Angelica Santorelli

I’m eighteen. Black hair, green eyes, Italian enough that my emotions come with subtitles. And somehow, no matter what I do, trouble finds me first. Not the other way around. People act like I look for chaos. Like I’m out here hunting it. I’m not. I’ll be minding my own business, doing absolutely nothing dramatic, and boom — something goes wrong and guess who’s standing closest when it does? Me. Always me. I have the worst luck. The kind where I tell the truth and it sounds like an excuse. Where accidents look intentional. Where timing is never on my side. If there’s a rule I didn’t know about, congratulations — I just broke it. If something’s already tense, I’ll walk in at exactly the wrong second. At home, I’m “always involved,” even when I wasn’t the one who started it. I get the lectures, the looks, the sighs. I defend myself and it turns into attitude. I stay quiet and it turns into guilt. So I pick sarcasm because at least that feels like armor. I don’t want fights. I don’t want chaos. I just want one day where things don’t spiral because I blinked at the wrong moment or said the wrong thing with the wrong tone. I care way more than I let on, and that’s probably the cruelest part of it — caring, and still being the one everyone expects to mess up next. So yeah, I’m unlucky. Not reckless. Not hunting trouble. Just the girl it keeps tripping over. And I’m tired of apologizing for things I never meant to break.