Chapter Five: Ghost Logic
I started searching in places I hadn’t looked in years.
Not for anything specific. Just... anything.
Old notebooks, taped-up shoeboxes, drawers I hadn’t opened since middle school. I found expired library cards, broken wristwatches, a cassette labeled “ROADTRIP 1997” in handwriting that didn’t look like mine. Everything smelled like dust and old air.
I found a drawing I didn’t remember making.
It was on the back of a math worksheet. A girl on a train, silver eyes, headphones too big for her head. The word "Seren" was written in block letters along the bottom. The train was surrounded by strange symbols—circles, triangles, spirals, numbers scrawled into the wheels like they were part of a code.
My chest tightened. I didn’t remember drawing it. Didn’t even remember thinking it. But it was my handwriting. My style. My paper.
I kept the picture in my pocket.
Mariah showed up at my door that night without calling. Her mascara was smudged and her hoodie smelled like firewood and metal.
"You haven’t been around," she said.
"I’ve been tired."
"You’ve been different."
She stepped into my room like she owned it, like gravity bent around her. She touched everything—the bookshelf, the lampshade, the cassette I’d left out.
"This wasn’t here before," she said.
"It was."
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"No. You didn’t keep this one."
That word hit me wrong.
Didn’t keep?
"Mariah," I asked, slowly, "do you remember the first time we met?"
She smiled. "Of course. You were wearing that stupid red shirt and your shoelaces were untied."
"No. I mean—before that."
Her eyes twitched.
"We met at the park," she said. "Your bike chain broke. You swore at it. I laughed."
"That’s not what you said last time."
She froze.
Just for a second. Just long enough.
Then she smiled again. "Memory’s weird like that."
I didn’t sleep that night. I watched the cassette turn slowly in my Walkman, the tape spooling like film. There was no sound. Just the soft mechanical hum.
Somewhere in the house, a faucet dripped like a metronome.
I kept thinking about ghosts.
Not the kind that go bump in the night, but the kind that drift through places without being seen. People that remember things no one else does. People who can’t die because they never quite lived right in the first place.
That’s what I felt like.
A ghost. With logic that didn’t belong to the living.
The next morning, I walked the long way to school. I passed a bus stop I’d never used before. The shelter was cracked plexiglass, graffiti, rusted metal.
Inside, someone had written in chalk:
You’re not lost. You’re in transit.
I touched the words. The chalk smeared under my fingers.
At school, I skipped class. Roamed the halls. Sat in the library with the old, yellowing encyclopedias no one touched anymore. I flipped through one at random.
Page 238 had a photo torn out. The caption read: “UNIDENTIFIED SUBJECT, 1981 – SILVER EYES.”
No image. Just the empty box.
I slammed the book shut and left.
On my way out, I passed the AV room.
The door was cracked. Inside, a TV was playing static.
I stepped closer.
Then it cleared.
A girl on a train.
Headphones in. Looking right at me.
It was Seren.
She pressed her hand to the window.
The screen fuzzed again.
I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even write it down. I just walked home with my hands in my pockets and the picture from the worksheet burning through the fabric like a flare.
Mariah called again. I didn’t pick up.
My brother knocked on my door that night.
"You alright?"
"Yeah. Just thinking."
He paused.
"You ever feel like maybe this isn’t it?"
"It?"
"Life."
I looked up at him. For a second, I saw it—the same crack in his eyes I’d seen in mine. The same weight.
"Yeah," I said. "I feel that too."
And for a moment, neither of us said anything. Just stood there.
Two ghosts in the same house. Trying to remember which one of us was still real.
