The Shadow You Burn

I was always the hero in my own story. In high school I was the one who stood up to the bullies, got good grades and volunteered at the animal shelter every Saturday afternoon. I’m Rachel Linwood and for the first seventeen years of my life I believed in fairness, second chances and of course the golden rule.

Then came Mara Wexley. She came in our junior year. Her hair was the color of rust and her eyes were cracked like marbles and beautiful and broken. I could see some danger in her eyes too. She didn’t fit the mold of our suburban school. She wore black nail polish and never took notes in class but managed to ace every test. She was a storm. I was the tree that never saw the storm wind coming.

I’m not sure why I befriended her. Maybe because she was different. Maybe because I envied her or maybe because I wanted to fix her like a project. She smoked outside of the gym. I brought her candy and granola bars. She skipped class and I covered for her. She laughed when I told her that I wanted to be a vet. She said, “You’re the kind of person who believes everything and everybody can be fixed and healed.”

She was right. I did.

We grew close, the way that wild things do out of necessity. Mara didn’t trust anyone except for me. She let me in. We were inseparable by early winter. My other friends faded like old photographs. I didn’t even notice or maybe I just didn’t care.

Then everything cracked.

It started small. Mara stole a scarf from the school’s lost and found and dared me to do the same. I just laughed. I didn’t take her seriously. The next week she stole tip money from a cafe where we had stopped for some hot chocolate. Just a few dollars. She flashed the cash once we were outside and smiled.

“You can’t live without a little chaos.” She said.

I should have told her that it was not right to steal. I should have told someone. But I didn’t. I told myself that she needs a friend, not a lecture. I told myself that she would stop and grow out of it.

The turning point came in March. There was a science fair competition. It was the regional finals. I had worked on my project for months, a study on animal cognition. I wanted to win the scholarship badly. Mara didn’t enter. She said contests and competitions were for people who needed permission to feel good about themselves.

The day of my presentation my display board went missing. It was gone just like that. The janitor later found it in the dumpster. It was torn into two pieces and smeared. It was not salvageable.

I knew who did it. I confronted her. She didn’t deny it.

“I did you a favor.” She said coldly. “You don’t care about science. You just want approval. That's not the same thing.”

I clenched my fists. “You sabotaged me!”

“No, I saved you.”

That’s when something in me broke. It didn’t snap exactly, just cracked. It was a hairline fracture. Like a subtle shift in the ground I was standing on.

The next week I told the principal about the thefts. I gave them names, dates and I showed them where she hid stuff. I showed them the abandoned locker near the art room. It was easy. Too easy.

They expelled her. Her foster parents didn’t fight it. They didn’t care. She disappeared the next day. No good-byes, no messages, no texts. Just gone.

I told myself I had done the right thing. She Was wrong and destructive. She need consequences. I was the hero. So why did I feel like I had just betrayed someone?

Two years later I saw her again. I was in college studying to be a vet at a small college. I was walking home from the library with my coffee in one hand and phone in the other. Then I saw her leaning against a stone wall near the chapel. She was wearing a black leather jacket and still had her red hair. Same smile and cracked glass eyes.

“Mara?”

She smiled like the edge of a sharp knife. “Still playing the good girl I see.”

I should have just walked away. Instead I crossed the street and stood in front of her like a moth drawn to an open flame.

“I didn’t expect to see you again.” I said.

“I know you didn’t. You thought that you got rid of me.”

“I was trying to help you.”

“No, you were trying to help yourself. You didn’t like who you were around me so you tried to erase me.”

Her words stung like a thousand bee stings. Because she was right.

“I’m not the villain.” I said.

“Aren’t you?”

She pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. Inside the pages were sketches and story outlines. In the center written in a bold red marker was a title:” The Girl Who Burned”.

I recognized myself as the character of Emily, kind of soft spoken but quietly ruthless.

“You wrote about me?”

She smiled. “No, I wrote about a girl who thought she was saving the world but ended up burning it down instead.”

I felt the burn deep in my stomach.

“I didn’t burn anything.”

“Didn’t you?”

She stepped closer. “Every villain is a hero in their own eyes. That’s what makes the story interesting.”

I stood there. I said nothing. There was nothing to say. She walked away.

Years passed. I graduated and started working at a vet clinic. I even got engaged. I had a quiet life. A good life. But I never stopped thinking about Mara.

One day I looked her up. I found her blog. She had become a writer and published a book, the same book she had shown me years ago in the notebook. In interviews she talked about betrayal and how some people will destroy you while pretending to save you. She never used my name but I saw myself in every paragraph.

I was furious. How could she paint me of all people as a villain? I was the one who tried to help her. I was the one who cared. I was the one who stayed. But slowly I began to understand. I had become the villain in her story because I thought that love meant control. That care justified betrayal. That righteousness excused revenge. Mara was wild, broken and dangerous. But she was never a liar.

But I was.

To myself.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d made a different choice. If I would have confronted her differently. Listened to her harder and loved her better. But, life doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to rewrite the ending once you become someone else’s shadow.

Mara

They always say that villains wear black that they lurk in the shadows. They sneer, plot and destroy. But sometimes they wear cardigans and hand you granola bars and green juice. Sometimes they smile and tell you they’re your best friend.

I met Rachel Linwood on my second day at East side High. I was the new girl, again. This was my fifth school in four years. I was in the foster care system and my placement was slowly falling apart. I had stopped unpacking my things months ago. Why bother? The addresses and houses changed by the rules remained the same. I had to stay quiet, stay invisible and don’t get too close.

Rachel didn’t play by those rules. She noticed me. That alone should have been a red flag. She was everything I wasn’t. She was clean, polished and preppy. She looked like she stepped out of a fashion catalog dressed in soft colors and symmetrical handwriting. When I skipped class she would whisper, “You okay?” When I smoked behind the gym she would sit behind me with a look like I was a stray cat that she needed to coax back inside with a few treats.

I didn’t trust her. Not at first. Maybe not ever.

But I let her in. And that was my first mistake.

People think destruction is like a loud explosion. They think it is like a loud screaming fire. But it is not. Sometimes it is an awkward silence between words. Sometimes it a look that lingers too long. The moment someone says that they love you and chooses to protect their image over your soul.

Rachel wanted to fix me. I could feel it in everything she did. I was her project. I was her redemption arc. It was going to be proof she was good. I was her charity case in combat boots. I let her think she was saving me. It kept her close. I didn’t have many people. I had no people really.

In the beginning she was nice and kind. She made me laugh. She stood up for me when the other girls whispered to each other about me. She didn’t care that I had lived in group homes or that I wore the same three pairs of jeans. But, kindness has a price.

The day I stole the tip money from the cafe I was hungry. Not metaphorically but literally. The fridge at my foster parents house was empty again. I was not allowed to ask anyone for help. When I showed her the money I expected judgement. But she just stared at me horrified and fascinated all at once. She looked at me like I was in some science exhibit.

“You can’t do that.” She whispered.

“I just did.”

That’s when the shift began.

She started seeing me as a problem not as a person. Something that was broken and she didn’t know how to repair it. I could feel her pulling away slowly. It felt like someone pulling off a bandaid slowly and deliberately. She never even asked why I took the money.

That’s the thing about people like Rachel, they love you as long as you play the part they have written for you. But I was never going to be that supporting character in her story.

She was obsessed with that science competition. She spent hours in the library. She glued photos of raccoons to her poster board like she was publishing a thesis. I didn’t care about science or competitions and I especially didn’t care about what some old dusty judge thought.

But I still cared about Rachel. Even if she stopped seeing me as anything more than a moral dilemma. So I watched her and wondered when she would see the line she was drawing between us.

That night before the presentation I found her in the lab. She was checking her board. I watched her through the glass window for a long time. She looked peaceful and sure of herself like she belonged there. At that moment I realized that I wasn’t in her story anymore.

So, yes, I trashed her board. Not out of anger but out of grief. I needed her to see me one last time.

She came to my locker the next day and was seething with rage. “You sabotaged me!”

I didn’t lie. I told her the truth. “I saved you from becoming another robot who needed gold stars and approval from judges to feel alive.”

She didn’t understand. Of course she didn’t. Her world was out of order. Mine was survival. That was the last real conversation we had. The next day I was called in the principal’s off. They had photos and evidence of everything I had done submitted by an anonymous person. Only the person was not anonymous. It was her.

I was expelled that same day. My foster parents shrugged when they found out. It was just another failure to them, another disappointment. By that afternoon I was gone. No calls, no messages from Rachel, nothing. She had erased me with the same precision she used to label her color coded file folders. She was a hero in her eyes. Villain in mine.

I spent the next few years drifting. I went from shelters to food stamps to spending some nights when there was nothing between me but a cold slap of cement sidewalk and ice cold air. But I had stories.

Late at night I scribbled in stolen notebooks stories about girls with fire in their eyes and wolves at their backs. Stories where the villain told her side. Where betrayal didn’t come with fangs but with a sweet smile. Eventually I turned these stories into something real, a book.

A book that was real, a book with a name, a book with a life. I didn’t use her name. I didn’t have to. The story was not about Rachel. It was about Emily, a girl who claimed to love broken things she found but crushed them when it threatened her reflection. I was Cass, the wild fire and the warning. They didn’t know it was a confession.

Then one day I saw her again. Three years after the book dropped. I was in a college town doing a guest poetry reading and there she was walking out of the library, coffee in one hand and eyes wide open when her eyes met mine. She looked older and like some of her edges had dulled over the years.

“Mara?” She said.

I smiled. I hadn’t heard my name in a long time. She crossed the street and for a moment I thought that she was going to cry. She didn’t.

“I didn’t expect to see you again.” She said.

“I know you thought that you got rid of me.”

She flinched.

“I was trying to help you.” She said.

“No.” I said. “You were trying to help yourself.”

I pulled out my notebook, the old worn one where the pages were overturned and wrinkled. I flipped it open to the title page and she read it.

“The Girl Who Burned.”

“You wrote about me?”

“No”. I said, stepping closer to her. “I wrote a story about a girl who thought saving someone meant silencing them. Who thought morality and success was measured in ribbons and recognition.”

“I am not the villain.” She said,

I smiled sadly. “Aren’t you?”

She didn’t follow me when I walked away. Maybe she still believed she was the hero. Maybe she would always think she would be. But here is the truth:

Heroes don’t get to decide if they are heroes. Not when they leave ashes behind. Not when they call it mercy. Not when they never ask the villain what she remembers.