My dearest Barbie,
A year ago, I hated the thought of coming to the White Colony, this world bristling with supernatural creatures, werewolves and vampires alike.
I remember how I complained to you every single day.
"Why couldn't they send someone else?"
"I'm going to get eaten."
I refused to believe people willingly live with creatures that grow fangs and are as pale as corpses, or is it the other specie that howled terribly and shape shifted regularly into a beastly wolf??
You laughed every time.
You told me I was dramatic.
I told you I was realistic.
Looking back now...
Perhaps we were both a little right.
Do you remember the first time you showed me Jordan Files on your phone?
We were sitting in my room and I was sulking while Norma was ecstatic and drooling over the Moon Sol band.
I remember looking at the screen for exactly four seconds before declaring,
"He looks insufferable."
You nearly hit me.
You called him handsome.
I called him arrogant.
Those frozen eyes of his looked as though they had never apologized to anyone in their entire existence.
He carried himself like someone who believed gravity worked harder for him than for everyone else.
I disliked him immediately.
He doesn't know I'm writing this part.
He already thinks he's irresistible.
I refuse to encourage him.
Then I met him.
Unfortunately...
He turned out to be exactly as arrogant as I imagined.
Only somehow kinder.
More annoying.
Much funnier than I expected.
He had the infuriating habit of sneaking up on me in classes. That stupid Alpha ability. Lupine teleportation.
He also had this effortless magnetism and could read my thoughts at will. Stupid Mindcraft. The moon blest him with a dozen little gifts.
He kept finding reasons to see me.
I kept finding reasons to avoid him.
Looking back now, I don't think either of us stood a chance.
Love has an odd sense of humour.
It disguises itself as irritation until one day you realize you've memorized someone's laugh.
You know the sound of their footsteps.
You know exactly how they smile before they smile.
Somewhere between running away from him...
...and desperately trying to protect him...
I fell in love.
Not all at once.
Little by little.
Until there wasn't any part of my heart left untouched by him.
I wish I could tell you that the difficult part ended there.
It didn't.
You have probably read everything in the newspapers by now.
The arrests.
The trial.
The lies.
The riots.
Sometimes I still wake up expecting cold iron cuffs around my wrists.
Sometimes I still hear people shouting for our execution.
It feels impossible that only a few weeks have passed.
Barbie...
Do you remember Maren and Darien?
You once asked me why nobody at The Academy ever spoke about them above a whisper.
Now the whole world knows their names.
Their portraits hang in the Academy.
Students leave flowers beneath them every morning.
Frodo Peppins' name has been restored too.
History finally apologized to people who never lived long enough to hear it.
Three hundred years.
Three hundred years of fear.
Three hundred years of a lie told so often that even good people believed it.
Sometimes I wonder how many lives were quietly stolen before ours.
How many lovers never held hands.
How many families never existed.
How many children were never born because someone powerful decided fear was easier to govern than hope.
I still cry when I think about it.
But I smile too.
Because few days ago I watched a werewolf kiss his human girlfriend outside my room.
Nobody screamed.
Nobody called the guards.
Someone only shouted,
"Get a room!"
I don't think they realized how beautiful those words sounded.
Normal.
Ordinary.
Safe.
Perhaps peace is simply love becoming too common to notice.
Now for the part that will probably shock you.
I finished my final examinations.
Before you begin celebrating...
I should probably confess something.
I'm not coming home.
Not yet.
I know.
I can already imagine your face.
Hear me out first.
This place doesn't feel like the place I arrived in anymore.
Or perhaps...
I'm not the girl who arrived anymore.
I've grown to love these strange streets.
The cafés where vampires somehow make terrible coffee.
Jordan's mom and I go hiking every weekend. Her name is Moira Files.
The library where silence somehow feels warm.
My friends.
Peach.
Cassidy.
Hari Spence.
None of us are coming home yet. They have all decided to go to college here.
Theres Beth Camper, the room mate who's become a sister.
Even Professor Viviette Tom, who still scolds me every opportunity she gets.
They've become home in ways I never expected.
And then...
There's Jordan.
I love him, Barbie.
I love him with the sort of certainty that doesn't need poetry to make itself understood.
Though, knowing me...
I'll probably write him poetry anyway.
I've decided to sit for the entrance examinations into Tish Central University.
I'm going to study Law.
I know.
You are laughing.
The girl who once argued with teachers at Greta High because attendance was "an oppressive social construct" wants to become a lawyer.
Life is hilarious.
But after watching Percy Network stand before an entire Council armed with nothing except truth and courage...
Something changed inside me.
He didn't wield magic.
He didn't carry a weapon.
He simply knew the law better than those who had twisted it.
He reminded an entire nation that justice is not whatever powerful people decide it is.
Imagine that.
A library at The Academy now bears his name.
Every time I walk past it, I think perhaps words really can change the world.
Maybe I want to spend my life proving that.
Tell everyone back home I'm well.
Tell Mama I still forget to eat whenever examinations come around.
Tell Norma I haven't become famous enough to tolerate her calling me "Your Excellency."
Tell Ogef...
Tell Ogef I miss the smell of rain after sunset.
I miss familiar roads.
I miss home.
But for the first time...
Home feels like something I'm carrying with me instead of somewhere I'm trying to return to.
Who would have thought the frightened scholarship girl who arrived here convinced she'd hate every second...
...would end up staying?
Write back soon.
And if you happen to see my old complaint about the White Colony scribbled somewhere in one of my notebooks...
Burn it.
Jordan would never let me hear the end of it.
With all my love,
Night Persephone Carter