CHAPTER 1
OPHELIA
SENIOR YEAR
The glow from my laptop screen made everything else in the room look gray.
COMMON APPLICATION—FALL TERM ADMISSION
Click. Fill. Tab. Repeat.
I typed in my name, my address, my GPA. I’d done it so many times already for other places that they were all blurring together. Community colleges close to home that only offered two-year degrees. Schools you could drive to in half an hour. Safe choices. Predictable ones.
The kind of schools guidance counselors suggested for students with “transitional challenges.”
That was the term they used when you’d been out of the real world for too long. When you had gaps in your transcripts and a résumé full of therapy sessions instead of clubs or sports.
When your “few weeks” away turned into two years, the world outside stopped feeling real.
I blinked, dragging my gaze from the blue glow of the screen.
But all I could see were the white walls of the place they’d locked me in.
They took my shoelaces first.
Then my phone and Nico’s picture.
Then every piece of privacy I had left, one item at a time, until even the edges of me felt dull and padded and watched.
In exchange, they handed me a laminated daily schedule with color-coded blocks for group therapy, individual sessions, mealtimes, and “quiet reflection,” along with a spiral-bound notebook I wasn’t allowed to tear pages out of—just in case I tried to hide something inside.
They even counted the pages before giving it to me, like trust was something that had to be measured.
“You’ll be here for a couple weeks,” my mom had said at intake, in a tight voice, her mouth set in a line too firm to be comforting. My dad stood beside her, nodding along, his smile thin and grim, like he was trying to convince himself this was mercy and not surrender.
That was a lie, but I think she believed it when she said it.
It was a lie built from exhaustion and guilt and the desperate hope that someone else might be able to fix what she couldn’t.
Two weeks blurred into two months.
Then six.
Then twenty-four.
I turned fifteen with a waxy cupcake from the cafeteria and a folded construction paper card signed by staff members I barely knew, written in that fake cheerful handwriting they all used when they didn’t know what else to say.
By the time I left Northfield Psychiatric Wellness, I was sixteen.
My hair was buzzed to an inch of regrowth after a “therapeutic reset.”
My file had been stamped with the word Stabilized like it meant something.
Like it meant safe.
Like it meant I was fixed.
I blinked hard, dragging myself out of the past and back to the glow of the laptop.
The screen had dimmed slightly, the cursor still blinking inside a blank field titled:
EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES/HOBBIES.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, but nothing came.
No clubs. No sports. No volunteering. No late-night diner runs or beach trips or dumb inside jokes carved into yearbook pages.
Just…blank.
I hadn’t done anything.
Not since I got back.
Before the facility, I’d at least had tumbling.
Every afternoon and weekend were spent on the mats under harsh lights, chalk dust in the air, blisters on my palms, the sound of my breath syncing with each run and flip.
The repetition, the rhythm…It used to be the one thing that could drown everything else out.
It helped me not to think. Not about what I’d done. Not about who I wasn’t supposed to want.
I’d lived for that kind of forgetting, for the ache in my muscles, for the quiet that came when the music stopped and my head finally went still.
But when I came home, I didn’t go back. The idea of mirrors and eyes on me made my stomach turn. The gym sent an email saying they missed me. I never replied.
While everyone else was building a life in high school, I’d been relearning how to eat lunch in a cafeteria without flinching. How to sit in a desk chair and not feel like I was being monitored. How to exist in a hallway full of people without breaking down from the noise.
I couldn’t even fake it. There was nothing to write.
No “interests” that didn’t feel like someone else’s life.
After a long pause, I typed None.
Then I erased it and typed Independent reading. Occasional drawing.
Lies.
Sort of.
I read. But mostly articles about attachment theory or trauma recovery blogs I never commented on. I drew sometimes. Faces I’d never show anyone. Most of them looked like ghosts. Or boys I wished I’d never met.
I stared at what I’d written for another few seconds, then hit next.
INTENDED AREA OF STUDY
I’d been dreading this part too.
My fingers hesitated over the drop-down menu as rows of majors scrolled by—Biology, Business, Communications, Criminal Justice...
Each one felt like a dare.
Pick something. Pretend you’re someone.
But how do you choose a future when you’ve spent the last two years trying not to be a person?
There were days I couldn’t even decide what to eat, when I couldn’t choose between brushing my hair or curling into bed and pretending I didn’t exist.
A major?
That felt like planning for a version of me that didn’t exist yet.
That maybe never would.
I selected Undecided and moved on before I could think too hard about it.
I stared at the next section of the form, but the words started to blur.
Letters lost their shapes. My chest felt too tight.
I pushed back from the desk and stood, barefoot on the cold hardwood floor of my room, stretching like that would somehow knock something loose. Shake the numb off.
It didn’t.
Nothing could.
I sat back down and let my fingers rest on the edge of the keyboard, not typing, not moving, just watching the little blinking cursor flash in and out of existence like it couldn’t decide if it belonged, either.
Then—
POP-UP BLOCKED.
Click to allow content from
An orange banner shoved its way across my screen before I could even think, bright and loud and everything I wasn’t.
UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE FOOTBALL—RECRUITING EXCELLENCE
The bold white text was written over a looping video of boys in helmets slamming into one another, shoulder pads cracking, sweat flying.
I moved the cursor toward the little X in the corner, ready to shut it down and get back to pretending I had a plan.
But I missed the click.
The screen stuttered once, then fully shifted…loading an entire page I hadn’t meant to see.
A highlight reel started playing automatically, filling my laptop with noise and motion. Blinding stadium lights. Orange-and-white uniforms. A sea of roaring fans. Pads colliding. Coaches shouting.
I reached for the back button, already annoyed…and then I stopped.
Because that’s when I saw him.
Jersey #23.
Black hair.
Light blue eyes.
Tan skin, sun-warmed and stretched over lean, perfect, tattooed muscle.
He stood with his arms crossed, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth like he’d just scored and knew exactly what it did to people.
There were other people on the screen—players tackling, fans cheering—but my eyes locked on to him.
“Matthew Adler,” I whispered. He was a tight end, whatever that was. A business major.
There was a video of him catching a pass, his feet leaving the ground in one fluid motion, arms outstretched, muscles tight, focus razor-sharp.
I didn’t blink…or breathe.
I leaned closer to the screen. Not even consciously. Just drawn in like gravity didn’t apply anymore.
He was beautiful.
I hadn’t seen anyone like him in real life.
Not in the fluorescent lighting of group rooms. Not in the cold hallways of my high school. Not even in the magazines the other girls in the facility used to cut up and glue into collages during art therapy.
But now he was here.
Right in front of me.
And something inside me shifted.
Like the world had finally tilted into focus. Like he was what I’d been waiting to see through all the static.
My fingers moved before I’d even made the decision.
I clicked the “Apply Now” tab, and a new page opened, sleek and bright, the University of Tennessee logo stamped across the top like it was waiting for me all along.
I started typing.
Name. Birthdate. GPA.
The same mechanical details I’d filled in a dozen times for schools I didn’t care about, schools that my parents preferred…what they would pay for. But here, those details took on weight. Like each keystroke was threading me to something I hadn’t realized I’d been looking for.
I pasted the essay I’d written for the local schools into the application, my eyes skimming the words without really reading them. And then, halfway through, I stopped.
The tone was all wrong. It was too passive and soft, not like a girl they’d want to let in there.
And I had to be let in there. It felt like it was already a matter of life or death.
So I started editing.
I sharpened a sentence here. Reframed a paragraph there. Made myself sound clearer, bolder…like someone who had vision. Direction. Like someone who wasn’t just surviving day-to-day.
Like someone who might belong in Tennessee. Someone who might deserve…him.
That was when it hit me.
He was in Tennessee.
And I was in Pennsylvania.
Almost six hundred miles between us, and somehow it felt less like a problem and more like a promise.
It was perfect.
It was far enough to leave everything behind—the house I barely spoke in, the town that never forgot, the whispers that still followed me through the halls of my school.
Far enough to be able to start over.
Because I didn’t want to stay here. I couldn’t stay here. Not in a place that only remembered who I used to be. Not in a place that reduced me to diagnoses and cautionary tales.
Tennessee felt like a clean slate. A new city, a new school, a version of me that wasn’t broken or sick or shadowed by everything I’d been through.
I didn’t know Mathew Adler, obviously.
But it didn’t matter.
Something inside me had already decided…he was the point. The anchor. The reason all this had started to make sense.
I kept going.
Phone number. Graduation date. Emergency contact.
My fingers hovered over the field, the cursor blinking like it was waiting for me to lie.
It should’ve been my mom. It always had been for any other forms I’d needed to turn in.
But the thought of her name on this form, tethered to something she’d never approve of, something she’d try to shut down before it even began…it made my stomach twist.
I typed a fake name instead.
Someone who didn’t exist and who wouldn’t try to stop me.
My heart thudded, steady and loud-sounding, like something inside me had finally started to wake up.
And I didn’t care that my parents would refuse to help with the cost, because this wasn’t about their approval anymore.
It was about him.
I’d find a way.
Loans. Grants. A job. Whatever it took.
Somehow, in the middle of an application I hadn’t meant to open, with a stranger’s face frozen mid-play on a paused highlight reel, I felt something shift inside me.
It wasn’t logic. It wasn’t hope.
But it felt like purpose.
Like direction.
Like maybe this—he—was the reason I hadn’t completely unraveled yet. The reason the sky hadn’t fallen in on top of me.
And yeah, I knew what it probably looked like. What they’d say if I brought it up in therapy.
Transfer of attachment.
That was the clinical term.
A new fixation. A different container for all the same brokenness. A new object to project everything onto—need, hope, desperation, fantasy.
But it didn’t feel sick.
It didn’t feel like an obsession, even though maybe it was.
It felt like clarity.
Like the sharp snapping into place of puzzle pieces that had never fit before…edges smoothing out into something that finally made sense.
Because I’d never been meant for the boys I used to chase. The ones I’d twisted myself into knots for, the ones who ran the moment they felt me coming too close.
I wasn’t built for halfway love. Or maybe I wasn’t built for love at all.
But I could be built for him.
For the man who looked like he belonged to a world I’d never been allowed into, but wanted so badly to touch. Who moved like gravity bent for him. Who smiled like he’d never suffered a day in his life.
I didn’t know him yet.
But I would.
I wanted to know everything about him—where he lived, what he studied, the music playing in his ears as he walked across campus. I needed to learn what made him laugh, what kept him quiet, and what existed beneath all that effortless perfection.
What made him real.
I’d figure it out. I’d find a way to be near him, even if I had to build that way myself.
And maybe, if I got close enough, he’d see me.
Really see me. In a way no one else ever had.