Everything was too sharp.

  The colors. The sounds. The way people looked at me like I was exactly who they thought I was—when I wasn’t.

  I went through the motions. Brushed my teeth. Ate toast. Walked to school. But it felt like I was playing a character in someone else’s life. The words came out of my mouth like lines from a script I didn’t believe in anymore.

  Mariah showed up at my locker with a smile like nothing had changed.

  “Hey,” she said. “You vanished yesterday.”

  I stared at her. She looked perfect. Too perfect.

  “Did I?”

  She tilted her head. “Everything okay?”

  “I almost died.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  We walked together. The halls echoed too much. The lockers stretched longer than I remembered. I swore we passed the same poster for the fall dance three times.

  Mariah kept talking—something about band practice, a teacher she didn’t like, the smell of cafeteria meatloaf—but it all sounded like static. White noise wrapped in familiarity.

  By third period, I started noticing the glitches.

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  A girl in the back row who wrote the same sentence in her notebook over and over.

  A teacher who called roll twice, forgetting he’d already done it.

  A boy who dropped his pencil—and it never hit the floor. Just vanished midair.

  I left early. Didn’t say goodbye.

  At home, the TV was already on. No one had touched it. A game show host laughed and laughed and never stopped.

  I unplugged the TV.

  It kept playing.

  I smashed it.

  The laughter stopped.

  I sat in silence until the lights flickered.

  Then Seren’s voice came through the ceiling vent.

  “Don’t trust what doesn’t bleed.”

  I didn’t sleep that night.

  In the early hours, I wrote everything down. Not just what had happened—but what I remembered from before. The real before. The sound of her voice. The smell of the hospital. The feeling of my mind splintering like ice under pressure.

  It all came back in waves.

  And when I was done writing, I heard a knock on the window.

  My brother.

  Only—he was already supposed to be inside. I saw him leave for school earlier. We’d talked. Laughed. He’d called me paranoid.

  Now he was at the window, wearing the same clothes. Same expression.

  He mouthed the words: “That’s not me.”

  I backed away.

  Inside, the other him sat on the couch, flipping through a comic book.

  I left through the back door.

  Ran until my legs went numb.

  When I finally stopped, I was in front of the library. Closed. Lights off. But the door opened when I touched it.

  Inside, a single lamp burned.

  And on the table beneath it—one book. No title. Just a leather cover with a spiral burned into it.

  I opened it.

  Every page was filled with drawings.

  Me. Seren. The bike. The train. The mirror. The deer. The crash.

  All of it—sketched in ink. Hundreds of pages.

  At the very end, a note:

  “You’re remembering faster now. But so are they.”

  I closed the book.

  I didn’t feel afraid.

  I felt awake.

  More awake than I’d ever been.

  And deep inside, beneath the panic and revelation and noise, one quiet truth settled like dust on water:

  Mariah wasn’t just part of the problem.

  She was the problem.

  And I was ready to break her.