CHAPTER 7
The morning after the note, school felt louder than usual.
Not louder in the obvious way. Nobody was shouting or throwing desks or doing anything dramatic enough to make a scene. It was just the ordinary noise of boys talking too much, chairs scraping, somebody laughing at the wrong thing, the sharp clap of a ruler against a table. All of it pressed against my nerves until even breathing felt like work.
I kept one hand in my pocket where the torn page was folded up. The paper had gone soft from being touched too many times. Every now and then my fingers brushed the edge of the brass key too, and I would remember the way it had appeared on the kitchen table like it belonged there.
CJ caught up with me near the corridor, swinging his bag over one shoulder.
"You look like you fought a ghost and lost," he said.
I gave him a tired look. "Morning to you too."
He grinned, then leaned closer. "You slept?"
"Not really."
"That's becoming your thing."
Before I could answer, there was a sudden wave of noise from the gate outside. Girls were turning their necks. Boys were pretending not to stare and failing terribly at it. CJ frowned, then followed the direction of everybody else's eyes.
"Oh," he said. "So that's what all the noise is about."
A new girl was walking in like she owned the whole school already.
Her uniform had been customized in a way that would have made any strict teacher develop chest pain on the spot. Her shirt was neatly tucked, but the sleeves had been altered. She wore a bright scarf tied around her wrist, her nails painted a glossy electric blue, and her hair—good God—her hair was the kind of color that refused to be ignored. Not natural, not even trying to look natural. Just bold. Confident. Loud. She was chewing gum like it was part of the performance and holding up her phone as if the school itself might be useful content if she framed it properly.
She stopped at the gate, turned her phone toward her own face, and said, "Okay, first day. Let's see if this place deserves me."
CJ made a noise beside me. "I like her already."
I looked at him. "Of course you do."
"I respect commitment."
She spotted the small crowd, smiled like she'd been expecting applause, and walked straight toward us.
"Which one of you is supposed to be the tour guide?" she asked.
CJ stepped forward immediately. "That would be me, obviously."
She looked him up and down, then nodded. "You seem like you talk too much."
He gasped, wounded. "And you seem like trouble."
"Correct."
I almost laughed. Almost.
She noticed me still standing slightly apart and gave me a quick once-over. "You're quiet."
"I'm being polite," I said.
"That's what quiet people always say."
CJ pointed at himself. "I'm CJ."
"I know," she said. "You look like someone with a nickname."
"That was rude."
"That was accurate."
By then a few students had started watching the exchange like it was better than the morning assembly. One of them laughed. She turned the laughter into a grin, as if she had expected that too.
"I'm Zee," she said finally. "If anybody calls me Zainab, I'll deny it."
CJ held out his hand. "Welcome to the circus."
She shook it once. "This school has a circus?"
"It does now."
I should have walked away then. I should have kept my head down and gone to class and tried very hard to forget the way the house had felt last night. But something about her energy made the corridor feel less tight. Not safe. Just less tight.
Naome arrived a moment later, books hugged against her chest, and looked from Zee to CJ to me with the faint expression she always wore when she had already understood more than she was saying.
"So this is the new student," she said.
Zee flashed her a bright smile. "And you are?"
"Naome."
"Nice."
Naome raised an eyebrow. "You say that like it's a review."
"It is."
CJ snorted. "She's dangerous."
"I know," Naome said, though she was smiling now.
For a few minutes the whole thing became normal in the way school things do. Zee wanted to know where the good food was sold. CJ wanted to know if she had already posted a first-day video. She rolled her eyes and told him she had uploaded three clips before first period and that her followers were already asking whether the school had "main character energy."
"Does it?" CJ asked.
She looked at the buildings around us, then at the muddy courtyard, then at the broken bench near the tree.
"Not yet," she said.
"That hurt," CJ said.
"It was supposed to."
I laughed before I could stop myself. It was small, but real. Zee saw it and pointed at me like she had won something.
"There. He can laugh."
"I can also leave," I muttered.
"No, no," she said. "You're useful. Quiet people notice things."
The words landed a little too close to the part of me that had been trying not to think about the key in my pocket.
I looked away first.
Classes began, and for a while the day almost behaved itself. Almost.
By second period Zee had already become a problem for two different teachers and a source of entertainment for half the class. She asked questions too quickly, answered before being called on, and once took a selfie while pretending to hide her phone inside her exercise book. The teacher noticed, of course, and everybody groaned when he asked her to stand.
She did it without shame.
"Name?" he asked.
"Zee."
He waited.
"Zee what?"
She smiled sweetly. "Depends who's asking."
The class lost it.
Even the teacher cracked a tiny smile before telling her to sit down and behave. She saluted him with two fingers and sat with the kind of confidence that only belonged to people who had never been properly embarrassed in public. Or had been embarrassed so many times it no longer mattered.
At lunch, CJ pulled a chair over to our table so Zee could join us. Ethan showed up with food he had definitely not prepared himself, and for once the four of us actually looked like a group instead of random people who had accidentally ended up in the same place.
Zee was in the middle of telling Ethan that his handwriting looked like it had been attacked by a chicken when her phone buzzed. She glanced at it, frowned, then turned the screen toward us.
"Okay, that's weird."
"What?" CJ asked.
She opened a clip she'd recorded near the corridor earlier. It was just a few seconds of her walking past the classrooms, talking to her camera about "day one vibes," then turning the phone around for a dramatic transition.
At first I saw nothing.
Then, in the background, just for a blink, a shape crossed the glass in the corridor window behind her.
CJ leaned in. "That's a reflection."
"No," Zee said. "Reflections don't move like that."
Ethan squinted. "Could be a person."
"Where?" she asked.
He had no answer.
Naome, who had joined us with her lunch tray, studied the screen for a long moment and said, "Maybe it's a glitch."
Zee pointed at her phone. "Thank you. That is the correct answer."
But she wasn't fully convinced. I could tell. The smile she put on afterward was too quick, too practiced. Like she had decided not to let herself be rattled by a tiny thing on a screen.
She slid the phone into her pocket and returned to teasing CJ about his shoes, but I had stopped listening properly.
A shape.
A reflection.
A blur that shouldn't have been there.
It was nothing, probably. Less than nothing. Yet my stomach had tightened all the same.
After school, I took the longer road home. I didn't tell anyone why. I just said I was tired, and CJ had tried to call me dramatic, and Zee told him he was obviously the dramatic one. Then I left before they could ask more.
The house was quiet when I got back.
Too quiet.
Mother was still out. Diane's room was closed. The front gate had not been touched. But when I stepped inside, I felt that same slight pressure at the back of my neck, the sense that somebody had moved in the room before I entered it.
I went straight upstairs.
Father's study door was locked.
For a second I just stood there, staring at it. Then I remembered the brass key.
My hand was steady only because I had no choice.
The key slid into the hidden lock behind the row of books with a soft click so small I almost missed it. A section of the bookshelf shifted inward. My breath caught. The panel opened just enough to reveal a narrow compartment tucked behind the shelves.
Inside was a photograph, a sealed envelope, and a folded map.
My father stood in the photo, younger than I had ever seen him, beside a priest I didn't recognize and another man whose face had been scratched so hard it almost tore through the paper. The map was marked in red pencil, with one room circled at the top floor of the house.
I picked up the envelope last.
On the front, in my father's handwriting, were seven words.
For Robert. Only after the Third Knock.
I was still staring at it when my phone buzzed in my pocket.
Unknown number.
One new video.
My throat tightened.
I opened it.
It was our house.
Night footage.
The front gate.
And standing under the oak tree, just beyond the edge of the light, was someone who did not move even once while the video played.
At the very end, the camera tilted slightly, as if whoever was filming had taken one step back.
Then the figure under the tree looked up.
And the screen went black.