There are things lonelier than being alone.
Being different in a room full of people who love you — that is lonelier.
By sixteen, Nora had built a careful life. She wore plain clothes. She laughed at the right moments. She joined the school newspaper because it gave her a reason to observe everyone without it being strange. She studied people the way a scientist studies specimens, not out of cruelty, but out of hunger — she wanted so badly to understand how they worked, these ordinary humans with their ordinary hearts that didn't crack the pavement when they felt too much.
Because hers did. Once, in gym class, she'd gotten so angry at a girl who'd mocked her that every lightbulb in the gymnasium burst simultaneously. The teacher blamed faulty wiring. Nora had stood in the dark with glass raining down around her, perfectly uncut, and thought: I am the faulty wiring.
She had one friend. Maya Okafor, who wore band t-shirts and had a laugh that could peel paint. Maya didn't ask questions Nora couldn't answer. She just showed up — at Nora's door with chips and terrible horror movies — and that was enough. Almost enough.
"You never cry," Maya said once, studying Nora over the rim of a soda can.
"I cry," Nora said.
"Not in front of anyone."
Nora looked out the window. Outside, it had begun to rain, though the forecast had called for sun. "Some people aren't allowed to fall apart," she said quietly. "They don't get to."
Maya didn't push. But Nora saw the question in her eyes — the one that said: why not? What are you so afraid of?
The answer was complicated. She was afraid of the things that happened when she lost control. She was afraid of the way her mother looked at her sometimes — not with hate, but with a careful, exhausted distance, like someone standing at the edge of a cliff and deciding not to look down. She was afraid that if she ever let herself feel everything she actually felt, the house would burn down. Literally.
She was sixteen when she finally found a name for herself, buried in an old book at the town library — a book so old it had no proper catalogue entry, just slid between outdated encyclopedias like it had always been there, waiting. The word was printed in faded ink: witch.
Not the costume kind. Not the fairy-tale kind. The old kind. The real kind. The kind that is born, not made — that carries the world's weather inside their chest and knows things without being told and bends the fabric of what is without meaning to.
She read the entire book in one sitting. She cried the whole time.
She had never felt so found. She had never felt so hopeless.
Because the book also said this: witches who live among humans must choose — hide forever, or burn.
History, it seemed, had not been kind.