Let me tell you something about dangerous girls.
We know what we are. That's the first thing. We don't stumble into it — we choose it, deliberately and early, because we figured out at some point that the alternative was being ordinary and ordinary was the one thing we could not survive. So we sharpen ourselves. We learn to walk into rooms a certain way, talk a certain way, look at people like we already know something about them they haven't said out loud yet. We cultivate the reputation. We maintain it. We become, over time, fluent in a language most people only visit.
I was very good at this.
I want to be clear about that, because what comes next requires you to understand who I was before it. Not the version I became. The version I was walking in — composed, certain, the girl who had never been in a room she couldn't own. The girl who thought she had seen everything worth seeing, done everything worth doing, and that the rest was just variation on a theme she already knew.
I was seventeen years old and I genuinely believed that.
I had no idea.
---
The plane was somewhere over the Atlantic when Arthur said: "You're going to be fine, you know."
He says this sometimes. Not to reassure me — Arthur knows me well enough to know reassurance doesn't land — but in the specific way of someone stating a fact they have already verified. Like he's done the calculation and I should just trust the result.
I was on my second glass of wine, which at thirty thousand feet hits like a third, and I was looking at the view — that particular blue that doesn't exist anywhere except above clouds, the colour of being completely between things — and I said, without turning: "Of course I am."
"I mean it," he said.
"I know you do." I finally looked at him. Arthur in a window seat had a specific quality — the light hitting the side of his face, the way he held things like he was always slightly braced for something. He was annoyingly handsome in the way of people who hadn't decided to be. "You always mean things. It's one of your less interesting qualities."
He looked at me for a moment.
"Asia."
"Arthur."
The corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. The thing he did instead. "New York is going to be interesting."
"New York," I said, "is going to be a disaster."
He didn't argue with me. He rarely does. That's the thing about Arthur — he knows the difference between the things worth arguing and the things worth letting me say.
I turned back to the window.
Outside: clouds, blue, the vast indifference of altitude.
Below: Washington, getting closer.
Below that: everything I was about to walk back into.
---
Here is what I knew about the move:
My father — Alejandro Alvarez, cabinet secretary, political force, the most stubborn human being God ever assembled — had decided that New York was where I needed to be for my final year of school. He had a house there. He had connections there. He had, apparently, reasons he hadn't fully explained that I had been too tired to demand.
I was going to Ambrose Academy.
I was going to be the new girl.
I was going to do it in a city that didn't know me, with people who hadn't been chosen, in a life I hadn't designed.
All of this was Freya's fault.
I should say that Freya is not, technically, my stepmother. She is my father's — I don't have a word for it. *Companion* sounds too Victorian. *Girlfriend* sounds too small. She exists in the specific category of women who move into the spaces that grief leaves and arrange themselves there with such careful, permanent-seeming warmth that you can't remove them without appearing to be the unreasonable one. She has a stupid soft voice. She is uselessly beautiful. She has taste I can't insult and opinions I can't dismiss and a presence in my father's house that I have been trying to dislodge for two years without success.
I hate her.
I want to be fair — this feeling is entirely mutual, regardless of what she performs. I see through the performance. She knows I see through it. We have arrived at a cold, stable standoff that functions exactly like a relationship and is nothing like one.
The New York decision has her fingerprints all over it. She is too smart to have said anything directly. She never does anything directly. That's what I hate most about her.
The second thing I hate most: she was my mother's friend first.
---
*I hope she's dead when we get back.*
"Still not a very nice thing to say," Arthur said.
I hadn't said it out loud. I never had to with him.
"Read somewhere that thinking it counts as processing," I said.
"That's not what processing means."
"Arthur." I set the glass down. "Everything I do is not selfish. I need you to know that. When we get back, and I have to go through this — whatever this is — everything I do is for everyone."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I know," he said.
"You don't sound convinced."
"I'm thinking about *everyone* and trying to figure out who's included."
I looked at him.
He looked back.
There was, as always with Arthur, a conversation happening underneath the conversation. We were both fluent in it by now — had been since we were fifteen and something shifted and neither of us decided to acknowledge the shift, which was a decision in itself. I was aware of this. I filed it regularly in the section of my brain I kept for things I intended to examine later and hadn't.
"Get some sleep," I said.
He nodded. Closed his eyes.
I turned back to the window and watched the clouds until they weren't clouds anymore and we were descending into Washington, into the grey-gold of late afternoon, into the life I'd been on holiday from.
---
The estate felt smaller than I remembered.
Not literally — the house was the same house, the gates the same gates, the driveway the same sweeping length of pale gravel. But something about coming back from somewhere expansive makes everything you left feel like it contracted while you were gone.
I stood in the foyer and looked around.
They'd redecorated. New paintings, different palette — lighter, more considered, the kind of interior design that announces *someone with taste lives here* without shouting it. I hated that it looked good. I had been prepared to insult the decor.
I dropped onto the nearest couch and sank into it.
*Rich people furniture.* The one reliable thing.
"Alright," I called toward the staircase. "I'm here. Come down."
"Why the rush?" The voice floated before she did. "We could have lunch."
Freya appeared at the top of the stairs — one hand on the railing, perfectly manicured, descending with the specific unhurried quality of someone who has decided she belongs in every space she occupies. She was wearing something simple and devastating. She always was.
I looked at her and felt the familiar, useless inventory: beautiful, soft-voiced, sincere-sounding, impossible to insult with anything true.
"When are you leaving?" I said.
"Next week." A slight pause. "Your father won't be here until the weekend. His schedule—"
"Fine." I stood. "I'm going to rest."
"Asia." She said my name the way she always did — gently, like it was something to be careful with. I had spent two years trying to make that gentleness feel like condescension and failing. "Why did you come through Washington? You could have flown straight to New York."
"Freya." I kept my back to her. "Why do you always pry?"
"Because I care."
*That voice.* "These acts of yours," I said, "are getting old. Find a new talent."
I walked. She let me. And then, just before I reached the corridor:
"I want to go with you. She was my friend too."
I stopped.
The house was very quiet.
I turned around slowly and looked at Freya at the top of the stairs — at the careful sincerity of her, the beautiful face that had started appearing in my father's orbit six months after my mother was in the ground — and I said, very evenly:
"The plain difference, Freya, is that you were her friend. I'm her *fucking* daughter." I held her gaze. "Don't talk about her."
The tears arrived without permission. I hated them. Grief had no manners — it showed up in arguments, on planes, in the middle of kitchens at three in the morning. It didn't care about timing or dignity.
I found Arthur where I knew he'd be: door frame, arms crossed, expression closed.
"How long?" I asked.
"Long enough," he said. And then, quieter: "I'm sorry."
He didn't say what for. He didn't have to.
He walked me to my room. I didn't explain anything. I never had to with him. He sat on the window seat while I washed my face and when I came back he was still there, looking at the garden going gold in the late light, and I sat on the bed and we existed in the same space without requiring anything of it.
Eventually he left.
I slept.
---
I woke up to 8:52 and four missed calls from Dad.
He'd texted:
*Hey Luv. You're probably exhausted. Everything's ready in New York. Had to cancel the weekend — I'll see you Saturday. Flight's at 3pm tomorrow. Love you. Take care.*
I read it twice.
School. New city. New people. The life I hadn't asked for, starting in approximately eighteen hours.
My stomach had opinions about this that had nothing to do with dread.
I changed and went downstairs.
---
Martha was in the kitchen.
This is one of the constants of my life — Martha in a kitchen, something in the oven, the smell preceding her like an announcement. She has been with our family since before I was old enough to remember not having her, which means she is less staff than she is the architecture of my childhood. She looked up when I came in and did the thing her face always does when she sees me: that involuntary, enormous, completely unguarded smile that I have never once been able to receive without feeling like I was seven years old and home.
"My girl." Her eyes were already going. She opened her arms.
I walked straight into them.
She held on for a long time. Martha's hugs have a specific gravity — the kind that says *I've been waiting to do this* and means it.
"You might crush me one day," I said.
"Then let it be today," she said. "I missed you so much."
We finally let go. She tucked the hair out of my face and I immediately made an expression at the mention of Freya and she immediately smacked my head.
"Don't ruin that face."
My stomach announced itself.
We both went still.
Then we laughed — the full version, loud and uncontained, the kind that bounces off tile and doesn't apologise for the hour.
"Sit," she said. "They starved you." She moved something from the fridge to the microwave and pressed buttons with the authority of someone who had been feeding me for seventeen years and intended to continue. "Lasagna."
"You *knew.*"
"The best for my perfect girl."
I sat at the counter and let the warmth of the kitchen do what it always did — dismantle me slightly, in the good way. Martha talked. I listened. She told me about the maids and Paul and the state of the upstairs bathroom and I tracked approximately half of it and didn't need to track more because the point was never the content. The point was her voice. The point was this kitchen. The point was being known by someone who had known me since before I knew myself.
"I'll miss you," I said. And my voice did the thing I hated, cracking on the last word.
"*No nos arruinemos con lágrimas, niña estúpida,*" she said firmly. Don't let's ruin it with tears, stupid girl. She patted my head. "And I baked cookies. Half for Arthur."
"He leaves tomorrow."
"That boy." She shook her head. "College is taking everything from him." Then, after a pause — the specific pause of someone arriving at something they've been building toward: "Asia."
I looked up.
"Has Arthur said anything to you? Lately?"
I stared at her.
"Martha—"
"He looks at you," she said simply.
"Everyone looks at me," I said. "I have a very strong presence."
She was not amused. "He looks at you *differently.*"
"Martha. People are sleeping."
"And if he does like you—"
"*Por favor.* Suficiente."
The microwave beeped like it was agreeing with me. She plated the lasagna and slid it across and I grabbed it with both hands and took a bite so large it precluded further conversation.
"My Spanish," I said, through lasagna, "is not good enough for this discussion."
That got her. Both of us, gone — laughing until the kitchen filled with it, until it was the only thing in the room, until I forgot for a few minutes that I was leaving tomorrow and the life I was walking toward was a complete unknown and I was, underneath all the composure and performance, slightly terrified.
Martha.
Lasagna.
The warm kitchen.
The last safe thing.
I breathed it in and held it.
---
Later — much later, after the cookies were wrapped and the kitchen was clean and Martha had gone to bed — I sat at the counter alone with my phone and the particular quiet of a house that has settled into its night sounds.
I opened the journal app. I do this sometimes, when the thoughts are too crowded to carry.
'Tomorrow,' I typed. 'New York. New school. New everything.'
I paused.
'I've always been the dangerous one in every room I've walked into. I wonder what happens when the room has someone worse.'
I stared at that.
Deleted it.
Wrote instead: 'I'll be fine.'
Closed the app.
Went to bed.
I didn't know, then, that I'd written a prophecy.
I didn't know about the room, or the phone, or the locked door, or the green eyes that would look at me like I was a problem he'd already decided to enjoy.
I didn't know that in approximately seventy-two hours, I would meet someone who would make every version of dangerous I'd ever performed look like a rehearsal.
I just went to bed.
And that — the sleeping, the not-knowing — was the last breath of fresh air I would get for a long, long time.