Chapter 1: THE GIRL IN THE BROKEN MIRROR
The mirror shattered the moment Madison forced Nora’s forehead against it.
For one terrible second, the seventeen-year-old girl saw her own frightened face split into a hundred reflections.
Then pain flashed across her forehead, and she caught the edge of the sink to keep herself from falling.
Behind her, Madison laughed.
“What?
You gonna cry now?”
Nora could feel the other girl’s fingers tangled in her long, dark chestnut hair.
A thin line of blood had appeared near her left eyebrow, dangerously close to the small crescent-shaped birthmark she had carried since birth.
She wanted to get away.
She wanted someone to hear what was happening and open the restroom door.
But more than anything, she wanted Madison to stop treating her as though she were a person who didn’t matter.
Madison leaned closer, her blonde ponytail brushing the collar of her black varsity jacket.
“Look at you,” she said.
“You actually thought you could stand up to me?”
Nora stared at the broken mirror.
Her cream blouse was wrinkled, and her navy cardigan had slipped halfway down one shoulder.
Her hazel eyes looked frightened, but something beneath the fear was beginning to change.
She had spent months trying to avoid this girl.
Now there was nowhere left to go.
And although Nora could not possibly know it, the worst thing waiting inside that restroom was not the cracked mirror or the pain in her forehead.
It was a secret.
A secret that would make her question the one person she had always believed she understood.
Her mother.
Nora had never thought of herself as a particularly brave person.
She was not the sort of student who enjoyed standing in front of a classroom or arguing loudly when someone disagreed with her.
She preferred knowing what was expected of her.
She liked finishing her assignments early, keeping her belongings organized, and going home without attracting unnecessary attention.
At seventeen, she had learned that being quiet made certain parts of school easier.
Teachers rarely complained about her.
Her grades were good.
She did not interrupt people, and she had never been interested in the endless competition over who was wearing the right clothes, attending the right parties, or sitting beside the right people at lunch.
Yet somehow, that quietness had become the very thing Madison disliked most about her.
At first, Nora had believed the trouble would pass.
Madison was popular, attractive, and confident in the way some people became when they were accustomed to receiving attention wherever they went.
With her sharp blue eyes, perfect blonde ponytail, and black varsity jacket, she moved through the school corridors as though the building belonged to her.
Students greeted her before she greeted them.
People laughed when she made jokes, even when the jokes were not particularly funny.
When Madison entered a room, conversations often shifted around her.
Nora had noticed these things without envying them.
She had never wanted Madison’s life.
She only wanted Madison to leave hers alone.
But indifference was something Madison seemed incapable of accepting.
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The first unpleasant encounter had happened in a crowded hallway between classes.
Nora had been carrying two textbooks and a notebook when Madison brushed past her, striking her shoulder hard enough to knock the notebook from her arms.
The pages scattered across the floor.
Nora remembered crouching to collect them while shoes passed dangerously close to her fingers.
“Watch where you’re going,” Madison had said.
Nora looked up.
She knew perfectly well that Madison had been the one who walked into her.
For a moment, she considered saying so.
Instead, she answered, “Sorry.”
Madison smiled.
It was not a friendly smile.
It was the pleased expression of someone who had discovered how little effort was needed to make another person step aside.
After that, the little incidents became more frequent.
Sometimes Madison deliberately blocked the hallway when Nora approached.
Sometimes she repeated something Nora said in class, changing her voice to make it sound foolish.
Once, when Nora answered a question correctly, Madison leaned toward another student and whispered loudly enough for Nora to hear.
“Of course she knows.
She probably spends every night talking to her textbooks.”
A few students laughed.
Nora kept looking at the front of the classroom.
She had trained herself not to turn around.
That became her first rule for surviving Madison.
Do not react.
Her second rule was even simpler.
Do not give her an audience.
For a while, those rules seemed to work.
Madison might laugh at her clothes or make a comment about her quiet voice, but eventually somebody else would attract her attention.
Nora would walk away, find her next classroom, and tell herself that tomorrow would be different.
