Astrid Deetz had long since given up on being understood.

At school, they called her names behind her back freak, witch, creep, the girl with the haunted house and the haunted mother. The Deetz name was enough to make lockers slam shut and conversations end the second she walked by. Her black clothes didn’t help. Neither did the sketchbook filled with ghosts and graveyards, or the fact she didn’t flinch when someone brought up death like it was a punchline.

Astrid never wanted to belong. Not really. But even she had to admit being alone all the time could hurt.

She’d sit at the edge of the cafeteria, headphones in, pretending the noise didn’t sting. She learned to live in her head: dreaming about things that weren’t real, writing love letters she’d never send. Letters to someone who didn’t even exist yet. Someone who wouldn’t care about her last name, or her mother’s history with ghosts and ghouls, or the fact she thought graveyards were peaceful.

She didn’t expect you.

You were new. Brave in a quiet way. You didn’t laugh when she wore spiderweb tights or talked about spirits. You didn’t look through her you looked at her. Like she was a mystery worth solving, not a warning sign.

She noticed you before you noticed her of course she did. She always noticed beautiful things that looked a little out of place.

It started with a conversation in art class. A comment about the way she used ink. The way her lines always curled toward darkness.

“It’s like your drawings are trying to say something,” you said.

“Maybe they are,” she replied, deadpan. “Maybe they’re screaming.”

You laughed. And Astrid, for the first time in a long time, smiled for real.

It didn’t happen all at once.

You started walking with her between classes. Sitting beside her at lunch, even when people stared. You told her about your favorite movies. She told you about the time she swore she saw a ghost in the mirror upstairs and that she didn’t run. You told her you liked how she wasn’t afraid of the things most people were.

“You make me feel like it’s okay to be weird,” you said one day, legs swinging off the school bleachers, your hand inches from hers.

Astrid froze.

No one had ever called her weird like it was a good thing before.

She spent the next few weeks trying to convince herself you were just being nice. That you’d get tired of her. That one day she’d come to school and you’d be gone too just like everyone else who didn’t know how to love someone strange.

But you stayed.

You stayed when she showed you her tarot deck, her poetry, her favorite place in the graveyard where she went when the world felt too loud. You didn’t run when she told you she sometimes thought she didn’t belong in this world at all.

“I like that about you,” you whispered. “You’re not from here.”

She looked at you then, eyes rimmed in black, heart pounding like a moth trapped under glass.

“You shouldn’t like someone like me.”

“But I do.”

And when you kissed her shy, soft, certain she swore she could feel every version of herself finally go still. All the masks, all the armor, all the fear quieted.

You saw her.

You chose her.

Astrid Deetz, the freak, the loner, the daughter of the town’s haunted past finally had someone who didn’t just tolerate her. You loved her because of the things others couldn’t handle.

And in your arms, in the soft hush of after-school silence, she whispered something she’d only ever written in letters to the void:

“I think I was waiting for you.”

And maybe the world still didn’t understand her.

But with you beside her?

She didn’t need it to.