The Bracelet: From Nobody to the Chosen One

Chapter Three: The Weight of a Hand

I didn't sleep much. I lay in the dark of the woodpile shed — because Chloe's friend had stayed over, and Aunt Diane had decided the couch was "for guests, obviously, Alex, don't be difficult" — turning the bracelet in the dark until the metal warmed against my palm from nothing but my own skin. I didn't put it on again that night. I wanted to. I told myself I was being careful, being smart, being the kind of person who thinks things through before he does something irreversible, but honestly I think I was just scared of how much I'd wanted to keep it on.

Morning came, as it does, indifferent to personal crises. I put the bracelet in my backpack, wrapped in a sock, and told myself it was for safekeeping and not because some superstitious part of my brain thought hiding it in dirty laundry would keep it from anybody who might want to take it from me.

Ashcroft Preparatory Academy sits on eleven manicured acres at the edge of Millhaven, the kind of campus that has its own arboretum and a library with a fireplace, built by families whose names are on half the buildings downtown. I'd gotten in on a scholarship so thin it may as well have been printed on tissue paper — top of my class at my old public school, tested well, wrote an essay about resilience that some admissions officer clearly found charming in the abstract and never had to actually witness in practice. Three years in, and I still hadn't figured out how to walk those hallways without feeling like an item that had been mis-shelved.

"Nice shoes," said Trent Ballard, not looking up from his phone, as I passed the senior lounge — a joke everyone found funnier than it deserved to be, because my shoes were, in fact, held together at one seam with careful application of superglue, and everyone knew it.

I didn't try the bracelet at school. I want that clearly established, because it would have been so easy — so tempting, standing at my locker with my rebuilt shoes and my library-fireplace envy — to just slip it on and see what happened in front of an audience. I didn't. Some instinct, maybe the same one that told me to throw it in the weeds in the first place, said school was not where I wanted to find out what this thing could really do.

I found out something else at school instead. I found Bianca Cole standing at the science hall trophy case, absolutely alone, which was unusual, because Bianca Cole was rarely alone — not because she was popular in the Chloe sense, all sharp elbows and social math, but because people just liked being near her, the way you like being near a window on a gray day.

"You're staring," she said, without turning around, and I nearly dropped my books.

"I wasn't—" I started, and then gave up, because we both knew I had been. "Sorry."

She turned, finally, and did the thing she always did, which was look at me like I was a whole person and not a scholarship line item. "What's the verdict? Do I have spinach in my teeth?"

"No. I mean — no, you don't. I was looking at the trophy, not you. The, uh." I looked past her at the case, desperately, and landed on the nearest plaque. "The debate one. From ninety-four."

"Liar," she said, but she smiled when she said it, small and real, and something in my chest did the thing it always did around Bianca Cole, a kind of warm collapsing that had nothing to do with any bracelet.

I'd known her since freshman year, in the loose, orbiting way you know someone you share three classes with but never quite work up the nerve to actually talk to outside of group projects. She wasn't rich the way most of Ashcroft was rich — her mother taught art history two towns over, her father did something with insurance that put them solidly in the school's financial-aid middle tier — which maybe was part of why she'd always felt like the one person in that building who might actually see me and not just my shoes.

"You look tired," she said, studying me with an attention that made me want to fix my collar, fix my hair, fix my whole face. "Everything okay at home?"

"Chloe was on my bed again," I said, before I could stop myself, and immediately regretted it, because it wasn't the kind of thing you said out loud to someone like Bianca, someone whose house presumably had rooms that belonged only to the people whose names were on them.

Bianca's face did something complicated — not pity, which I would have hated, but a kind of quiet, focused anger, like she was filing the information away for later use. "That's not okay, Alex."

"It's fine," I said, which was the second dumbest sentence of the week, right behind *this is my room.*

"It's not," she said, simply, and then the bell rang and the moment folded itself away like it had never happened, the way all my best moments with Bianca Cole always did, too small and too quick to hold onto. But I carried it with me all day anyway — *that's not okay, Alex* — turning it over like I'd turned the bracelet over the night before, looking for the warmth underneath.