I used to think liking someone was supposed to feel simple.

You see them. Your stomach flips. You tell your friends. They squeal. There’s a corridor moment, maybe a dance, maybe a hand brushed under a table.

No one tells you what it’s like when it feels like standing on a shoreline and realising the tide is coming in from two different directions.

I noticed Emily before I ever understood that I was noticing her.

Not because she was the prettiest girl in the room — she isn’t, not in the obvious way St Anne’s tends to reward. She doesn’t float down corridors. She doesn’t perform serenity. She slouches. She chews the inside of her cheek when she’s thinking. Her hair frizzes in the damp and she never quite tames it. When she reads in chapel, her voice sometimes catches on the long words and she clears her throat, annoyed at herself. But she means everything she says.

That’s the difference.

At St Anne’s, meaning things is rare. Most of us are curating ourselves. Even our sincerity is rehearsed.

Emily doesn’t rehearse.

The first time she spoke to me properly, I had just embarrassed myself in Theology by arguing too hard about predestination. My voice went sharp. Defensive. I could feel the scholarship kid in me bristling. After class, I was stuffing books into my bag too quickly when she said, “You don’t have to sound clever all the time.”

I froze.

She wasn’t mocking me. She wasn’t superior. She just looked… certain.

“You are clever,” she added. “It’s different.”

No one had ever said that to me like that. Without envy. Without agenda.

I didn’t know what to do with the gentleness of it.

Emily doesn’t belong to places the way some girls do. She doesn’t glide through them. She questions them. She forgets responses in Mass and rolls her eyes at herself. She stays behind after chapel not because she has to, but because she wants to sit in the quiet and see if it’s real.

She once told me, “If I’m going to believe something, I need it to survive scrutiny.”

I think that’s when it shifted.

Because I recognised myself in that.

And then there’s Marla.

Marla doesn’t belong to places. Places bend to fit her in.

The first time I noticed her, she was late to chapel and didn’t apologise. She slipped into the pew like it was reserved for her. Her blazer wasn’t regulation, it was a beat up leather jacket with a collar that just about passed of a teacher didn't look too closely.

Marla looks like she’s constantly resisting something invisible.

She sat next to me one afternoon when Emily had prefect duties. She leaned back, stretched her legs too far into the aisle, and whispered, “Do you think God prefers Latin because it so bording? I'd submit to any religion of it droned on at me like this every day.”

I choked trying not to laugh.

She grinned at me like we’d already decided to be co-conspirators.

That’s the thing about Marla: she makes everything feel like a shared rebellion. Even silence.

With her, I feel electric. Slightly reckless. She’ll brush against my arm and it feels intentional, even if it isn’t. She’ll look at me during a hymn and raise one eyebrow like she’s daring me to admit we both think something is absurd.

Emily once told a teacher she disagreed with him. Not cleverly. Not theatrically. Just plainly. “I don’t think that’s true,” she said, and then explained why. Afterwards, I asked if she was scared.

“Of being wrong?” she said. “Always. Of saying what I think? Less and less.”

Marla would have handled it differently. She would have turned it into spectacle. A raised eyebrow. A cutting aside. She’d win the room, even if she lost the point.

I admire both of them.

That’s the problem.

Emily steadies me.

Marla does the opposite.

And I don’t know what that says about me that I need both.

Sometimes I try to be sensible about it.

I tell myself this is just admiration. That St Anne’s is intense, and intensity turns ordinary feelings into dramatic ones. I tell myself I’m projecting.

But then there are moments.

There was a day in October when the three of us were in the courtyard. Emily was explaining something about metaphors. Marla was pretending not to listen. I was standing between them, aware in a way that felt almost physical that I wanted them both looking at me at once.

It’s not that I want to choose.

It’s that I don’t understand what the choice even is.

Emily feels like becoming.

Marla feels like burning.

And here is the part I don’t say out loud: sometimes I think they see each other more clearly than they see me.

There are looks that pass between them. Not romantic — at least I don’t think so. Something sharper. Competitive. Curious. As if they’re both aware of the same fault line and waiting to see who slips first.

I don’t know if I am the fault line.

At home, none of this has language. At home, I am the responsible one. The example. The girl who prays properly and studies properly and will make it all worth it. In the chapel at school, the incense hangs thick and deliberate. At the centre near home, worship is louder, looser, imperfect. In both places, I kneel and try to work out whether what I’m feeling is temptation or simply clarity.

There is no vocabulary there for the way my chest tightens when Emily looks at me like I’ve said something true. Or the way Marla’s smile can undo an entire day.

I don’t feel wicked.

I feel exposed.

Because if Emily ever knew, she would want honesty.

And if Marla ever knew, she would want heat.

I’m not sure I can survive either demand.

There are moments when I imagine telling Emily first. She would go quiet. She would ask questions. She would make sure she understood before she reacted.

I imagine telling Marla and her laughing softly, stepping closer, saying, “I wondered how long it would take you.”

One of those futures feels grounding.

The other feels like falling.

And I am fifteen, and ambitious, and trying very hard to be good.

But when Emily challenges me, I feel stronger.

And when Marla chooses me, I feel incandescent.

I don’t know yet whether that makes me divided — or simply honest enough to admit I want both.