Volume Three: The First Lesson in Kindness
Chapter 3
Here is a fact about me that I would have denied with my whole chest a week ago: when Sienna Hart decides to fix a problem, she makes a list.
I made mine at 6 a.m., sitting cross-legged on my bed with a legal pad, because apparently even a curse doesn't stop me from color-coding. Under the header GOOD DEEDS (TEMPORARY, UNTIL FACE NORMAL AGAIN), I wrote:
1. Help someone carry something.
2. Open a door.
3. Be nice to staff.
4. Compliment a stranger.
5. ???
I didn't have a five yet. I figured I'd know it when I saw it.
By ten a.m. I'd knocked out the first three. I helped a freshman named — I want to say Priya? — who'd dropped an entire tower of textbooks outside the library, gathering them so fast and so publicly that three different people got the moment on video. I held the door to the philosophy building for a professor who looked mildly alarmed by the gesture. And in the dining hall, where I very deliberately did not look at Marcus, I bought a coffee for one of the older cleaning staff on shift and handed it over with what I hoped looked like warmth and definitely felt, from the inside, like a transaction.
I posted the door one to my story. Blair commented a string of heart emojis within four minutes.
I want to be honest about something: it felt good. Not the doing — the being seen doing it. There's a difference, and I promise you I did not understand that difference yet, not really, not the way I was about to.
* * *
The blemishes did not go away.
If anything, by the next morning, the first one had swollen slightly, gone tender at the edges, like something under my skin was insulted on principle. I stood in front of the mirrored doors of the philosophy building on my way to class — the same doors I'd so generously held open the day before — and caught my own reflection stopping to stare back at me, except it wasn't quite my reflection anymore.
Delia's face slid over mine in the glass for exactly as long as it took me to blink twice.
"You performed kindness beautifully yesterday," she said, her voice coming from the glass itself, low enough that no one walking past seemed to hear it but me. "I counted three cameras."
"I did three nice things. That's the assignment, isn't it?"
"Kindness used to polish your reflection is still, in the end, only about your reflection." The glass rippled faintly, the way water does when something moves beneath the surface. "You are still asking the same question you've always asked. Not 'how do I help this person,' but 'how do I look, helping this person.' The curse can tell the difference even when your followers cannot."
I opened my mouth to argue and found, for possibly the first time in my adult life, that I didn't actually have an argument. The glass went still. My own face looked back at me, blemished, unimpressed with itself.
* * *
I told Noah about it at lunch, mostly because there was genuinely no one else on the planet I could tell, and partly, I think now, because some small traitorous part of me wanted to know what he'd say.
"You can't perform your way out of this," he said, not unkindly, poking at a sad plastic container of noodles. "You need to actually fix something. Not a stranger. Someone specific. Someone you already broke."
"That's a very long list, Noah."
"Then start at the top."
I knew who was at the top before he finished the sentence. Her name arrived in my chest like a stone dropping into still water: Lily Carter.
I hadn't thought about Lily in months, which tells you something ugly about how memory works when you're the one holding the knife instead of feeling it. Freshman year, Lily had tried out for Constellation — the campus fashion and media collective, the one every image-conscious sophomore fights to get into — and she'd been genuinely good. Original. A little strange, in the way people are right before everyone else catches up to what they were doing. I'd taken one look at her thrifted, mismatched, defiantly uncool outfit and decided, on behalf of the entire selection committee, that she didn't fit the brand. I hadn't even had to say much. A raised eyebrow in the right circle of friends is its own kind of verdict. She hadn't gotten in. I don't think I thought about her again until this exact moment, more than a year later, sitting across from a boy in an ugly sweater who apparently kept a mental inventory of everyone I'd ever hurt.
"I got her cut from Constellation," I said. "I didn't even do it on purpose, exactly. I just — didn't want her there."
"That sounds like it was on purpose."
"You're not helping."
"I'm not trying to help you feel better," Noah said. "I'm trying to help you fix it. Those aren't the same thing."
* * *
I found Lily in the art building that afternoon, sketchbook open on her lap, headphones in, sitting on the floor in the hallway with her back against a locker like it was the most natural place in the world to be. She looked up when my shadow fell over her page, and something in her face closed instantly, like a door with a very good lock.
"Wow," she said. "Didn't know Constellation royalty slummed it down here."
"I wanted to talk to you."
"About?"
I'd rehearsed something in the mirror that morning, something clean and gracious that would let me say the word sorry and immediately move on with my day, restored. What actually came out was worse.
"I heard you're still doing the whole — art thing," I said. "Which is great. I just wanted to say, you know, for what happened freshman year — I hope there's no hard feelings. It was a long time ago."
Lily stared at me for a second like I'd slapped her with a feather pillow full of nerve. "There's no hard feelings," she repeated. "For what happened. Which you're not going to say."
"I said I'm sorry."
"You said you hoped there weren't hard feelings, which is a completely different sentence, and you know it." Her voice had gone sharp and controlled, the kind of controlled that comes from practicing not to cry in front of someone. "You didn't just not pick me, Sienna. You made sure the whole room laughed at what I was wearing before anyone even saw my portfolio. I heard about it for a week. I switched majors because of it, actually — did you know that? I don't do fashion design anymore. I do illustration, in a building you clearly never have a reason to walk into."
I felt the old reflex rise in my throat — the one that wants to explain, to soften, to make the story about my good intentions instead of her actual damage — and I opened my mouth to do exactly that.
Noah's voice came back to me, uninvited: I'm not trying to help you feel better.
So instead, for possibly the first time in my life, I closed my mouth and let someone else's pain simply sit in the air without immediately trying to manage it into something more comfortable for me.
It was awful. I want to be clear about that. It is genuinely awful to stand still while someone tells you, accurately, exactly how you hurt them, and not defend yourself, not explain, not perform remorse loudly enough that they have to comfort you instead. My face got hot. My eyes stung in a way I refused to let turn into anything visible. I just stood there, in the hallway, and listened, all the way to the end.
"I didn't know you switched majors," I said finally, when she stopped. "I didn't know any of that."
"Would it have mattered?"
"I don't know yet," I admitted. "But I'd like it to, going forward. If that's worth anything."
Lily looked at me for a long moment, unconvinced, which was fair. "It might be. Ask me again in a year."
I nodded, and left before I could ruin it by saying one more unnecessary thing.
* * *
I went straight to the Constellation office instead of straight to a mirror, which felt like its own kind of small miracle. The current selection committee was mid-meeting, half a dozen sophomores arguing about a lookbook theme, and I stood in the doorway until someone noticed and the room went quiet the way rooms tend to for me.
"I'd like to bring something to the committee," I said. "About a girl named Lily Carter who tried out freshman year."
I told them the truth. All of it, including the part where I was the reason she hadn't made it, including the part where it had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with a raised eyebrow I'd given at exactly the wrong moment. I asked them to let her try out again, this cycle, on her own merit, without my name attached to the request in any way that would help her — I specifically asked that they not mention I'd been the one to bring it up, because if this was going to mean anything, it couldn't be one more thing with my fingerprints all over it.
Nobody clapped. Nobody filmed it. I walked out of that office and back across campus in the flat gray afternoon light feeling strange and hollowed out and, for reasons I couldn't fully explain to myself, lighter.
* * *
Noah found me by the fountain an hour later, where I was doing absolutely nothing except sitting very still and thinking. He sat down beside me without asking, which had somehow already become a thing he did.
"How'd it go," he said. Not really a question.
"Badly, and then not badly. She's not going to forgive me because I want her to. She might not forgive me at all." I touched my cheek without meaning to — an old, nervous habit that had gotten a lot more loaded lately — and stopped when I felt something different under my fingers. Softer. Smaller than it had been that morning.
Noah noticed me notice. He leaned in slightly, studying my face with the same careful, clinical attention he'd give a difficult equation, and for once I let him.
"It's shrinking," he said.
"It's small," I corrected, because apparently even mid-miracle I have to control the narrative. "Not gone. Small."
"Small is still something." He sat back, and something that might almost have been a smile pulled at one corner of his mouth — the first one I think I'd ever actually earned from him instead of talked him into. "Guess you're not completely hopeless."
"Don't get used to complimenting me."
"Wouldn't dream of it," he said, and for the first time since this whole nightmare started, I laughed — a real one, short and surprised, nothing like the practiced version I use for cameras.
We sat there a while longer, not talking about the curse, not talking about Lily, just two people who'd spent three years pretending not to know each other, discovering they were apparently going to be stuck figuring this out together whether either of us had signed up for it or not.
I didn't know it yet, but that was the day Noah Bennett stopped being the boy I used to laugh at, and started becoming the only person on campus who could tell, at a glance, whether I was actually changing or just getting better at pretending.
I had a feeling I was going to need him to keep being able to tell the difference.