pen up, and handed it back to me with a little smile, like we were in on something together.
"I'm fine," I said. "Sorry. I'm fine."
When I looked back out the window, the roof was empty. The raven was gone, like it had never been there at all.
I told myself I had imagined the whole thing... right up until I opened my bag at lunch and found a single black feather lying on top of my books.
I never put it there.