The air outside the school felt sharper than usual — cold, cutting into my skin with every gust. Even the sky looked wrong. Pale, bleached-out, like someone had cranked the contrast down until it barely looked real. I could almost see the edges where the world didn't fit together properly, as if it was stitched into place by trembling hands.
The tension from lunch hadn't disappeared. If anything, it had gotten worse, curling up in my gut like a knot. I could see it in the way people moved — cautious, like they were walking on ice.
After the final bell rang, none of us even spoke. We just knew. Without saying a word, we moved toward the back of the old gym, away from the teachers, away from the noise. It was almost instinctive, like we needed to get away from the "normal" world to even be able to breathe.
The gym looked abandoned, its walls cracked and sprayed with graffiti so old it had started to peel. The benches were warped from the rain, and trash skittered across the cracked pavement in the wind. It felt more real here, more honest somehow.
Theo kicked a soda can out of the way and crossed his arms. "So," he said finally, glancing at the rest of us, "what now? We all saw it, right? No pretending it's just stress or whatever."
Jack leaned against the wall, chewing the inside of his cheek. "It's him. Jerry. It's always been him."
"But how? He's just..." Mia trailed off, her voice small.
"A kid?" I finished for her.
Nobody said anything, but I could feel it — the agreement hanging unspoken between us.
Except he wasn't just a kid.
I pressed my fingers against my forehead, feeling a headache coming on. "Maybe he never was."
Ivy's arms were crossed tightly over her chest, her expression as unreadable as always. But I caught the flicker of fear in her eyes. Fear she was trying to hide. "We need to know more. About him. About where he came from."
"Good luck," Jack muttered. "We don't even know if Jerry's his real name. The teachers don't say anything either. It's like he just… showed up."
That idea sat heavy in my mind. Like Jerry was a puzzle piece that didn't belong to any puzzle.
"No family," I said quietly. "No last name. No history."
Amelia, silent until now, pulled out her phone and began typing rapidly. "Let's check the student files."
We crowded around her, breathless with anticipation. On the screen, a profile loaded: Jerry.
No last name.
No birthplace listed.
No past school records.
Only one line under the history section: "Transfer — Special circumstances."
I swallowed hard.
"That's... not normal," Mia said, her voice barely above a whisper.
"It's like he doesn't even officially exist," Theo said, stepping back from the screen like it might burn him. "How can someone be that blank?"
Amelia's brow furrowed. "Special circumstances... It sounds like code for something they don't want us asking about."
"But why here?" Ivy demanded. "Why at this school? Why mix him with us?"
I glanced at each of them — Ivy, Jack, Theo, Mia, Amelia — all drawn into this spiraling nightmare.
There was no turning back now.
"We need to watch him," I said. "Carefully."
"Watch him?" Jack scoffed. "More like stay the hell away from him."
A gust of wind rattled the chain-link fence nearby, making a hollow, clanging sound. It was a small thing, but it made all of us flinch.
The cracks weren't just in Jerry. They were leaking out.
That night, I couldn't sleep.
My mom was downstairs, still unpacking boxes, moving dishes around noisily in the kitchen. It was her way of pretending everything was normal. Pretending we hadn't left our home behind. Pretending there weren't fractures running through the very air around us.
I stared at the cracked ceiling, tracing the tiny splits with my eyes. The cracks looked like roads leading nowhere. I wondered if that's what was happening to our reality — just breaking apart, one silent line at a time.
A knock at my door snapped me out of it.
Mia.
She stepped inside without waiting for permission, her face pale, her arms hugging herself.
"I can't sleep," she said, her voice small. "It's... too quiet tonight."
I nodded wordlessly and made space on my bed. She sat, curling her legs underneath her.
"It's like the air's heavy," she whispered. "Like something's pressing down on everything."
We both stared at the darkened window for a moment, listening to the distant hum of traffic. Even that sound felt wrong, out of sync, like a recording played back at the wrong speed.
"Do you think he even knows?" Mia asked suddenly, breaking the silence.
I didn't have to ask who she meant.
Jerry.
I thought about the way he drifted through the halls like a ghost, the way he stared through people instead of at them. The way reality itself seemed to warp around him, like it didn't know what to do.
"I don't think he does," I said finally. "But whatever's inside him... it's waking up."
Mia shivered. "And when it fully wakes?"
I turned my gaze back to the ceiling, to the cracks, the endless splitting lines.
"When it does," I whispered, "we might already be too late.
Somewhere, deep in the town, unseen by human eyes,
the first fracture widened.
Just a hairline tear in the fabric of reality.
But it was enough.
Enough for something else to slip through.
Something ancient, something hungry.
The real nightmare was only just beginning.