Chapter 62: The Notebook Grows

Georgia

I stop pretending the list is a coincidence collection and start calling it what it is. An investigation.

Mandi’s five words are still sitting in my chest hours later. *Don’t wear it around Puck.* They refuse to dissolve no matter how many times I turn them over, sharp edges catching every time. I took the necklace off the second she said it, unclasping it with fingers that felt clumsier than they should, the silver chain slithering cold against my palm. It’s sitting now in the bottom drawer of my desk, out of sight, though not exactly out of mind. Every so often I catch myself glancing at the drawer like the pendant might glow through the wood.

I pull my notebook out from under my mattress where I’ve taken to keeping it, cool spiral binding pressed against my thigh as I sit cross legged on my bed. Pen in hand, I stare at the pages I’ve already filled without ever quite admitting to myself what they add up to.

I flip back through the pages now, actually reading them in order instead of skimming past them the way I usually do, and something in my chest goes very still.

This isn’t a list. It never was.

I turn to a fresh page and, for the first time, write a heading at the top instead of just diving into another loose entry. *Evidence.* I underline it twice, the way I used to underline important terms in exam notes, like giving it that kind of formal weight will somehow make the whole thing easier to look at directly.

I start writing.

*Puck’s reflexes.* I think of the hockey game, the check that should have flattened him, the way he was skating again before I’d even fully processed the sound of the hit. I think of the balcony railing at The Fang, the two handprints bent clean into the steel that I found there after my first solo skate, proof that he’d been gripping it hard enough to warp metal while he watched me from the dark.

*His temperature.* His hand on my arm that very first day, burning hot even through the fabric of my sleeve. His skin against mine in the library, close enough that I could feel heat radiating off him from two inches away. The pen he’s snapped clean in half more than once without seeming to notice he’d done it.

*The gold.* I write it carefully, the way you’d write something you’re still not fully sure you actually saw. His eyes, more than once now, flashing a color no human eyes are supposed to hold, gone before I could be completely certain.

*The hit that should have broken him.* I write the date beside it. I write *witnesses did not react.* I write *Liam:* "Rosethorne kids heal fast," he’d blurted, panic bleeding through every syllable, before he fled down the hallway like the words themselves might chase him.

*The campus’s strange silences.* The full moon nights when events get quietly cancelled and nobody explains why. Mandi’s warning not to go outside after dark, delivered with none of her usual lightness. I think of the necklace too, sitting cold in my desk drawer, and the way Mandi’s face went carefully blank instead of answering me. I don’t know if it’s a warning about a person or a warning about a thing, whether the necklace itself means something or whether it’s just what it represents, Darcy’s claim laid over whatever’s already sitting unclaimed between me and Puck. I don’t write it down as its own entry. It doesn’t fit in a box yet. But it sits underneath everything else on the page, quiet and unresolved. The howling that everyone insists is coyotes, every single time, the lie so smooth and so practiced it barely qualifies as a lie anymore.

*The twins’ too fluid grace.* Bella and Bianca, moving through hallways like their bodies work on entirely different mechanics than everyone else’s. The way they folded, submissive and silent, the moment Puck said two flat words in the hallway, his voice low and final, like a door closing.

*Dominic Valentine.* I write his name last, slower than the rest, the ink pressing a little harder into the page. *Career ending injury. Unusual aggression inconsistent with his playing style. Two years ago.* He’s different from the rest of this list. Everything else here is something I witnessed myself, something I can at least half trust my own eyes about. Dominic Valentine is secondhand, a name in an old article, a stranger’s ruined future I never saw happen. But he might be the only piece of this that shows me what happens when whatever Puck is stops holding itself together. Not a coincidence. A consequence.

I sit back and look at the page, seven separate entries staring up at me, each one strange enough on its own to be explained away with enough imagination. Except now they’re not separate anymore. Now they’re sitting together on the same page, in the same handwriting, collected by the same girl who’s been quietly cataloguing them for weeks without letting herself admit what she was actually doing.

I pick the pen back up and start drawing lines. Puck’s reflexes to the hit that should have broken him. His temperature to the twins’ fluid grace, some shared quality underneath both that I don’t have language for yet. The gold in his eyes to Dominic Valentine’s ruined career, unusual aggression, a boy who loses control of something he doesn’t usually lose control of. The campus’s silences to all of it, an entire school built around covering for something, protecting something, hiding something so thoroughly that even the lies have gone smooth from overuse.

The lines cross and tangle across the page until it looks less like a notebook entry and more like the kind of evidence board you’d see in a crime show, string stretched between photographs on a wall. Except I don’t have string. I have ballpoint pen. And I don’t have photographs. I have half formed observations that refuse to add up to anything I have a name for.

*That’s the part that scares me most,* I think, pressing the pen tip hard enough into the paper that it nearly tears. Not the individual details. The fact that I can draw every single line I want to draw, and at the center of the page there’s still just empty space where an answer should be.

I stare at that blank space for a long time. The room stays quiet around me, Mandi’s rhythmic breathing from the other bed the only sound besides my own pulse, steady and slow, like she doesn’t have a single secret weighing her down.

I think about the pendant sitting in my desk drawer, cool metal with my initials carved into the back. I think about Mandi’s face going pale at the sight of it, the careful words she chose instead of the real ones. *"Just don’t,"* she’d said, voice tight and clipped, eyes darting to the door like she expected someone to be listening. I think about a boy who catches you with burning hands and defends you with two words and leaves notes under water bottles and vanishes before you can ever get a straight answer out of him. I think about golden eyes and a howl that never sounds quite like coyotes and an article about a career ending injury that used the word *aggression* like it meant something more specific than just hockey.

I press the pen to the bottom of the page.

My handwriting comes out firmer than it has in any of my other entries, no hesitation in the strokes, no small, uncertain letters like I’m afraid of the question even as I’m asking it.

*What is Rosethorne hiding?*

I look at the words sitting there in black ink, plain and undeniable. For the first time since I started filling this notebook, I don’t cross it out.

I close the notebook slowly and slide it back under my mattress, my hand resting flat against the cover for a moment before I let go.

Something has shifted. I can feel it in the stillness of the room, in the way the air itself seems to hold its breath around me. I don’t have an answer yet. But for the first time, I’m not asking the question quietly anymore.