It happened in March, during a town meeting about the school.
They had arranged it properly — rented the community center, made flyers, invited parents and administrators and anyone with a concern. The agenda was broad but everyone knew the real agenda: what to do about the girl.
Nora was not supposed to be there. Her mother had told her to stay home. Maya had told her to stay home. Even Vera, when Nora called her, said: "Let it die down. Don't give them a stage."
But she had been staying home. She had been staying small and staying quiet and staying hidden for seventeen years, and she was tired — a specific, bone-deep, cellular exhaustion — of letting other people tell her story in rooms she wasn't allowed to enter.
She walked in alone.
The room went quiet in that specific way that means everyone was already talking about you and now has to stop. She found a seat in the third row. She folded her hands in her lap. She breathed slowly.
The meeting proceeded. Parents stood at the microphone and said things like community safety and our children's wellbeing and we have a right to know. None of them looked at her directly. Most of them looked at her constantly.
Then Brianna's mother stood up and said: "That girl has terrorized this school for years. Strange things happen around her. She's involved in occult practices, she's unstable, and I don't understand why we're tiptoeing around the obvious—"
Nora stood up.
She had not planned it. Her body simply stood.
The room stopped breathing.
She walked to the microphone. Someone tried to block her — a PTA president type, hand extended — and she looked at him calmly and he stepped aside.
"My name is Nora Ashfield," she said. Her voice was steady. "I've lived in this town my whole life. I've gone to your schools and eaten at your diners and breathed your air. I've walked past your houses every day and none of you knew me — not really — because I spent my entire childhood making sure of it. Making myself small. Making myself nothing. Because I learned very young that what I am frightens people, and I thought if I just got small enough, quiet enough, invisible enough, the fear would eventually go away."
She paused. The room was absolutely silent.
"It didn't," she said. "It doesn't. Fear doesn't go away because its subject disappears. Fear grows in the absence of knowledge. So here's the knowledge: I am a witch. That word means something very old and very real and not at all what most of you think it means. It means I feel things more acutely than most people. It means the world responds to me in ways that don't follow the rules you were taught. It means I was born different, and I cannot stop being different, and I am done apologizing for it."
Someone in the back started shouting. She kept going.
"I have not hurt anyone. I have not cursed anyone. I have not done anything to Brianna Keller's cat." A ripple of something near laughter moved through the crowd. "I have existed in your town and your school and tried to be decent and tried to be quiet and tried to take up as little space as possible, and you have made that into a crime. I am seventeen years old and I am done."
She stepped back from the microphone.
The room erupted. She stood in it like a stone in a river — the noise breaking around her, the anger and fear and something else, something hesitant, something that might in another world be the first small movement toward understanding.
Her mother was in the back of the room. Nora hadn't known. She had driven herself, apparently, and sat in the last row, and when Nora found her eyes, her mother nodded once. Just once.
It was, somehow, enough.