What is life?
I once imagined it as a happily ever after. A simple, carefree existence filled with joy, surrounded by the people I loved most. That was enough for me — it was everything, really. I didn't need anything grand or extraordinary. I just wanted that.
But that illusion shattered with a single tragedy.
It happened the summer before middle school. One moment — that's all it takes, I've learned. One moment to split your life into a before and an after. An ordinary day that becomes the last ordinary day. And then everything that follows is just you, trying to figure out how to carry what you were never supposed to carry.
For three years, it lingered over me like a shadow I couldn't shake.
I became a ghost of the girl I used to be. I drifted through middle school — through the hallways, the classrooms, the lunch tables full of noise and laughter that felt like it belonged to a world I was no longer part of. I turned inward. Quiet. Careful. I poured everything I had left into the only two things I could control: my daily routine and my academics. Wake up. Study. Survive. Repeat.
It wasn't living. I knew that even then.
But underneath the silence, one thought echoed in my mind every single day for those three years, steady and stubborn as a heartbeat —
I want to be sociable again. I want to live a normal life.
Then my uncle mentioned Burbank Heights High School.
I don't know why it struck me the way it did. Maybe I was just ready. Maybe some part of me had been quietly waiting for exactly that kind of door to appear. I took the entrance exam without letting myself think too hard about it — thinking too hard had never done me any favors. And when the acceptance letter arrived, I held it in my hands for a long time.
It felt like a window cracking open. So I seized it. I packed up the version of myself that Starlight Hills knew — the quiet one, the grieving one, the girl people handled with careful hands — and I chose something different. A fresh chapter. A clean slate. A chance to reclaim the three years I lost and shape the next four into something I actually want to look back on.
The high school life I always longed for.
It won't be easy. I know that. Starting over never is — and I'm not naive enough to think that crossing a city line means leaving everything behind. The shadow doesn't disappear just because the scenery changes.
But maybe, in Burbank Heights, I can finally learn to step out of it.
My name is Madison Jones. And this — this — is where my story truly begins.