I hadn't been sleeping well.
Not since that night on the rooftop—the one where everything had felt like it shifted. Like someone had cracked open a door between then and now, and left it swinging.
I blamed it on memories. On the echo of Abeer's name still clinging like rot to old notebooks and group photos. On the exhaustion that clung to her bones, from trying to rebuild something that had never really belonged to her.
I knew it was something else.
The cold came first.
Even in the sweltering August heat, her room would ice over with this strange chill. The kind that crawled under skin and made your breath fog, like you'd stepped into winter barefoot.
Then came the dreams.
Always the same girl—hair dripping wet, violet ink staining her fingertips. Her face was never clear.It came through loud. It screamed.
I would wake up gasping, nails clawing at her chest like something was stuck there. Something that didn't belong to her…but maybe once bruId past her in a hallway. A face I'd forgotten. A moment I missed.
One night, I found a notebook in her locker.
It wasn't hers. Worn leather cover. Faint scent of eucalyptus and turpentine—like an art room left abandoned. The first page read:
"He kissed me like I wasn't allowed to exist."
Page after page was filled with poems, sketches, spirals of pain and obsession and grief so thick it felt like blood. At the bottom of one entry:
"I didn't know. But I will."
I stared at the words until her vision blurred.
I tried to remember if I'd ever seen this handwriting before. If maybe this was some leftover relic from a student long gone. But her gut said otherwise.
Her gut said Isha.
But I was a name from whispers and rumors now.A girl who vanished. A girl people had stopped saying out loud.
Still, the notebook felt warm in I's hands. Like it remembered being held by her.
Like it was waiting.elsewhere…
The mirror in Block B's girls' washroom had cracked again.
Right down the middle.
They said it was bad wiring. Old building. Coincidence.
But one girl from the dance team swore I'd seen something in it.
A girl standing behind her—not reflected, but reversed. As if the mirror showed the world before it all went wrong.
I had violet ink on her fingers.
And when I smiled…
It wasn't kind.
Back in I's world…
The closer I got to someone new—the more I smiled, laughed, healed—the stronger the haunt became.
At first, it was petty.
Cold water from the tap, no matter the setting. Lights flickering only when I was near. Paintings smudged. Phone gallery deleted. Her perfume bottle shattered on the floor, Abeer's favorite scent.
Her best friend Riya fell down the stairs.
I swore someone puId her.
I swore it was Isha.
I didn't know what to believe anymore.
All I knew was this: something had followed her home from that rooftop.
Something that wasn't looking to be forgiven.
It wanted to be seen.
Heard.
Felt.
And I… had just started to remember.
I was there.
I was the one who walked past Isha that day, not with rage—but with that awful, distant pity.
I thought I was above it. That Abeer's lies were hers alone to bear.
But the truth?
He'd already broken someone else first.
And now that broken girl was back.
Not for revenge.
But for something deeper.
Replacement.
And the scariest part?
Sometimes, I didn't feel like myself anymore.
Sometimes, when I stared too long in the mirror, it felt like Isha was staring back.
With her cracked smile.
And violet eyes.