WHITNEY –
The ballpoint pen drilled savage spirals into the registration form, each twist angrier than the last. The cheap plastic barrel bent under her grip, threatening to snap, and ink pooled in vicious blotches that bled through the paper. Whitney Stephens leaned closer, strawberry-blonde hair spilling forward like a curtain.
David Stephens. David Stephens. David Stephens.
She carved his name into the margins, between printed lines, in corners where no one would look—each letter a prayer she didn't believe in, a curse she couldn't swallow. Her brother's name had become both talisman and tormentor.
All around her, the quad moved in polite choreography: papers handed over, schedules slid into folders, futures embossed with Thornfield's seal. But Whitney's world had shrunk to the width of a pen tip, to the ghost she chased across every blank space.
"Next."
The word cut through her trance, flat and practiced. Mr. Garrison sat behind the folding table, his suit the color of wet ash, his gaze hollow as an abandoned house. His clipboard sat in his hands like both weapon and shield.
She pushed the ruined form toward him, blue ink smudging her fingertips like blood. Her nails tapped a twitchy rhythm against the weathered wood, each beat spelling what she couldn't say out loud.
S.O.S. Help me. Find him.
Garrison's gaze skimmed her paperwork with the warmth he might give a grocery list. "Emergency contact information?"
"My aunt. Charlotte Stephens." The words scraped her raw throat. Three months of begging for answers had sandpapered her voice into something hoarse and brittle.
"And you're here from...?"
"Millfield High. Georgia." She tracked the slow stroke of his pen, each checkmark reducing her life to neat data points. Then, before she could stop herself, the truth lunged out. "I'm investigating my brother's disappearance."
His pen froze—just for a breath—before it resumed its mechanical dance.
"I'm sure the school has already provided you with all relevant information regarding former students," he murmured, voice flat as old concrete.
Whitney's fingers curled into fists. "David Stephens graduated in 2020. Except he didn't. No diploma. No forwarding address. No alumni database entry. Nothing. Like he just—"
"Miss Stephens." His tone iced over. "Thornfield Academy takes student privacy very seriously. I'm sure you understand."
The rubber stamp hit the page with dull finality: APPROVED. Filed. Forgotten.
Whitney's mind cataloged every twitch: that flash of hesitation when she said David's name, the way Garrison's eyes darted left toward the administrative offices before snapping back, the subtle tremor in his hand reaching for the next file.
He knew something.
Her messenger bag pressed hard against her hip, loaded with obsession—manila folders bursting with yearbook photos, news clippings, emails from David's last semester spiraling into paranoia before silence swallowed them whole.
"Whitney? Whitney Stephens?"
She turned, expecting another gray-suited shadow. Instead, she met sharp eyes belonging to a boy her age, tall and lean, with dark blonde hair tousled as if by nervous fingers. His clothes weren't about status—practical, worn in the right places. Ink stains mapped his fingers like battle scars.
"Ryder Williams," he said, offering his hand. "Editor of the Thornfield Gazette."
Whitney stared at the gesture like it might explode. No one here had dared approach her yet. "How do you know my name?"
"Research." His smile was crooked, real. "I make it my business to know things. Like the exposé you wrote on prep school admissions corruption back home. That was gutsy."
Whitney's walls snapped up higher. "What do you want?"
"To offer you something." Ryder's eyes flicked to the registration chaos before he leaned in, voice dropping to a whisper. "A platform. Thornfield's crawling with secrets, Whitney. The kind that fester in silence. And I think you're exactly the person who won't quit digging until the truth bleeds out."
Before she could find words, a shadow slid between them—cold, deliberate.
"There's my girl."
The words slid through the air like poisoned honey. Dawson Matthews materialized beside her: six feet two of varsity jacket and carefully cultivated menace. Sun-bleached hair artfully tousled, teeth movie-star perfect, and the smug certainty of someone handed the world on a monogrammed platter.
His hand locked around Whitney's wrist, tight enough to brand ownership. "Been looking everywhere for you, babe. I'll show you around, come on."
Babe. They'd lasted three months before she'd discovered that Dawson's definition of love included combing through her private messages and tracking her every move.
"I'm busy, Dawson." She twisted her arm, the fight rising despite fear dancing up her spine.
Ryder's lazy smile melted away, replaced by something sharper. "She said she's busy."
"And you are?" Dawson's voice dripped with entitlement.
"Someone who listens when a girl says no," Ryder shot back, his tone soft as velvet over a blade's edge.
The air snapped taut, humming with the promise of violence—two boys squaring off, testosterone mixing with something older, meaner.
"Let. ME. Go." Each syllable cracked like breaking bone.
She tore her wrist from Dawson's grip, stumbling back. Her messenger bag swung wide, colliding with her hip. Inside, her entire world shifted: paper edges slicing against each other, photos rasping inside dog-eared folders. Evidence and obsession packed into worn leather.
Ryder's gaze flickered, surgical, not missing a detail. When he spoke next, his words shed all trace of boyish curiosity.
"Tell me about your brother."
The question didn't just hang in the air—it detonated.
Across the quad, conversations faltered and died. From the glass-paneled doors of the main buiding, Dean Blackwood emerged—a figure cut from privilege and authority, his pale gaze zeroing in, unblinking, dissecting them like a scalpel.
For one heartbeat, Whitney felt Thornfield's ancient machinery pivot to focus on her—evaluating, calculating, deciding whether she was a loose thread to be quietly snipped.
Her fear calcified into something harder than resolve. Into purpose.
People back home had called her obsessed. Whispered it behind coffee cups: delusional, brittle, a girl clinging to ghosts. They said people vanished all the time. That closure wasn't owed, and justice almost never came.
They were about to learn how spectacularly wrong they'd been.
She locked eyes with Ryder, voice soft enough to bruise but heavy enough to shatter glass. "Not here. Too many ears."
Something flickered behind his hazel-green gaze—curiosity and caution—then: "Library. Third floor. Northwest corner. Twenty minutes." His tone made it sound like a dare.
"Whitney!" Dawson's voice cracked through the quad like a lash, raw with frustration and something darker. But she was already moving, slicing through Thornfield's sea of dark privilege with predatory grace.
Behind her, Ryder's voice floated out—calm, almost amused, but edged in quiet defiance: "Sorry, man. She's got better things to do."
The administrative windows tracked her departure, glass eyes hiding real ones, their silence louder than any accusation. Whitney Stephens had dragged her grief and questions into Thornfield's hallowed halls, each step powered by evidence slamming against her ribs.
She hadn't come to heal. She hadn't come to forget.
She'd come to find the truth—no matter whose secrets she had to crack open to get it.
Even if the truth burned everything down. Especially then.