Page 85 of What Goes Around

I had apologized.

Lied.

Told her I needed a challenge, something different.

She accepted it with a forced smile, but hurt lingered in her eyes for days.

Rebirth came with its own cracks. I couldn’t step back into that closeness, into blind trust. Loving people too deeply had cost me everything once.

Distance was safer and the more distance I put between us, the faster other girls stepped into the spaces I abandoned. Payton wasn’t alone for long, she never struggled to find people to orbit around her warm, bright center.

I watched it happen with a strange detachment, like observing a life I once lived but no longer belonged to.

We were still friends… just not the kind who shared souls anymore.

Nick.

In this life, I’d tried to keep my distance. I ignored his texts for weeks at a time at first. Like distancing myself now would save us both from the disaster we became in my past life.

But Nick had always been… relentless. Patient. The quiet kind of persistent that wore down walls.

Eventually, his determination wore me down, or maybe it reached a part of me I hadn’t fully managed to bury. I gave in and texted back. Just small things at first. Stupid little jokes we would’ve shared anyway.

How’s school?

Why MIT? Why so far?

Not gonna lie, I’m low-key offended you’re abandoning Utah /cry.

I’d rolled my eyes at the emoji, but my stomach had tightened all the same. I told him MIT was a last-minute choice.

He sent dramatic emojis. Threatened to “boycott the universe” for stealing his friend. Then joked about visiting me and eating awful cafeteria food together.

We fell into a rhythm, light, easy conversations. Memes at midnight. The occasional rant about school.

Nothing deep. Nothing dangerous.

But every time my phone lit up with his name, I felt the same traitorous softening in my chest. No matter how hard I tried, the old feelings were still there, humming quietly under my ribs like a bruise that never healed.

I pretended they meant nothing, that I wasn’t affected, that I wasn’t remembering another lifetime where he had loved me and I had loved him.

MIT made sense for who I was becoming. For what I needed to do. Amy was going too, already certain she wanted Computer Science & Engineering. It suited her, hacking wasn’t just a hobby for her, it was instinct.

I didn’t know my exact major yet, but I knew what my long-term plans required and MIT was a step in the correct direction.

Apple, meanwhile, was exactly where fate had placed her before. She was accepted into Juilliard for violin.

The prodigy.

The miracle child.

Marissa cried when the acceptance letter came, clutching Apple to her chest like she’d won a war. She was already planning a massive graduation party. A celebration of “both my girls,” she said, but money was tight, which meant my eighteenth birthday a few weeks before would be a small home gathering with relatives and friends.

But I knew the truth. I’d lived the truth before.

The party had never been for both of us. It was always a celebration disguised as a shared event but constructed entirely around Apple’s Juilliard repertoire.

Her stage, her spotlight, her worshippers.