They’d read it.
They’dseenit.
All those pages I’d filled in secret—every scrawl, every looping heart, every whispered fantasy that I thought would make the feelings smaller—now turned inside out under the fluorescent lights.
I could picture the therapist tilting her head, her lips pursed in clinical concern. My mother’s hands quivering just enough to seem like she cared…my father sitting in frozen silence.
The panic was everywhere, swarming under my skin. My heart hammered so loudly I thought they’d hear it through the door.
I wanted to claw my own chest open and scrape out whatever made me this way.
The words in the office dissolved, replaced by the scratch of a pen.
I wrote it all in purple pen. The glittery kind that smelled like grapes.
I thought it was romantic.
I thought maybe if I learned everything about him, like his favorite gum flavor (cinnamon), the way he always tied his left shoe first, the fact that he always let girls go first in line…he’d see me. He’d realize I was the one who understood him best.
It wasn’t stalking.
It wasn’t.
It was love.
At least, that’s what I told myself.
“She doesn’t see anything wrong with it,” my mom said, bringing me back to the present. And I could hear the way her voice shook with rage. “She thinks it’s sweet. She told me last night she thinks he’s her soulmate. Herfuckingsoulmate.”
I pressed my forehead to my knees, squeezing my eyes shut so tightly it made stars burst behind my lids.
They weren’t wrong.
They weren’t wrong about any of it.
And that’s what made it worse.
Because I had felt it. The second Nico smiled at me that first day of seventh grade—when he passed me the pencil I dropped and said “Here you go”—I’d felt it in my chest. That thud. That zing. Thatconnection.
It wasn’t just a crush. It was an obsession.
And I couldn’t turn it off.
“Has she ever hurt anyone?” the therapist asked.
“No,” my dad said quickly, too quickly. “But she’s hurting herself.”
“I think we need to consider a more structured environment. At the very least, intensive therapy. This isn’t something she’s going to outgrow.”
My stomach twisted even more. The air seemed to leave the hallway all at once, replaced by a low hum that pressed against my ears.Structured environment. The words felt heavy, important…like they were supposed to fix me, even though I already knew nothing could.
It was my sentence.
I didn’t know what a “structured environment” was, but it sounded a lot like a prison. And maybe I deserved it.
Because love wasn’t supposed to feel like this.
It wasn’t supposed to hurt this much.
